New Primate with Face Mask & Toxic Bite Discovered

A new small primate with a toxic bite and distinctive facial fur markings has been discovered in the jungles of Borneo.

The new slow loris species is found in the highlands of the island of Borneo and has been named Nycticebus kayan, after a major river, the Kayan, flowing through the region. The trio of scientists also found that two species previously considered sub-species in the Nycticebus genus are officially unique species.

"Historically, many species went unrecognized as they were falsely lumped together as one species," researcher Rachel Munds, of the University of Missouri Columbia, said in a statement.

Closely related to lemurs, the slow loris is found across Southeast Asia, from Bangladesh and China's Yunnan province to Borneo. To distinguish between species, the researchers focused on the seeming face masks of Borneo's slow lorises; fur patches cover their eyes, while their heads are covered with differently shaped caps. The examined photographs and museum samples for eight face mask features, finding there were four species of Bornean lorises. [See Photos of the Slow Loris Primates]

The new species to science, N. kayan, showed a dark, highly contrasting face mask, with dark patches around its eyes. From the specimen examined, the species is about 10.8 inches (273 millimeters) long and weighs about 14.5 ounces (411 grams). The other species include: N. menagensis, N. bancanus and N. borneanus. (N. menagensis had already been recognized as a species.)

The newly identified species illustrate the breadth of biodiversity yet to be discovered in the jungles of Borneo and nearby islands, the researchers noted. The slow lorises, as with other animals on these islands, face threats from human activity.

"The pet trade is a serious threat for slow lorises in Indonesia, and recognition of these new species raises issues regarding where to release confiscated Bornean slow lorises, as recognition by nonexperts can be difficult," said study researcher Anna Nekaris, of Oxford Brookes University in England, in a statement.

Munds, Nekaris and co-author Susan Ford of Southern Illinois University also note this week in the American Journal of Primatology that their results confirm the use of fur color and pattern as a valid way of distinguishing between species of small primates. Some researchers, they wrote, had claimed that because Bornean slow lorises are not a diverse group because they share similar cranial features and all are lacking an upper second incisor. The new study suggests otherwise, the team added.

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/primate-face-mask-toxic-bite-discovered-173850559.html

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Selling flak jackets in the cyberwars

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - When the Israeli army and Hamas trade virtual blows in cyberspace, or when hacker groups like Anonymous rise from the digital ether, or when WikiLeaks dumps a trove of classified documents, some see a lawless Internet.

But Matthew Prince, chief executive at CloudFlare, a little-known Internet start-up that serves some of the Web's most controversial characters, sees a business opportunity.

Founded in 2010, CloudFlare markets itself as an Internet intermediary that shields websites from distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks, the crude but effective weapon that hackers use to bludgeon websites until they go dark. The 40-person company claims to route up to 5 percent of all Internet traffic through its global network.

Prince calls his company the "Switzerland" of cyberspace - assiduously neutral and open to all comers. But just as companies like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have faced profound questions about the balance between free speech and openness on the Internet and national security and law enforcement concerns, CloudFlare's business has posed another thorny question: what kinds of services, if any, should an American company be allowed to offer designated terrorists and cyber criminals?

CloudFlare's unusual position at the heart of this debate came to the fore last month, when the Israel Defense Forces sought help from CloudFlare after its website was struck by attackers based in Gaza. The IDF was turning to the same company that provides those services to Hamas and the al-Quds Brigades, according to publicly searchable domain information. Both Hamas and al-Quds, the military wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, are designated by the United States as terrorist groups.

Under the USA Patriot Act, U.S. firms are forbidden from providing "material support" to groups deemed foreign terrorist organizations. But what constitutes material support - like many other facets of the law itself - has been subject to intense debate.

CloudFlare's dealings have attracted heated criticism in the blogosphere from both Israelis and Palestinians, but Prince defended his company as a champion of free speech.

"Both sides have an absolute right to tell their story," said Prince, a 38-year old former lawyer. "We're not providing material support for anybody. We're not sending money, or helping people arm themselves."

Prince noted that his company only provides defensive capabilities that enable websites to stay online.

"We can't be sitting in a role where we decide what is good or what is bad based on our own personal biases," he said. "That's a huge slippery slope."

Many U.S. agencies are customers, but so is WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing organization. CloudFlare has consulted for many Wall Street institutions, yet also protects Anonymous, the "hacktivist" group associated with the Occupy movement.

Prince's stance could be tested at a time when some lawmakers in the United States and Europe, armed with evidence that militant groups rely on the Web for critical operations and recruitment purposes, have pressured Internet companies to censor content or cut off customers.

Last month, conservative political lobbies, as well as seven lawmakers led by Ted Poe, a Republican from Texas, urged the FBI to shut down the Hamas Twitter account. The account remains active; Twitter declined to comment.

MATERIAL SUPPORT

Although it has never prosecuted an Internet company under the Patriot Act, the government's use of the material support argument has steadily risen since 2006. Since September 11, 2001, more than 260 cases have been charged under the provision, according to Fordham Law School's Terrorism Trends database.

Catherine Lotrionte, the director of Georgetown University's Institute for Law, Science and Global Security and a former Central Intelligence Agency lawyer, argued that Internet companies should be more closely regulated.

"Material support includes web services," Lotrionte said. "Denying them services makes it more costly for the terrorists. You're cornering them."

But others have warned that an aggressive government approach would have a chilling effect on free speech.

"We're resurrecting the kind of broad-brush approaches we used in the McCarthy era," said David Cole, who represented the Humanitarian Law Project, a non-profit organization that was charged by the Justice Department for teaching law to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, which is designated by the United States as a terrorist group. The group took its case to the Supreme Court but lost in 2010.

The material support law is vague and ill-crafted, to the point where basic telecom providers, for instance, could be found guilty by association if a terrorist logs onto the Web to plot an attack, Cole said.

In that case, he asked, "Do we really think that AT&T or Google should be held accountable?"

CloudFlare said it has not been contacted about its services by the U.S. government. Spokespeople for Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, told Reuters they contracted a cyber-security company in Gaza that out-sources work to foreign companies, but declined to comment further. The IDF confirmed it had hired CloudFlare, but declined to discuss "internal security" matters.

CloudFlare offers many of its services for free, but the company says websites seeking advanced protection and features can see their bill rise to more than $3,000 a month. Prince declined to discuss the business arrangements with specific customers.

While not yet profitable, CloudFlare has more than doubled its revenue in the past four months, according to Prince, and is picking up 3,000 new customers a month. The company has raked in more than $22 million from venture capital firms including New Enterprise Associates, Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners.

Prince, a Midwestern native with mussed brown hair who holds a law degree from the University of Chicago, said he has a track record of working on the right side of the law.

A decade ago, Prince provided free legal aid to Spamhaus, an international group that tracked email spammers and identity thieves. He went on to create Project Honey Pot, an open source spam-tracking endeavor that turned over findings to police.

Prince's latest company, CloudFlare, has been hailed by groups such as the Committee to Protect Journalists for protecting speech. Another client, the World Economic Forum, named CloudFlare among its 2012 "technology pioneers" for its work. But it also owes its profile to its most controversial customers.

CloudFlare has hosted 4Chan, the online messaging community that spawned Anonymous. LulzSec, the hacker group best known for targeting Sony Corp, is another customer. And since last May, the company has propped up WikiLeaks after a vigilante hacker group crashed the document repository.

Last year, members of the hacker collective UgNazi, whose exploits include pilfering user account information from eBay and crashing the CIA.gov website, broke into Prince's cell phone and email accounts.

"It was a personal affront," Prince said. "But we never kicked them off either."

Prince said CloudFlare would comply with a valid court order to remove a customer, but that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has never requested a takedown. The company has agreed to turn over information to authorities on "exceedingly rare" occasions, he acknowledged, declining to elaborate.

"Any company that doesn't do that won't be in business long," Prince said. But in an email, he added: "We have a deep and abiding respect for our users' privacy, disclose to our users whenever possible if we are ordered to turn over information and would fight an order that we believed was not proper."

Juliannne Sohn, an FBI spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Michael Sussmann, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted computer crimes, said U.S. law enforcement agencies may in fact prefer that the Web's most wanted are parked behind CloudFlare rather than a foreign service over which they have no jurisdiction.

Federal investigators "want to gather information from as many sources as they can, and they're happy to get it," Sussmann said.

In an era of rampant cyber warfare, Prince acknowledged he is something of a war profiteer, but with a wrinkle.

"We're not selling bullets," he said. "We're selling flak jackets."

(Reporting By Gerry Shih in San Francisco and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; editing by Jonathan Weber and Claudia Parsons)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/selling-flak-jackets-cyberwars-125406473--sector.html

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Depression eased quickly with experimental drug: Works in brain like Ketamine, with fewer side effects, study suggests

Dec. 12, 2012 ? A drug that works through the same brain mechanism as the fast-acting antidepressant ketamine briefly improved treatment-resistant patients' depression symptoms in minutes, with minimal untoward side effects, in a clinical trial conducted by the National Institutes of Health. The experimental agent, called AZD6765, acts through the brain's glutamate chemical messenger system.

Existing antidepressants available through prescription, which work through the brain's serotonin system, take a few weeks to work, imperiling severely depressed patients, who can be at high risk for suicide. Ketamine also works in hours, but its usefulness is limited by its potential for dissociative side-effects, including hallucinations. It is being studied mostly for clues to how it works.

"Our findings serve as a proof of concept that we can tap into an important component of the glutamate pathway to develop a new generation of safe, rapid-acting practical treatments for depression," said Carlos Zarate, M.D., of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health, which conducted the research.

Zarate, and colleagues, reported on their results online Dec. 1, 2012 in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

AZD6765, like ketamine, works by blocking glutamate binding to a protein on the surface of neurons, called the NMDA receptor. It is a less powerful blocker of the NMDA receptor, which may be a reason why it is better tolerated than ketamine.

About 32 percent of 22 treatment-resistant depressed patients infused with ASD6765 showed a clinically meaningful antidepressant response at 80 minutes after infusion that lasted for about half an hour -- with residual antidepressant effects lasting two days for some. By contrast, 52 percent of patients receiving ketamine show a comparable response, with effects still detectable at seven days. So a single infusion of ketamine produces more robust and sustained improvement, but most patients continue to experience some symptoms with both drugs.

However, depression rating scores were significantly better among patients who received AZD6765 than in those who received placebos. The researchers deemed this noteworthy, since, on average, these patients had failed to improve in seven past antidepressant trials, and nearly half failed to respond to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

The patients reported only minor side effects, such as dizziness and nausea, which were not significantly different from those experienced with the placebo.

Zarate and colleagues say their results warrant further trials with AZD6765, testing whether repeated infusions a few times per week or higher doses might produce longer-lasting results.

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Journal Reference:

1. Carlos A. Zarate, Daniel Mathews, Lobna Ibrahim, Jose Franco Chaves, Craig Marquardt, Immaculata Ukoh, Libby Jolkovsky, Nancy E. Brutsche, Mark A. Smith, David A. Luckenbaugh. A Randomized Trial of a Low-Trapping Nonselective N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Channel Blocker in Major Depression. Biological Psychiatry, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2012.10.019

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/q7e1tNK8sDw/121212205736.htm

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South Korea: NKorea's satellite orbiting normally

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) ? South Korea says that a satellite North Korea launched aboard a long-range rocket is orbiting the Earth normally but it's unknown whether it is functioning properly.

North Korea defiantly launched the rocket Wednesday and its state media quickly announced it placed an observation satellite into orbit.

Seoul and Washington condemned the launch as a cover for testing banned ballistic missile technology but they said the launch appeared to be successful.

South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok told reporters Thursday that the satellite is orbiting at a speed of 7.6 kilometers (4.7 miles) per second but it's not known what mission it is performing.

He says it takes two weeks to determine whether a satellite works successfully after liftoff.

Kim cited data from the North American Aerospace Defense Command.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/south-korea-nkoreas-satellite-orbiting-normally-062254712.html

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Protesters to march on Michigan capitol over "right-to-work" vote

LANSING, Michigan (Reuters) - As many as 10,000 labor union workers from throughout Michigan and the U.S. Midwest are expected to march on the Michigan Capitol building in freezing temperatures on Tuesday to protest likely passage of a "right-to-work" law.

The Republican-controlled Michigan House of Representatives will consider two and perhaps three bills on Tuesday that would prohibit unions from compelling private sector workers and government employees to pay union dues.

The right-to-work movement has been growing in the country since Wisconsin fought a similar battle with unions over two years ago.

Michigan would become the 24th state to enact right-to-work provisions and passage of the legislation would deal a stunning blow to the power of organized labor in the United States.

Michigan is home of the heavily unionized U.S. auto industry, with some 700 manufacturing plants in the state. It is also the birthplace of the United Auto Workers, the richest U.S. labor union.

While the new laws are not expected to have much immediate impact because existing union contracts would be preserved, they could, over time, further weaken the UAW, which has already seen its influence wane in negotiating with the major automakers.

Right-to-work laws typically allow workers to hold a job without being forced to join a union or pay union dues.

Last Thursday, when the senate passed two bills and the House also considered right-to-work legislation, protesters converged on Lansing. Several people were arrested and officials sealed the Capitol from the public.

"We support people exercising their constitutional rights to protest," said Inspector Gene Adamczyk of the Michigan State Police. "But we need them to do it in an orderly manner."

President Barack Obama waded into the debate during a visit to the Daimler Detroit Diesel plant in Redford, Michigan on Monday, criticizing the Republican right-to-work effort.

"What they're really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money," Obama said.

School teachers are among those expected to march on the Capitol on Tuesday. Several school districts will not hold classes on Tuesday due to teacher and staff absences, Detroit newspapers and television stations reported.

Labor leaders such as UAW President Bob King say they were blindsided by Republican Governor Rick Snyder, who last Thursday announced he was supporting right-to-work after nearly two years of saying the issue was too divisive.

King was unsuccessful in more than a week of talks with Snyder and his staff in staving off the right-to-work push by the Republicans, who will lose several seats when newly elected members take their seats in the state house and senate in January.

Michigan has the fifth highest percentage of unionized workers in the United States at 17.5 percent and the Detroit area is headquarters for General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co and Chrysler, which is majority owned by Fiat SpA.

(Reporting by Bernie Woodall; Editing by Greg McCune and Lisa Shumaker)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/protesters-march-michigan-capitol-over-vote-054656984.html

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Ex-Democrat Lieberman to leave U.S. Senate, calls for bipartisanship

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Democrat Joe Lieberman used his last speech on the U.S. Senate floor on Wednesday to call for bipartisanship and get in a last dig over the controversial result of the 2000 election, when he was the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

Lieberman, 70, announced in January 2011 that he would retire when his fourth term ends next month rather than seek re-election. He reflected on his career in remarks that lasted for about 20 minutes, recounting landmarks in his career and changes in society since he became a U.S. senator in January 1989.

"When I started here in the Senate, a blackberry was a fruit and tweeting was something only birds do," Lieberman said.

The four-term Connecticut senator was elected to the Senate as a Democrat in 1988. He sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, but withdrew from the race and John Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts, became the party's nominee.

Known for hawkish foreign policy views, Lieberman lost Connecticut's Democratic primary to an anti-war rival when he sought a fourth term in the Senate in 2006, forcing him to run - and win - as an independent.

Lieberman, 70, remains strongly allied with the Democratic Party, but more recently also has been well-known as one of the "Three Amigos," with Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

The trio has had a strong influence on U.S. foreign policy debate partly because it has representation from both parties. Lieberman at times angered some fellow Democrats for siding with Republicans, for example by refusing to vote with other members of his party in 2007 to set a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq.

Democrats also became furious with Lieberman in the 2008 election for backing McCain, the Republican nominee, rather than the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama.

"It's the partisan polarization of our politics which prevents us from making the principled compromises on which progress in a democracy depends, and right now, which prevents us from restoring our fiscal solvency as a nation," he said.

PRAISE FROM REPUBLICANS

As Republicans in Congress and Obama's White House debate how to address the country's budget problems, Lieberman made a passionate appeal for the country not to focus exclusively on domestic politics.

"The American people need us, the Senate, to stay engaged economically, diplomatically and militarily in an ever smaller world," he said.

Lieberman is chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, former chair of the committee and its top Republican, praised Lieberman's bipartisanship. "He has demonstrated his willingness, time and again, to risk his political career to do what he believes is right for America," she said.

Lieberman said in his career he was proudest of achievements including helping pass the Clean Air Act in 1990, creating the commission investigating the September 11 attacks and the Department of Homeland Security, reforming the intelligence community and repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the U.S. military.

He also noted that he was the first Jewish American nominated for national office by a major party.

In 2000, the Democratic ticket of Al Gore and Lieberman won 500,000 more votes than Republican George W. Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney. But Bush won the White House in the electoral college, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against allowing a recount of votes in Florida.

"And incidentally," Lieberman said in his speech, "(I am) grateful to the American people, grateful to have received a half million more votes than my opponent on the other side, but that's a longer story."

(Editing by Alistair Bell and Stacey Joyce)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ex-democrat-lieberman-leave-u-senate-calls-bipartisanship-233121473.html

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On Mars, Opportunity Rover Continues to Cover New Ground

NASA

An illustration of the Opportunity Mars rover.

SAN FRANCISCO ? While many obsessed over speculation that NASA?s newest Mars rover, Curiosity, had dug up signs of life ? it had not ? it is the agency?s older, smaller jalopy, Opportunity, that has been exploring a more intriguing plot of Martian real estate.

?This is our first glimpse ever at conditions on ancient Mars that clearly show us a chemistry that would have been suitable for life,? Steven W. Squyres, the principal investigator for Opportunity, said at a news conference last week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union here.

Opportunity could be sitting on rocks chock-full of organic molecules ? but the rover and the scientists back on Earth would never know. Unlike Curiosity, Opportunity is not carrying instruments that can detect those kinds of molecules.

But the scientists are not complaining. Everything from Opportunity over the past eight years has been a bonus for a mission that was to have ended long ago.

Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004, for what was supposed to be a three-month mission. Yet the rover continues operating in good condition. (Its twin, Spirit, died in 2010, stuck in a sand trap and unable to point its solar arrays in the correct direction to survive winter, outliving its planned lifetime by almost six years.)

Last year, Opportunity arrived at a 14-mile-wide crater named Endeavour, where NASA?s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has spotted clays from above. Clays generally form in the presence of water.

The clay signal pointed to a hill, which the scientists named after Jacob Matijevic, an engineer on the rover team who died this year.

As Opportunity approached, ?We started seeing things that looked really, really different,? Dr. Squyres said. The most common rock there was light-colored, fine-grained, very soft, and nothing like any that Opportunity had come across before.

?It is right in the sweet spot of where the clay signature is present,? Dr. Squyres said. ?It has got to be the clay-bearing stuff.?

But when the rover looked at the elements in the rock, it was the same mix of elements in a typical Martian rock. ?What?s unusual is that it?s not unusual,? Dr. Squyres said. ?This puzzled us at first. I was expecting something dramatic and instead what you see here kind of looks like average Mars.?

Another instrument could have identified minerals in the rock, but the radioactive cobalt it relies on has long decayed away.

If Curiosity were at the Endeavour crater, its instruments could directly look for the carbon-based molecules known as organics that are the building blocks of life. But Curiosity, which landed in August, is more than 5,000 miles away exploring a different crater where clays have also been spotted from orbit ? and it is still months away from reaching there.

In its nearly nine years on Mars, Opportunity has driven more than 22 miles, crossing a Martian plain and stopping by several smaller craters. During its travels, it came across minerals that pointed to flowing water in Mars? past, but these minerals formed in highly acidic conditions. ?Battery acid kind of numbers,? Dr. Squyres said. ?And that?s a challenging place for life.?

Clays only form in more benign conditions. ?The thing that?s different here is that these clay minerals point towards a neutral chemistry ? water you can drink,? Dr. Squyres said. ?And that?s a different story, a different world.?

These rocks appear to date to the early warm and wet era of Mars, perhaps when the planet was more hospitable to life.

Then Opportunity took a look at another outcrop on Matijevic Hill made of darker, harder minerals. Close up, it saw tiny spheres embedded in the rocks, similar in appearance to iron-rich spheres nicknamed ?blueberries? that the rover had observed earlier.

Except these did not contain much iron. ?These are something totally different,? Dr. Squyres said. ?I?ve been calling them newberries, because there?s something new.?

Even though Opportunity cannot find organics, Dr. Squyres said there were many questions that it would be able to answer that would tell scientists what this part of early Mars was like. What are the newberries made of? How did they form? Did wind or water shape the rocks of Matijevic Hill?

Opportunity will spend several months at Matijevic Hill to try to unravel as many of these puzzles as it can, using its remaining instruments.

?What we have stumbled upon here at Matijevic Hill, drawn here by that clay signature, is what?s turning out to be one of the most delightful geologic puzzles that we have ever found with this rover on Mars,? Dr. Squyres said. ?It?s fascinating. It?s a work in progress.?

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/science/space/on-mars-opportunity-rover-continues-to-cover-new-ground.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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