Washington Post reveals new PRISM slides, offers greater clarity into the US' surveillance operation

PRISM: The surveillance story that started with four leaked slides from the Washington Post, today gets a bit clearer. The publication has revealed four more annotated slides about the once-secret NSA operation, along with detailing the various levels of scrutiny from the FBI and NSA that happen before, during and after approved wiretaps take place. It seems that many of the measures make sure the warrantless data mining of US citizens occurs to the smallest extent possible and that FISA rules are followed.

Detailing the process further, NSA analysts perform checks with supervisors to be certain intended targets are foreign nationals who aren't on US soil; approval is provided by way of "51-percent confidence" in assessments. During a "tasking process" search terms are entered, dubbed "selectors," which can tap into FBI gear installed within the private properties of participating companies -- so much for those denials. For live communications, this data goes straight to the NSA's PRINTAURA processing system, while both the FBI and NSA scan pre-recorded data independently. Notably, live surveillance is indeed possible for the likes of text, voice and and instant message-based conversations, according to a slide that details how cased are notated.

PRINTAURA is an overall filter for others, with names like NUCLEON for voice communications and MAINWAY for records of phone calls. Beyond that, another two layers, called CONVEYANCE and FALLOUT provide further filtering. Again, all of these checks apparently fine-tune results and help make sure they don't match up with US citizens. Results that return info about those in the US get scrapped, while results on foreigner targets get stored for up to five years -- this includes those that have US citizens' info in them, but restrictions are in place to limit the their exposure. A total number of 117,675 active targets were listed as April 5th, but the paper notes that this does not reflect the number of data that may also have been collected on American citizens in the process. It's likely that even more will be revealed in the coming weeks -- so if you haven't already, now might be a great time to catch up on this whole PRISM fiasco to learn about how it might affect you. You'll find all the new slides at the source link.

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Source: The Washington Post (1), (2)

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Kerry pushing Israel, Palestinians to resume talks

JERUSALEM (AP) ? U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in breakneck shuttle diplomacy to coax Israel and the Palestinians back into peace talks, is flying to the West Bank on Sunday to have a third meeting in as many days with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

U.S., Israeli and Palestinian officials have declined to disclose details of the past three days of closed-door meetings, but Kerry's decision to fly from Jerusalem to Ramallah, West Bank, to see Abbas again before he leaves the region was an indication that the secretary believes there is a chance of bringing the two sides together.

"Working hard" is all Kerry would say when a reporter asked him at a photo-op whether progress was being made.

Despite the lack of readouts, there are several clues that the meetings have been more than routine chats.

Most of Kerry's meetings have lasted at least two hours and several of them were much longer. His initial dinner meeting Thursday night with Netanyahu was clocked at four and the one Saturday night with the Israelis that started around 9 p.m. in a hotel suite was still going on at 2:30 a.m. Sunday.

Legal, military and other officials accompanied Netanyahu at the meeting, perhaps an indication that discussions had reached a more detailed level.

Kerry canceled a visit to Abu Dhabi on his two-week swing through Asia and the Mideast because of his extended discussions on the Mideast peace process in Jerusalem and Amman, Jordan.

And just the sheer number of meetings since Thursday ? three with Netanyahu and soon-to-be three with Abbas ? could indicate that the two sides are at least interested in trying to find a way back to the negotiating table.

A senior U.S. State Department official said Kerry would travel to Ramallah on Sunday to meet Abbas. The U.S. official was not authorized to discuss the negotiations by name and requested anonymity.

The meeting, however, will further squeeze Kerry's itinerary. He's scheduled to be at a Southeast Asia security conference on Monday and Tuesday in Brunei ? some 5,400 miles from Israel. On the sidelines of the conference, Kerry is to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an exchange that likely will focus on National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. Kerry also is to have a trilateral discussion with Japanese and South Korean officials that likely will include the topic of North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

For now, however, Kerry has his head in the Middle East. Except for quick flights to meetings in Amman, Kerry mostly has been holed up on the upper floors of a hotel near Jerusalem's Old City engaged in deep, serious conversations about the decades-old conflict. On other floors, the hotel has been hosting large family gatherings, and noisy children in party clothes have been running up and down the hallways, oblivious to Kerry's presence.

There is deep skepticism that Kerry can get the two sides to agree on a two-state solution. It's something that has eluded presidents and diplomats for years. But the flurry of meetings has heightened expectations that the two sides can be persuaded to restart talks, which broke down in 2008, at the least.

So far, there have been no public signs that the two sides are narrowing their differences.

In the past, Abbas has said he won't negotiate unless Israel stops building settlements on war-won lands or accepts its 1967 lines ? before the capture of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem in a Mideast war that year ? as a starting point for border talks. The Palestinians claim all three areas for their future state.

Netanyahu has rejected the Palestinian demands, saying there should be no pre-conditions for talks.

Abbas made significant progress with Netanyahu's predecessor, Ehud Olmert, in talks in 2007 and 2008, but believes there is little point in negotiating with the current Israeli leader.

Netanyahu has adopted much tougher starting positions than Olmert, refusing to recognize Israel's pre-1967 frontier as a baseline for border talks and saying east Jerusalem, the Palestinians' hoped-for capital, is off the table. Abbas and his aides suspect Netanyahu wants to resume talks for the sake of negotiating and creating a diplomatic shield for Israel, not in order to reach an agreement.

Abbas has much to lose domestically if he drops his demands that Netanyahu either freeze settlement building or recognize the 1967 frontier as a starting point before talks can resume. Netanyahu has rejected both demands. A majority of Palestinians, disappointed after 20 years of fruitless negotiations with Israel, opposes a return to talks on Netanyahu's terms.

While details of the ongoing discussions have remained closely held, it has not quelled speculation. Midday Saturday, news reports said a four-way meeting was going to be held in coming days with the U.S. Jordan, Israel and the Palestinians at the table.

"They're saying a four-way summit, did you hear that?" Netanyahu asked Kerry during a photo-op before his latest meeting with Kerry.

"I did," Kerry replied.

There is speculation that talks are going well and that they're headed nowhere.

Asked if the two sides were close to resuming negotiations, Israeli Cabinet Minister Gilad Erdan told Channel 2 TV: "Regrettably, so far, no."

___

Associated Press writer Karin Laub in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/kerry-pushing-israel-palestinians-resume-talks-214829857.html

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Violence hits China's west ahead of anniversary

BEIJING (AP) ? Violent incidents have spread this week in a tense minority region of western China, just days before the anniversary of a bloody clash between minority Uighurs and the ethnic Han majority that left almost 200 dead and resulted in a major security clampdown.

China's communist authorities have labeled some of the incidents ? including one which left 35 people dead ? as terrorist attacks, and President Xi Jinping has ordered that they be promptly dealt with to safeguard overall social stability, state media reported.

The latest violent incidents were reported in southern Xinjiang's Hotan area. In one, more than 100 knife-wielding people mounted motorbikes in an attempt to storm the police station for Karakax county, the state-run Global Times reported.

Another was an attack mob in the township of Hanairike on Friday afternoon, according to the news portal of the Xinjiang regional government. It said the mob was armed, but did not say with what sort of weapons.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported a "violent attack" Friday afternoon on a pedestrian street in downtown Hotan city. No casualties were reported for any of the incidents, which state media say were quickly brought under control. The government's news portal, Tianshan Net, said there was no civilian casualty in Hanairike.

An exiled Uighur activist disputed those accounts. Instead, Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress, said there were several protests in the Hotan area against what Uighurs see as China's suppressive policies in Xinjiang.

"It's a crisis of survival," said Dilxax Raxit, who called for international observers to be sent to the region to help curb excessive violence against Uighurs by the Chinese government. He said 48 people have been arrested.

It has not been possible to independently verify the reports because of tight controls over information in the region.

The incidents on Friday in Xinjiang came after what the government described as attacks on police and other government buildings on Wednesday in eastern Xinjiang's Turpan prefecture's Lukqun township killed 35 people.

That was one of the bloodiest incidents since the July 5, 2009, unrest in the region's capital city, Urumqi, killed nearly 200.

Xinjiang (shihn-jeeahng) is home to a large population of minority Muslim Uighurs (WEE'-gurs) in a region that borders Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and has been the scene of numerous violent acts in recent years.

Critics often attribute the violence in Xinjiang to what they say is Beijing's oppressive and discriminatory ethnicity policies. Many Uighurs complain that authorities impose tight restrictions on their religious and cultural life.

The Chinese government says that it has invested billions of dollars in modernizing the oil- and gas-rich region and that it treats all ethnic groups equally.

Calls to local government agencies were either unanswered or returned with the answer that they were unauthorized to speak.

State-run media reported that the incident Wednesday started when knife-wielding assailants targeted police stations, a government building and a construction site ? all symbols of Han authority in the region.

Photos released in state media show scorched police cars and government buildings and victims lying on the ground, presumably dead.

Dilxat Raxit also disputed that account, saying the violence started when police forcefully raided homes at night. It was impossible to independently confirm the conflicting accounts.

Xinhua said 11 assailants were shot dead, and that two police officers were among the 24 people they killed.

"This is a terrorist attack, there's no question about that," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Friday at a regular news briefing. "As to who masterminded it, local people are still investigating."

State news reports did not identify the ethnicity of the attackers, nor say what may have caused the conflict in the Turkic-speaking region. The reports said police captured four injured assailants.

The Global Times newspaper said Saturday that police had stepped up security measures, deploying more forces to public areas, governmental institutes and compounds for police and military police. It said a suspect was captured Friday afternoon in Urumqi.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/violence-hits-chinas-west-ahead-anniversary-044148211.html

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State Dept. identifies American killed in Egypt

An Egyptian protester waves a national flag over Tahrir Square, the focal point of Egyptian uprising as opponents of President Mohammed Morsi are gathered in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, June 28, 2013. Tens of thousands of backers and opponents of Egypt's Islamist president held competing rallies in the capital Friday and new clashes erupted between the two sides in the country's second largest city, Alexandria, in a prelude to massive nationwide protests planned by the opposition this weekend demanding Mohammed Morsi's removal. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

An Egyptian protester waves a national flag over Tahrir Square, the focal point of Egyptian uprising as opponents of President Mohammed Morsi are gathered in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, June 28, 2013. Tens of thousands of backers and opponents of Egypt's Islamist president held competing rallies in the capital Friday and new clashes erupted between the two sides in the country's second largest city, Alexandria, in a prelude to massive nationwide protests planned by the opposition this weekend demanding Mohammed Morsi's removal. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

JERUSALEM (AP) ? The State Department has identified the American killed in Egypt during violent clashes between government supporters and opponents.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, traveling with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in the Middle East, says Andrew Pochter was killed Friday in Alexandria. The department has issued a warning advising Americans to defer nonessential travel to Egypt because of the continuing violence there.

Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, says in a statement on its website that Pochter was a 21-year-old student from Chevy Chase, Md., working in Egypt as an intern for a non-profit education organization.

The State Department says the young American was killed while photographing battles between supporters and foes of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi. Details were not available.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-06-29-US-Egypt/id-0e6c3f69694e4a01bde9edf41ff51413

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California, Southwest scorch under extreme heat

Furnace Creek, Inyo County --

Scorching heat blistered the Southwest on Saturday, where highs between 115 and 120 degrees are expected for parts of Arizona, Nevada and California through the weekend.

Phoenix hit 119 degrees by mid-afternoon, setting a new record for June 29. And large swaths of California sweltered under extreme heat warnings, which are expected to last into Tuesday night - and possibly even longer.

Dan Kail was vacationing in Las Vegas when he heard that the temperature at California's Death Valley could approach 130 degrees this weekend. He didn't hesitate to make a trip to the desert location that is typically the hottest place on the planet.

"Coming to Death Valley in the summertime has always been on the top of my bucket list," the 67-year-old Pittsburgh man said. "When I found out it might set a record I rented a car and drove straight over. If it goes above 130 I will have something to brag about."

Death Valley's record high of 134 degrees, set a century ago, stands as the highest temperature recorded on Earth. On Saturday it cooked at 125 degrees.

A couple hours south in Baker, the temperature peaked at 117 degrees in the road tripper's oasis in the Mojave Desert. The strip of gas stations and restaurants between Los Angeles and Las Vegas is known by travelers for the giant thermometer that often notes temperatures in the triple digits.

At the Mad Greek restaurant there, a waitress called out orders for "Chocolate shake! Strawberry shake!" while the temperature hovered at 112 degrees during the lunch rush.

To make matters worse in California, National Weather Service meteorologist John Dumas said cooling ocean breezes haven't been traveling far enough inland overnight to fan Southern California's overheated valleys and deserts.

Burbank set a record overnight low with temperatures dipping to 74 degrees, much warmer than the previous record of 68 degrees for Saturday's early hours.

In Northern California, temperatures hit the upper 90s Saturday in San Jose.

Health officials warned people to be extremely careful when venturing outdoors. The risks include not only dehydration and heatstroke but burns from the concrete and asphalt. Dogs can suffer burns and blisters on their paws by walking on hot pavement.

Cooling stations were set up to shelter the homeless and elderly people who can't afford to run their air conditioners.

Officials said personnel were added to the Border Patrol's search-and-rescue unit because of the danger to people trying to slip across the Mexican border. At least seven people have been found dead in the past week in Arizona.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/California-Southwest-scorch-under-extreme-heat-4638605.php

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Egyptian clerics warn of 'civil war' ahead of mass protests

As Egypt approaches a weekend of confrontation, the divide between those who love and those who despise President Mohammed Morsi and his pro-Islamist government is wider than ever. NBC's Charlene Gubash reports.

By Charlene Gubash and Alastair Jamieson, NBC News

Egypt risks sliding into civil war, the country's leading religious authority warned Friday, as the nation braced itself for mass nationwide protests.

Organizers of "June 30" demonstrations ? which mark one year since Islamist President Mohammed Morsi's election ? claim they have the backing of an estimated 15 million Egyptians who want him to resign.

---

"Only God knows what will happen" Sunday, said Gamal Abdul Aziz, a pro-Morsi car mechanic in Madba'a, a blue-collar district in Cairo.

There were ominous signs Friday. U.S. officials told NBC News that they were investigating reports that a U.S. citizen was stabbed to death Friday during protests in Alexandria, where at least 80 other people have been wounded, the state news agency MENA reported.

The State Department authorized the departure of a limited number of non-emergency employees and family members and warned U.S. citizens to defer non-essential travel to Egypt.

NBC News

Gamal Abdul Aziz, left, a pro-Morsi car mechanic, argues with anti-Morsi computer science student Mohamed Abdul Munim, right, while being interviewed this week.

Building on discontent about a range of social and economic issues, Morsi's opponents hope to force early presidential elections.

His supporters, meanwhile, have promised they will also take to the streets to defend the Muslim Brotherhood-backed government.

"Vigilance is required to ensure we do not slide into civil war," clerics of the Al-Azhar institute said in a statement broadly supportive of Morsi, Reuters reported.

It blamed "criminal gangs" who besieged mosques for street violence that the Brotherhood said has killed five of its supporters in a week.

In an example of just how polarized the debate over Egypt's future has become, Aziz and his family became embroiled in a shouting match with a nearby resident, anti-Morsi computer science student Mohamed Abdul Munim, 23, while being interviewed this week.

Amr Nabil / AP

Egyptian drivers wait outside in long lines at a gasoline station in Cairo on Tuesday.

The argument, which took place after NBC News filmed a political discussion between the two, ended when Munim stormed off.

The dispute and recent violence ? one man was shot dead and four other people were wounded in an attack on a Muslim Brotherhood office Thursday ? was an ill omen for Sunday's marches.

The country's powerful army, which helped protesters topple Hosni Mubarak's authoritarian regime in 2011, has reinforced its presence in cities like Cairo and Port Said.

Munim said he believed "most" of Egypt's registered 50 million voters will be out on the streets, supporting one side or the other.

"We are sure that we will go out and get beaten up by the [Muslim] Brotherhood, [but] we are going out despite this," he said. "There is no security. There is economic collapse. The electricity cuts off and everybody is suffering. They will say Morsi is not at fault, but electricity didn't cut off when the military governed."

Aziz, meanwhile, said his life had improved under Morsi and accused the mostly secular opposition of "waging a war against Islam."

"Can you build a house in a day? No, it takes time." he said. "What can a president do in one year when a country is in ruins? The old [Mubarak] regime stole the country and left it destroyed."

In a sign of the nervousness many felt, Egyptians were stocking up on food, fuel, water and cash in the days leading up the protests.

'The Daily Show's' Jon Stewart took his satire to Cairo on Friday, appearing on a show hosted by the man known as 'Egypt's Jon Stewart,' who has faced investigation for insulting the country's president and Islam. TODAY's Jenna Wolfe reports.

Morsi's supporters claim the demonstration ? organized by an opposition umbrella group named "Tamarod," meaning "Rebel" ? is setting the stage for a repeat of the 2011 Arab Spring revolution.

Mahmoud Badr, a 28-year-old journalist and founder of the Tamarod movement, dismissed a televised speech by Morsi on Wednesday night in which the president appealed for calm.

"Our demand was early presidential elections, and since that was not addressed anywhere in the speech, then our response will be on the streets" Sunday, he told the English-language Egypt Independent news site.

The U.S. Embassy announced Tuesday that it would be closing its doors for the day of the demonstrations, but it added that "potentially violent protest activity may occur before June 30," and urged U.S. citizens to "maintain a low profile" from Friday onward.

Underscoring fears of violence, defenders of Morsi revealed plans Tuesday to form vigilante groups to protect public buildings from opposition demonstrations, the Egypt Independent reported, quoting Safwat Abdel Ghany, a member of Islamic umbrella organization Jama'a al-Islamiya.

"If chaos sweeps across the country, Islamist groups will secure state institutions and vital facilities against robbery by thugs and advocates of violence," he was quoted as saying.

Members of Tamarod were so confident that they would force Morsi from power that the organization set out a constitutional "road map" that it said would take Egypt forward without a president until new elections.

Eric Trager, a fellow at the Washington Institute think tank, said this week that battle lines were drawn between "an enraged opposition" and "an utterly incapable, confrontational ruling party that now counts some of Egypt's most violent political elements as its core supporters."

"Rising food prices, hours-long fuel lines and multiple-times-daily electricity cuts ? all worsening amidst a typically scorching Egyptian summer ? have set many Egyptians on edge, with clashes between Brotherhood and anti-Brotherhood activists now a common feature of Egyptian political life," he said.

"Whatever happens on [Sunday], it can't end well," he added.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Related:

Morsi: Political division threatens Egypt's democracy

Egypt's Islamists rally to show Morsi support ? and warn opponents

Egypt's Coptic Christians say they are 'no longer safe'

This story was originally published on Fri Jun 28, 2013 5:30 AM EDT

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News digest ? breast cancer guidelines, spending plans, liver ...

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Some super rich in Europe really are getting richer

wealth

Robert Frank CNBC

14 hours ago

MICHAELA REHLE / Reuters

Mercedes-Benz cars are displayed in a dealership of German car manufacturer Daimler in Munich May 17, 2013. Latest data show that the super rich in Europe increased their wealth last year.

Europe's top economies may be stalled, but in some countries there, the rich really are getting richer.

The report, from Wealth-X, a wealth research firm, said the number of people worth $30 million or more in Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy grew 6 percent in 2012. Their combined fortunes surged 13 percent to $3.4 trillion.

Germany posted the strongest gains, with the number of ultra-wealthy people growing 6 percent to 16,734, with total fortunes of more than $2 trillion. Switzerland's ultra-rich saw their fortunes grow 15 percent.

Even France?often portrayed as the country of wealth flight rather than wealth creation?saw its super-wealthy population grow 5 percent and fortunes gain 12 percent.

Based on Wealth-X?s methodology, the report only focused on those four countries, and excluded other European nations including Britain and Spain.

(Read More: Luxury Real Estate Braces for Troubles From China, Brazil)

Wealth-X attributed the improvements to smart investing. "Smart investments and prudent estate planning among the UHNW (ultra-high-net worth) individuals in these economies explain why they performed better than other European nations in the current economic climate," said Wealth-X President David Friedman.

Yet there may be another reason: globalization. Many of the ultra-rich in European countries own global businesses or companies that benefit from growth in other countries, making them far less dependent on their home countries. Many luxury companies in France, top manufacturers in Germany and design firms in Italy have decoupled from Europe and continue to see sales growth from China, the U.S. and other (relatively) stronger economies.

(Read More: US Back on Top: Most Millionaires in 2012)

Just consider Amancio Ortega, the founder of Spanish clothing chain Zara. Spain is hurting, but Ortega's wealth has soared by more than $10 billion over the past year to more than $50 billion. That makes him among the five richest men in the world.

? 2013 CNBC LLC. All Rights Reserved

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Vatican official arrested in corruption plot

VATICAN CITY (AP) ? A Vatican official has been arrested by Italian police for allegedly trying to illegally bring 20 million euros ($26 million) in cash into the country from Switzerland with a private jet.

Prosecutor Nello Rossi says Monsignor Nunzio Scarano is accused of corruption and slander stemming from the plot and was being held at a Rome prison.

He was allegedly asked by friends to bring back the money that had been given to financier Giovanni Carenzio in Switzerland. Scarano is supposed to have asked Giovanni Zito, a military official, to bring the money back by jet, avoiding customs.

Scarano was allegedly due to pay Zito a commission of 600,000 euros for the work. He paid only an initial installment of 400,000 euros before being arrested.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/vatican-official-arrested-corruption-plot-075720910.html

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Hundreds protest Obama's visit to South Africa

JOHANNESBURG (AP) ? Hundreds of protesters marched to the U.S. embassy in South Africa on Friday in a peaceful protest against the impending visit by President Barack Obama.

The demonstrators opposed U.S. policy on Cuba, the war in Afghanistan, global warming and other issues. The rally in Pretoria was organized by trade unionists and members of the South African Communist Party.

The protesters want to raise public awareness and warn U.S. citizens about human rights violations committed by the Obama administration, which includes the non-closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison holding terrorism suspects, said campaign coordinator Mbuyiseni Ndlozi.

"Their administration's government is not welcome, and is being received with antagonism," Ndlozi said. "Therefore they'll have to rethink the standards by which they hold their government."

Protesters carried signs that read: "No, You Can't Obama," a message inspired by the "Yes We Can" campaign slogan adopted by the president during his first run for election.

Obama and his family were expected to arrive in South Africa later Friday as part of a tour of three African countries. Their three-day trip includes a visit to Cape Town's Robben Island, where former President Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years imprisoned by the previous white racist South African government.

Demonstrators staged a similar protest outside the Parliament building in Cape Town where Obama's record on human rights and trade relations in Africa were questioned.

"He's coming here to plunder Africa and South Africa," protester Abdurahman Khan said. "He's coming for the wealth and resources, for the gold and the diamond mines, while the majority of Africans and South Africans are suffering."

Protesters also plan to rally Saturday at the University of Johannesburg's Soweto campus, where Obama will address students and receive an honorary law degree, and on Sunday at the University of Cape Town.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hundreds-protest-obamas-visit-south-africa-150104341.html

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Faults can reseal months after quakes

Measurements in southern China find quick healing of fractured rock

By Erin Wayman

Web edition: June 28, 2013

After an earthquake, fault zones may need no more than a couple of years to regain their strength, research suggests. But the recovery is not without setbacks: Large, distant quakes can redamage fragile faults and prolong healing.

A fault weakened by a rupture won?t begin to build up stress again until it?s strong enough. So the new findings, published in the June 28 Science, should help researchers understand the timing of earthquake cycles in a fault zone.

After a magnitude 7.9 earthquake devastated southern China in 2008, scientists drilled a borehole 1,201 meters into the Longmen Shan fault zone to monitor the healing process. Researchers have previously analyzed fault strengthening in the laboratory or with surface measurements. But this is the first time anyone has peered directly into a fault to observe recovery. ?We?re very hard up for evidence about what?s happening down there,? says seismologist John Vidale of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Researchers indirectly measured the Chinese fault?s strength by looking at how easily water flowed through the rock. When a fault fails during a quake, rocks break. Many processes reseal the cracks, such as the crystallization of minerals dissolved in groundwater. The more cracks a fault has, the weaker it should be, says coauthor Emily Brodsky, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

From January 2010 to August 2011, Brodsky, Lian Xue, also of UC Santa Cruz, and colleagues observed changes in the rock?s permeability by measuring shifting groundwater levels in the borehole. Permeability plummeted, and the team calculated that recovery after an earthquake in the Longmen Shan fault zone should have taken anywhere from seven months to 2? years. Some previous studies indicated that faults should take decades or more to heal.

In the case of Longmen Shan, recovery was interrupted by periodic spikes in permeability that coincided with big, faraway quakes. Seismic waves unleashed by those events probably fractured the still-delicate fault, Brodsky says.?

One open question, says Elizabeth Cochran of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena, Calif., is whether seismic waves from distant temblors can also damage strong, fully repaired faults.?

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/351292/title/Faults_can_reseal_months_after_quakes

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'Shields to maximum, Mr. Scott': Simulating orbital debris impacts on spacecraft and fragment impacts on body armor

June 27, 2013 ? We know it's out there, debris from 50 years of space exploration -- aluminum, steel, nylon, even liquid sodium from Russian satellites -- orbiting around Earth and posing a danger to manned and unmanned spacecraft.

According to NASA, there are more than 21,000 pieces of 'space junk' roughly the size of a baseball (larger than 10 centimeters) in orbit, and about 500,000 pieces that are golf ball-sized (between one to 10 centimeters).

Sure, space is big, but when a piece of space junk strikes a spacecraft, the collision occurs at a velocity of 5 to 15 kilometers per second -- roughly ten times faster than a speeding bullet!

"If a spacecraft is hit by orbital debris it may damage the thermal protection system," said Eric Fahrenthold, professor of mechanical engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, who studies impact dynamics both experimentally and through numerical simulations. "Even if the impact is not on the main heat shield, it may still adversely affect the spacecraft. The thermal researchers take the results of impact research and assess the effect of a certain impact crater depth and volume on the survivability of a spacecraft during reentry," Fahrenthold said.

Only some of the collisions that may occur in low earth orbit can be reproduced in the laboratory. To determine the potential impact of fast-moving orbital debris on spacecraft -- and to assist NASA in the design of shielding that can withstand hypervelocity impacts -- Fahrenthold and his team developed a numerical algorithm that simulates the shock physics of orbital debris particles striking the layers of Kevlar, metal, and fiberglass that makes up a space vehicle's outer defenses.

Supercomputers enable researchers to investigate physical phenomenon that cannot be duplicated in the laboratory, either because they are too large, small, dangerous -- or in this case, too fast -- to reproduce with current testing technology. Running hundreds of simulations on the Ranger, Lonestar and Stampede supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, Fahrenthold and his students have assisted NASA in the development of ballistic limit curves that predict whether a shield will be perforated when hit by a projectile of a given size and speed. NASA uses ballistic limit curves in the design and risk analysis of current and future spacecraft.

Results from some of his group's impact dynamics research were presented at the April 2013 American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics' (AIAA) meeting, and have recently been published in the journals Smart Materials and Structures and International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering. In the paper presented at the AIAA conference, they showed in detail how different characteristics of a hypervelocity collision, such as the speed, impact angle, and size of the debris, could affect the depth of the cavity produced in ceramic tile thermal protection systems.

The development of these models is not just a shot in the dark. Fahrenthold's simulations have been tested exhaustively against real-world experiments conducted by NASA, which uses light gas guns to launch 'centimeter' size projectiles at speeds up to 10 kilometers per second. The simulations are evaluated in this speed regime to insure that they accurately capture the dynamics of hypervelocity impacts.

Validated simulation methods can then be used to estimate impact damage at velocities outside the experimental range, and also to investigate detailed physics that may be difficult to capture using flash x-ray images of experiments.

The simulation framework that Fahrenthold and his team developed employs a hybrid modeling approach that captures both the fragmentation of the projectiles -- their tendency to break into small shards that need to be caught -- and the shock response of the target, which is subjected to severe thermal and mechanical loads.

"We validate our method in the velocity regime where experiments can be performed, then we run simulations at higher velocities, to estimate what we think will happen at higher velocities," Fahrenthold explained. "There are certain things you can do in simulation and certain things you can do in experiment. When they work together, that's a big advantage for the design engineer."

Back on land, Fahrenthold and graduate student Moss Shimek extended this hybrid method in order to study the impact of projectiles on body armor materials in research supported by the Office of Naval Research. The numerical technique originally developed to study impacts on spacecraft worked well for a completely different application at lower velocities, in part because some of the same materials used on spacecraft for orbital debris protection, such as Kevlar, are also used in body armor.

According to Fahrenthold, this method offers a fundamentally new way of simulating fabric impacts, which have been modeled with conventional finite element methods for more than 20 years. The model parameters used in the simulation, such as the material's strength, flexibility, and thermal properties, are provided by experimentalists. The supercomputer simulations then replicate the physics of projectile impact and yarn fracture, and capture the complex interaction of the multiple layers of a fabric protection system -- some fragments getting caught in the mesh of yarns, others breaking through the layers and perforating the barrier.

"Using a hybrid technique for fabric modeling works well," Fahrenthold said. "When the fabric barrier is hit at very high velocities, as in spacecraft shielding, it's a shock-type impact and the thermal properties are important as well as the mechanical ones."

Moss Shimek's dissertation research added a new wrinkle to the fabric model by representing the various weaves used in the manufacture of Kevlar and ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene (another leading protective material) barriers, including harness-satin, basket, and twill weaves. Each weave type has advantages and disadvantages when used in body armor designed to protect military and police personnel. Layering the different weaves, many believe, can provide improved protection.

Fahrenthold and Shimek (currently a post-doctoral research associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory) explored the performance of various weave types using both experiments and simulations. In the November 2012 issue of the AIAA Journal, Shimek and Fahrenthold showed that in some cases the weave type of the fabric material can greatly influence fabric barrier performance.

"Currently body armor normally uses the plain weave, but research has shown that different weaves that are more flexible might be better, for example in extremity protection," Shimek said.

Shimek and Fahrenthold used the same numerical method employed for the NASA simulations to model a series of experiments on layered Kevlar materials, showing that their simulation results were within 15 percent of the experimental outcomes.

"Future body armor designs may vary the weave type through a Kevlar stack," Shimek said. "Maybe one weave type is better at dealing with small fragments, while others perform better for larger fragments. Our results suggest that you can use simulation to assist the designer in developing a fragment barrier which can capitalize on those differences."

What can researchers learn about the layer-to-layer impact response of a fabric barrier through simulation? Can body armor be improved by varying the weave type of the many layers in a typical fabric barrier? Can simulation assist the design engineer in developing orbital debris shields that better protect spacecraft? The range of engineering design questions is endless, and computer simulations can play an important role in the 'faster, better, cheaper' development of improved impact protection systems.

"We are trying to make fundamental improvements in numerical algorithms, and validate those algorithms against experiment," Fahrenthold concluded. "This can provide improved tools for engineering design, and allow simulation-based research to contribute in areas where experiments are very difficult to do or very expensive."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/gqW_eYMJFc8/130627131829.htm

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Samsung launches 55-inch 'flawless' curved OLED TV in Korea

Just as the rumors foretold, Samsung has announced Korean availability of a 55-inch curved OLED HDTV. Priced at 15 million Korean won (around $13,000) Samsung claims its "Timeless Arena" design eliminates potential for defective OLED pixels. It also reiterates the claim LG made when it launched its own curved OLED model earlier this year that keeping all parts of the screen an equal distance from the viewer makes for a better viewing experience. It also supports features found in other Samsung TVs like multi-view that lets two people watch different things at the same time thanks to 3D glasses, and the Evolution Kit CPU upgrade. There's no word on US availability for its flat OLED HDTVs, but the company also launched its new 65- and 55-inch 4K TVs at the same event.

Gallery: Samsung 'world's first' curved OLED

Update: According to Reuters, Samsung says it has no plans to offer a flat OLED HDTV in 2013, and this curved model will ship outside Korea in July.

Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment, HD, Samsung

Comments

Source: Samsung Tomorrow

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/4p0hzmNkmcY/

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Samsung puts curve in OLED televisions

Kim Hyunsuk, the executive vice president of Samsung Electronics Co.?s TV division, right, poses with its 55-inch curved OLED TV during a press conference at its headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, June 27, 2013. After delays, Samsung rolled out Thursday a curved TV that uses an advanced display called OLED. The 55-inch TV will sell for 15 million won ($13,000) in South Korea, more than five times the cost of LCD televisions of the same size. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Kim Hyunsuk, the executive vice president of Samsung Electronics Co.?s TV division, right, poses with its 55-inch curved OLED TV during a press conference at its headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, June 27, 2013. After delays, Samsung rolled out Thursday a curved TV that uses an advanced display called OLED. The 55-inch TV will sell for 15 million won ($13,000) in South Korea, more than five times the cost of LCD televisions of the same size. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

Models pose with a Samsung Electronics Co.'s 55-inch curved OLED TV during a press conference at its headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, June 27, 2013. After delays, Samsung rolled out Thursday the curved TV that uses an advanced display called OLED. The 55-inch TV will sell for 15 million won ($13,000) in South Korea, more than five times the cost of LCD televisions of the same size. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

A journalist takes a close look at a Samsung Electronics Co.'s 55-inch curved OLED TV during a press conference at its headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, June 27, 2013. After delays, Samsung rolled out Thursday a curved TV that uses an advanced display called OLED. The 55-inch TV will sell for 15 million won ($13,000) in South Korea, more than five times the cost of LCD televisions of the same size. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) ? After delays, Samsung Electronics Co. rolled out Thursday a curved TV that uses an advanced display called OLED.

The 55-inch TV will sell for 15 million won ($13,000) in South Korea, more than five times the cost of LCD televisions of the same size.

But Kim Hyunsuk, the executive vice president of Samsung's TV division, said the company is optimistic about demand for the high-end TV.

"OLED is about picture quality," Kim told reporters. "We are sure that we realized the perfect picture quality."

It remains to be seen if consumers will be willing to pay a premium for enhanced imagery. The TV industry has been struggling to excite interest with its latest technologies. In recent years, attempts to boost sales by introducing 3-D TVs and TVs that are connected to the Internet have failed to end the downturn in the TV industry.

Samsung is not the first to introduce a curved TV using OLED. In May, its rival LG Electronics Inc., the second-biggest TV maker, launched a 55-inch curved TV in South Korea.

LG's model, which also sells for 15 million won, is not sold outside South Korea.

LG spokesman Kenneth Hong said the company will ship curved OLED TVs to other countries in the near future.

Samsung will ship its curved OLED TVs to overseas markets starting July, Kim said. The company does not plan to manufacture flat OLED TVs this year, he said.

The concave display gives viewers a sense of being immersed in the images, according to Samsung.

Samsung and LG, which are the only TV makers in the world to begin commercial sales of OLED TVs, had promised to launch them in 2012 but delayed the launch to this year.

The two South Korean TV giants tout OLED, short for organic light-emitting diode, as the next-generation display technology that will eventually replace older displays. But mass producing OLED displays still faces many challenges, leading to high prices.

In addition to curved OLED TVs, Samsung launched two ultra-HD TVs, with about four times the resolution of regular high-definition TVs.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-06-27-SKorea-Samsung-Curved%20TV/id-9a71dfd9adb4401984f5d9586bd7f812

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Large-scale quantum chip validated

Public release date: 28-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Robert Perkins
perkinsr@usc.edu
213-740-9226
University of Southern California

New research finds that prototype quantum optimization chip operates as hoped

A team of scientists at USC has verified that quantum effects are indeed at play in the first commercial quantum optimization processor.

The team demonstrated that the D-Wave processor housed at the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center behaves in a manner that indicates that quantum mechanics plays a functional role in the way it works. The demonstration involved a small subset of the chip's 128 qubits.

This means that the device appears to be operating as a quantum processor something that scientists had hoped for but have needed extensive testing to verify.

The quantum processor was purchased from Canadian manufacturer D-Wave nearly two years ago by Lockheed Martin and housed at the USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute (ISI). As the first of its kind, the task for scientists putting it through its paces was to determine whether the quantum computer was operating as hoped.

"Using a specific test problem involving eight qubits we have verified that the D-Wave processor performs optimization calculations (that is, finds lowest energy solutions) using a procedure that is consistent with quantum annealing and is inconsistent with the predictions of classical annealing," said Daniel Lidar, scientific director of the Quantum Computing Center and one of the researchers on the team, who holds joint appointments with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Quantum annealing is a method of solving optimization problems using quantum mechanics at a large enough scale, potentially much faster than a traditional processor can.

Research institutions throughout the world build and use quantum processors, but most only have a few quantum bits, or "qubits."

Qubits have the capability of encoding the two digits of one and zero at the same time as opposed to traditional bits, which can encode distinctly either a one or a zero. This property, called "superposition," along with the ability of quantum states to "tunnel" through energy barriers, are hoped to play a role in helping future generations of the D-Wave processor to ultimately perform optimization calculations much faster than traditional processors.

With 108 functional qubits, the D-Wave processor at USC inspired hopes for a significant advance in the field of quantum computing when it was installed in October 2011 provided it worked as a quantum information processor. Quantum processors can fall victim to a phenomenon called "decoherence," which stifles their ability to behave in a quantum fashion.

The USC team's research shows that the chip, in fact, performed largely as hoped, demonstrating the potential for quantum optimization on a larger-than-ever scale.

"Our work seems to show that, from a purely physical point of view, quantum effects play a functional role in information processing in the D-Wave processor," said Sergio Boixo, first author of the research paper, who conducted the research while he was a computer scientist at ISI and research assistant professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Boixo and Lidar collaborated with Tameem Albash, postdoctoral research associate in physics at USC Dornsife; Federico M. Spedalieri, computer scientist at ISI; and Nicholas Chancellor, a recent physics graduate at USC Dornsife. Their findings will be published in Nature Communications on June 28.

The news comes just two months after the Quantum Computing Center's original D-Wave processorknown commercially as the "Rainier" chipwas upgraded to a new 512-qubit "Vesuvius" chip. The Quantum Computing Center, which includes a magnetically shielded box that is kept frigid (near absolute zero) to protect the computer against decoherence, was designed to be upgradable to keep up with the latest developments in the field.

The new Vesuvius chip at USC is currently the only one in operation outside of D-Wave. A second such chip, owned by Google and housed at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, is expected to become operational later this year.

Next, the USC team will take the Vesuvius chip for a test drive, putting it through the same paces as the Rainier chip.

###

This research was supported by the Lockheed Martin Corporation; U.S. Army Research Office grant number W911NF-12-1-0523; National Science Foundation grant number CHM-1037992, ARO Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant W911NF-11-1-026.

---

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?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Public release date: 28-Jun-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Robert Perkins
perkinsr@usc.edu
213-740-9226
University of Southern California

New research finds that prototype quantum optimization chip operates as hoped

A team of scientists at USC has verified that quantum effects are indeed at play in the first commercial quantum optimization processor.

The team demonstrated that the D-Wave processor housed at the USC-Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center behaves in a manner that indicates that quantum mechanics plays a functional role in the way it works. The demonstration involved a small subset of the chip's 128 qubits.

This means that the device appears to be operating as a quantum processor something that scientists had hoped for but have needed extensive testing to verify.

The quantum processor was purchased from Canadian manufacturer D-Wave nearly two years ago by Lockheed Martin and housed at the USC Viterbi Information Sciences Institute (ISI). As the first of its kind, the task for scientists putting it through its paces was to determine whether the quantum computer was operating as hoped.

"Using a specific test problem involving eight qubits we have verified that the D-Wave processor performs optimization calculations (that is, finds lowest energy solutions) using a procedure that is consistent with quantum annealing and is inconsistent with the predictions of classical annealing," said Daniel Lidar, scientific director of the Quantum Computing Center and one of the researchers on the team, who holds joint appointments with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Quantum annealing is a method of solving optimization problems using quantum mechanics at a large enough scale, potentially much faster than a traditional processor can.

Research institutions throughout the world build and use quantum processors, but most only have a few quantum bits, or "qubits."

Qubits have the capability of encoding the two digits of one and zero at the same time as opposed to traditional bits, which can encode distinctly either a one or a zero. This property, called "superposition," along with the ability of quantum states to "tunnel" through energy barriers, are hoped to play a role in helping future generations of the D-Wave processor to ultimately perform optimization calculations much faster than traditional processors.

With 108 functional qubits, the D-Wave processor at USC inspired hopes for a significant advance in the field of quantum computing when it was installed in October 2011 provided it worked as a quantum information processor. Quantum processors can fall victim to a phenomenon called "decoherence," which stifles their ability to behave in a quantum fashion.

The USC team's research shows that the chip, in fact, performed largely as hoped, demonstrating the potential for quantum optimization on a larger-than-ever scale.

"Our work seems to show that, from a purely physical point of view, quantum effects play a functional role in information processing in the D-Wave processor," said Sergio Boixo, first author of the research paper, who conducted the research while he was a computer scientist at ISI and research assistant professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

Boixo and Lidar collaborated with Tameem Albash, postdoctoral research associate in physics at USC Dornsife; Federico M. Spedalieri, computer scientist at ISI; and Nicholas Chancellor, a recent physics graduate at USC Dornsife. Their findings will be published in Nature Communications on June 28.

The news comes just two months after the Quantum Computing Center's original D-Wave processorknown commercially as the "Rainier" chipwas upgraded to a new 512-qubit "Vesuvius" chip. The Quantum Computing Center, which includes a magnetically shielded box that is kept frigid (near absolute zero) to protect the computer against decoherence, was designed to be upgradable to keep up with the latest developments in the field.

The new Vesuvius chip at USC is currently the only one in operation outside of D-Wave. A second such chip, owned by Google and housed at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, is expected to become operational later this year.

Next, the USC team will take the Vesuvius chip for a test drive, putting it through the same paces as the Rainier chip.

###

This research was supported by the Lockheed Martin Corporation; U.S. Army Research Office grant number W911NF-12-1-0523; National Science Foundation grant number CHM-1037992, ARO Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant W911NF-11-1-026.

---

[ | E-mail | Share ]

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/uosc-lqc062813.php

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Texts, video cited in charges against Hernandez

Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, left, stands with his attorney Michael Fee, right, during arraignment in Attleboro District Court Wednesday, June 26, in Attleboro, Mass. Hernandez was charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player for the Boston Bandits, whose body was found June 17 in an industrial park in North Attleborough, Mass. (AP Photo/The Sun Chronicle, Mike George, Pool)

Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, left, stands with his attorney Michael Fee, right, during arraignment in Attleboro District Court Wednesday, June 26, in Attleboro, Mass. Hernandez was charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player for the Boston Bandits, whose body was found June 17 in an industrial park in North Attleborough, Mass. (AP Photo/The Sun Chronicle, Mike George, Pool)

Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, left, stands with his attorney Michael Fee, right, during arraignment in Attleboro District Court Wednesday, June 26, in Attleboro, Mass. Hernandez was charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player for the Boston Bandits, whose body was found June 17 in an industrial park in North Attleborough, Mass. (AP Photo/The Sun Chronicle, Mike George, Pool)

Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, left, stands with his attorney Michael Fee, right, during arraignment in Attleboro District Court Wednesday, June 26, in Attleboro, Mass. Hernandez was charged with murdering Odin Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player for the Boston Bandits, whose body was found June 17 in an industrial park in North Attleborough, Mass. (AP Photo/The Sun Chronicle, Mike George, Pool)

FILE - This Dec. 25, 2012 file photo taken by a sister and provided by the Boston Bandits football team shows Odin Lloyd, 27, whose body was found Monday, June 17, 2013 in an industrial park in North Attleborough, Mass. Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez was arraigned Wednesday, June 26, 2013, on a charge of murdering Lloyd. (AP Photo/Lloyd family via the Boston Bandits, File)

Family of Odin Lloyd react during the arraignment of former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez in Attleboro District Court Wednesday, June 26, in Attleboro, Mass. Hernandez was charged with murdering Lloyd, a 27-year-old semi-pro football player for the Boston Bandits, whose body was found June 17 in an industrial park in North Attleborough, Mass. (AP Photo/The Sun Chronicle, Mike George, Pool)

ATTLEBORO, Mass. (AP) ? In the final minutes of his life, Odin Lloyd sent a series of texts to his sister.

"Did you see who I was with?" said the first, at 3:07 a.m. June 17. "Who?" she finally replied.

"NFL," he texted back, then added: "Just so you know."

It was 3:23 a.m. Moments later, Lloyd would be dead in what a prosecutor called an execution-style shooting orchestrated by New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez because his friend talked to the wrong people at a nightclub. Hernandez was charged on Wednesday with murder.

Hernandez was cut from the NFL team less than two hours after he was arrested and led from his North Attleborough home in handcuffs, and nine days after Lloyd's body was discovered by a jogger in a remote area of an industrial park not far from Hernandez's home. The 2011 Pro Bowl selection had signed a five-year contract last summer with the Patriots worth $40 million.

His attorney, Michael Fee, called the case circumstantial during a Wednesday afternoon court hearing packed with news reporters, curiosity seekers and police officers. Fee said there was a "rather hysterical atmosphere" surrounding the case and urged the judge to disregard his client's celebrity status as he asked for Hernandez, 23, to be released on bail.

The judge, though, ordered Hernandez held without bail on the murder charge and five weapons counts. If convicted, Hernandez could get life in prison without parole.

Hernandez stood impassively with his hands cuffed in front of him as Bristol County Assistant District Attorney Bill McCauley laid out a detailed timeline of the events, cobbled together from sources including witnesses, surveillance video, text messages and data from cell phone towers.

Lloyd, 27, a semi-pro football player with the Boston Bandits, had known Hernandez about a year and was dating the sister of Hernandez's fianc?e, the mother of Hernandez's 8-month-old baby, McCauley said.

On June 14, Lloyd went with Hernandez to a Boston club, Rumor. McCauley said Hernandez was upset Lloyd had talked to people there with whom Hernandez had trouble. He did not elaborate.

Two days later, McCauley said, on June 16, Hernandez texted two unidentified friends. He asked them to hurry to Massachusetts from Connecticut. At 9:05 p.m., a few minutes after the first message to his friends, Hernandez texted Lloyd, telling him he wanted to get together, McCauley said.

Later, surveillance footage from Hernandez's home showed his friends arrive and go inside. Hernandez, holding a gun, then told someone in the house he was upset and couldn't trust anyone anymore, the prosecutor said.

At 1:12 a.m., the three left in Hernandez's rented silver Nissan Altima, McCauley said. Cell towers tracked their movements to a gas station off the highway. There, he said, Hernandez bought blue Bubblicious cotton candy gum.

At 2:32 a.m., they arrived outside Lloyd's home in Boston and texted him that they were there. McCauley said Lloyd's sister saw him get into Hernandez's car.

From there, surveillance cameras captured images of what the prosecutor said was Hernandez driving the silver Altima through the city of Boston. As they drove back toward North Attleborough, Hernandez told Lloyd he was upset about what happened at the club and didn't trust him, McCauley said. That was when Lloyd began sending texts to his sister.

Surveillance video showed the car entering the industrial park and at 3:23 a.m. driving down a gravel road near where Lloyd's body was found. Four minutes later, McCauley said, the car emerges. During that period, employees working an overnight shift nearby heard several gunshots, McCauley said.

McCauley said Lloyd was shot multiple times, including twice from above as he was lying on the ground. He said five .45 caliber casings were found at the scene.

Authorities did not say who fired the shots or identify the two others with Hernandez.

At 3:29 a.m., surveillance at Hernandez's house shows him arriving, McCauley said.

"The defendant was walking through the house with a gun in his hand. That's captured on video," he said.

His friend is also seen holding a gun, and neither weapon has been found, McCauley said.

Then, the surveillance system stopped recording, and footage was missing from the six to eight hours after the slaying, he said.

The afternoon of June 17, the prosecutor said, Hernandez returned the rental car, offering the attendant a piece of blue Bubblicious gum when he dropped it off. While cleaning the car, the attendant found a piece of blue Bubblicious gum and a shell casing, which he threw away. Police later searched the trash bin and found the gum and the casing. The prosecutor said it was tested and matched the casings found where Lloyd was killed.

As McCauley outlined the killing, Lloyd's family members cried and held each other, and two were so overcome that they had to leave the courtroom.

The Patriots said in a written statement after Hernandez's arrest but before the murder charge was announced that cutting Hernandez was "the right thing to do."

"Words cannot express the disappointment we feel knowing that one of our players was arrested as a result of this investigation," it said.

Hernandez, originally from Bristol, Conn., was drafted by the Patriots in 2010 out of the University of Florida, where he was an All-American.

During the draft, one team said it wouldn't take him under any circumstances, and he was passed over by one club after another before New England picked him in the fourth round. Afterward, Hernandez said he had failed a drug test in college ? reportedly for marijuana ? and was up front with teams about it.

A Florida man filed a lawsuit last week claiming Hernandez shot him in the face after they argued at a strip club in February.

Hernandez became a father on Nov. 6 and said he intended to change his ways: "Now, another one is looking up to me. I can't just be young and reckless Aaron no more. I'm going to try to do the right things."

___

Associated Press writers Bridget Murphy in Boston and Howard Ulman in North Attleborough contributed to this story.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2013-06-27-Hernandez-Police/id-c7abfb8130324e6582063afca1b68535

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Chimps or humans: Who's the better baseball pitcher?

June 26, 2013 ? Little leaguers and professional baseball players alike have our extinct ancestors to thank for their success on the mound, shows a study by George Washington University researcher Neil Roach, which is featured on the cover of the June 27 edition of the journal Nature.

Of course, the ability to throw fast and accurately did not evolve so our ancestors could play ball. Instead, Dr. Roach's study proposes that this ability first evolved nearly 2 million years ago to aid in hunting. Humans are unique in their throwing ability, even when compared to our chimpanzee cousins.

"Chimpanzees are incredibly strong and athletic, yet adult male chimps can only throw about 20 miles per hour -- one-third the speed of a 12-year-old little league pitcher," said Dr. Roach, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral scientist in GW's Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.

Funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Roach and colleagues from Harvard University set out to discover how humans throw so well, and when and why this ability evolved.

Using a 3-D camera system, like those used to make video games and animated movies, they recorded the throwing motions of collegiate baseball players, finding that the human shoulder acts much like a slingshot during a throw, storing and releasing large amounts of energy.

"When humans throw, we first rotate our arms backwards away from the target. It is during this 'arm-cocking' phase that humans stretch the tendons and ligaments crossing their shoulder and store elastic energy," Dr. Roach said. "When this energy is released, it accelerates the arm forward, generating the fastest motion the human body produces, resulting in a very fast throw."

Dr. Roach and colleagues also found that certain anatomical features in the torso, shoulder and arm that evolved in our hominin ancestors made this energy storage possible. These features that allow humans to throw so well first appeared in the species Homo erectus approximately 2 million years ago.

"We think that throwing was probably most important early on in terms of hunting behavior, enabling our ancestors to effectively and safely kill big game," Dr. Roach said. "Eating more calorie-rich meat and fat would have allowed our ancestors to grow larger brains and bodies and expand into new regions of the world -- all of which helped make us who we are today."

Dr. Roach's study may also have important modern-day implications for some athletes. Baseball pitchers, for example, throw much more frequently than our ancestors probably did.

"At the end of the day, despite the fact that we evolved to throw, when we overuse this ability it can end up injuring us," Dr. Roach said.

The next step for Dr. Roach and his colleagues is researching what humans were throwing so long ago, especially since stone projectile points don't appear in the archaeological record until much more recently. The likely weapons of choice? Rocks and sharpened wooden spears.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/dwGRxlC2hNo/130626142710.htm

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Violent birth of neutron stars: Computer simulations confirm sloshing and spiral motions as stellar matter falls inward

June 27, 2013 ? A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics conducted the most expensive and most elaborate computer simulations so far to study the formation of neutron stars at the center of collapsing stars with unprecedented accuracy. These worldwide first three-dimensional models with a detailed treatment of all important physical effects confirm that extremely violent, hugely asymmetric sloshing and spiral motions occur when the stellar matter falls towards the center. The results of the simulations thus lend support to basic perceptions of the dynamical processes that are involved when a star explodes as supernova.

Stars with more than eight to ten times the mass of our Sun end their lives in a gigantic explosion, in which the stellar gas is expelled into the surrounding space with enormous power. Such supernovae belong to the most energetic and brightest phenomena in the universe and can outshine a whole galaxy for weeks. They are the cosmic origin of chemical elements like carbon, oxygen, silicon, and iron, of which Earth and our bodies are made of, and which are bred in massive stars over millions of years or freshly fused in the stellar explosion.

Supernovae are also the birth places of neutron stars, those extraordinarily exotic, compact stellar remnants, in which about 1.5 times the mass of our Sun is compressed to a sphere with the diameter of Munich. This happens within fractions of a second when the stellar core implodes due to the strong gravity of its own mass. The catastrophic collapse is stopped only when the density of atomic nuclei -- gargantuan 300 million tons in a sugar cube -- is exceeded.

What, however, causes the disruption of the star? How can the implosion of the stellar core be reversed to an explosion? The exact processes are still a matter of intense research. According to the most widely favored scenario, neutrinos, mysterious elementary particles, play a crucial role. These neutrinos are produced and radiated in tremendous numbers at the extreme temperatures and densities in the collapsing stellar core and nascent neutron star. Like the thermal radiation of a heater they heat the gas surrounding the hot neutron star and thus could "ignite" the explosion. In this scenario the neutrinos pump energy into the stellar gas and build up pressure until a shock wave is accelerated to disrupt the star in a supernova. But does this theoretical idea really work? Is it the explanation of the still enigmatic mechanism driving the explosion?

Unfortunately (or luckily!) the processes in the center of exploding stars cannot be reproduced in the laboratory and many solar masses of intransparent stellar gas obscure our view into the deep interior of supernovae. Research is therefore strongly dependent on most sophisticated and challenging computer simulations, in which the complex mathematical equations are solved that describe the motion of the stellar gas and the physical processes that occur at the extreme conditions in the collapsing stellar core. For this task the most powerful existing supercomputers are used, but still it has been possible to conduct such calculations only with radical and crude simplifications until recently. If, for example, the crucial effects of neutrinos were included in some detailed treatment, the computer simulations could only be performed in two dimensions, which means that the star in the models was assumed to have an artificial rotational symmetry around an axis.

Thanks to support from the Rechenzentrum Garching (RZG) in developing a particularly efficient and fast computer program, access to most powerful supercomputers, and a computer time award of nearly 150 million processor hours, which is the greatest contingent so far granted by the "Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE)" initiative of the European Union, the team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) in Garching could now for the first time simulate the processes in collapsing stars in three dimensions and with a sophisticated description of all relevant physics.

"For this purpose we used nearly 16,000 processor cores in parallel mode, but still a single model run took about 4.5 months of continuous computing," says PhD student Florian Hanke, who performed the simulations. Only two computing centers in Europe were able to provide sufficiently powerful machines for such long periods of time, namely CURIE at Tr?s Grand Centre de calcul (TGCC) du CEA near Paris and SuperMUC at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum (LRZ) in Munich/Garching.

Many Terabytes of simulation data (1 Terabyte are thousand billion bytes) had to be analysed and visualized before the researchers could grasp the essence of their model runs. What they saw caused excitement as well as astonishment. The stellar gas did not only exhibit the violent bubbling and seething with the characteristic rising mushroom-like plumes driven by neutrino heating in close similarity to what can be observed in boiling water. (This process is called convection.) The scientists also found powerful, large sloshing motions, which temporarily switch over to rapid, strong rotational motions. Such a behavior had been known before and had been named "Standing Accretion Shock Instability," or SASI. This term expresses the fact that the initial sphericity of the supernova shock wave is spontaneously broken, because the shock develops large-amplitude, pulsating asymmetries by the oscillatory growth of initially small, random seed perturbations. So far, however, this had been found only in simplified and incomplete model simulations.

"My colleague Thierry Foglizzo at the Service d' Astrophysique des CEA-Saclay near Paris has obtained a detailed understanding of the growth conditions of this instability," explains Hans-Thomas Janka, the head of the research team. "He has constructed an experiment, in which a hydraulic jump in a circular water flow exhibits pulsational asymmetries in close analogy to the shock front in the collapsing matter of the supernova core." This phenomenon was named "SWASI" ("Shallow Water Analogue of Shock Instability") and allows one to demonstrate dynamical processes in the deep interior of a dying star by a relatively simple and inexpensive experimental setup of table size, of course without accounting for the important effects of neutrino heating. For this reason many astrophysicists had been sceptical that this instability indeed occurs in collapsing stars.

The Garching team could now demonstrate for the first time unambiguously that the SASI also plays an important role in the so far most realistic computer models. "It does not only govern the mass motions in the supernova core but it also imposes characteristic signatures on the neutrino and gravitational-wave emission, which will be measurable for a future Galactic supernova. Moreover, it may lead to strong asymmetries of the stellar explosion, in course of which the newly formed neutron star will receive a large kick and spin," describes team member Bernhard M?ller the most significant consequences of such dynamical processes in the supernova core.

The researchers now plan to explore in more detail the measurable effects connected to the SASI and to sharpen their predictions of associated signals. Moreover, they plan to perform more and longer simulations to understand how the instability acts together with neutrino heating and enhances the efficiency of the latter. The goal is to ultimately clarify whether this conspiracy is the long-searched mechanism that triggers the supernova explosion and thus leaves behind the neutron star as compact remnant.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/xulUjZRJoLM/130627083034.htm

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