RIM: It's okay, we have superheroes

It's a common human trait that, when faced with a series of calamities, the brain will retreat into a fantasy world in which everything is the exact opposite of reality. Could this be the inspiration for RIM's four new cartoon characters, which the company hopes will spread its "Be Bold" marketing message? The pattern certainly seems to fit. From left to right: there's GoGo Girl, who "saves the day with a brilliant strategy" (translation: we don't have a strategy). Then comes Justin Steele, who's "always ready to stick up for his friends" (translation: we don't have friends). Trudy Foreal "isn't afraid to call it as she sees it" (translation: our shareholders are complaining). Finally, the adventurous Max Stone is "able to jump out of a plane" (translation: we're going to crash).

Update: RIM has provided a little update stating that this is "not a new ad campaign." Still, it's fun to imagine what might have been.

RIM: It's okay, we have superheroes originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 Jan 2012 08:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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President Obama to raise money in DC as Florida returns come in (Washington Bureau)

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Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/193534213?client_source=feed&format=rss

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Calories count, but source doesn't matter: study (Reuters)

(Reuters) ? People trying to lose weight may swear by specific diet plans calling for strict proportions of fat, carbs and protein, but where the calories come from may not matter as much as simply cutting back on them, according to a study.

Researchers whose results were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found there were no differences in weight loss or the reduction of fat between four diets with different proportions of fat, carbohydrates and protein.

"The major predictor for weight loss was 'adherence'. Those participants who adhered better, lost more weight than those who did not," said George Bray, at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who worked on the study.

Earlier research had found that certain diets -- in particular, those with very low carbohydrates -- worked better than others, Bray told Reuters Health in an email, but there had been no consensus among scientists.

Bray and his colleagues randomly assigned several hundred overweight or obese people to one of four diets: average protein, low fat and higher carbs; high protein, low fat and higher carbs; average protein, high fat and lower carbs; or high protein, high fat and lower carbs.

Each of the diets was designed to cut 750 calories a day.

After six months and again at two years after starting the diets, researchers checked participants' weight, fat mass and lean mass.

At six months, people had lost more than 4.1 kg (9 lbs) of fat and close to 2.3 kg (5 lbs) of lean mass, but they regained some of this by the two-year mark.

People were able to maintain a weight loss of more than 3.6 kg (8 lbs) after two years. Included in this was a nearly 1.4 kg (3 lb) loss of abdominal fat, a drop of more than seven percent.

But many of the people who started in the study dropped out, and the diets of those who completed it were not exactly what had been assigned.

For example, the researchers had hoped to see two diet groups get 25 percent of their calories from protein and the other two groups get 15 percent of their calories from protein. But all four groups ended up getting about 20 percent of their calories from protein after two years.

"If you're happier doing it low fat, or happier doing it low carb, this paper says it's OK to do it either way. They were equally successful," said Christopher Gardner, a Stanford University professor uninvolved in the study.

"They did have difficulties with adherence, so that really tempers what you can conclude," he added.

In the end, he said, people should choose the diet that's easiest for them to stick with. SOURCE: http://bit.ly/zUm9ep

(Reporting from New York by Kerry Grens; editing by Elaine Lies and Ron Popeski)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/weightloss/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120130/hl_nm/us_calories

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Signs point to strong Jan. finsh for stocks

NEW YORK?? January has turned out strong for equities with just two trading days to go. If you're afraid to miss the ride, there's still time to jump in. You just might want to wear a neck brace.

The new year lured buyers into growth-related sectors, the ones that were more beaten down last year. The economy is getting better, but not dramatically. Earnings are beating expectations, but at a lower rate than in recent quarters. Nothing too bad is coming out of Europe's debt crisis ? and nothing good, either ? at least not yet.

"No one item is a major positive, but collectively, it's been enough to tilt it towards net buying," said John Schlitz, chief market technician at Instinet in New York.

Still, relatively weak volume and a six-month high hit this week make some doubt that the gains are sustainable.

But then there's the golden cross.

Many market skeptics take notice when this technical indicator, a holy grail of sorts for many technicians, shows up on the horizon.

As early as Monday, the rising 50-day moving average of the S&P 500 could tick above its rising 200-day moving average. This occurrence ? known as a golden cross ? means the medium-term momentum is increasingly bullish. You have a good chance of making money in the next six months if you put it to work in large-cap stocks.

In the last 50 years, according to data compiled by Birinyi Associates, a golden cross on the S&P 500 has augured further gains six months ahead in eight out of 10 times. The average gain has been 6.6 percent.

That means the benchmark is on solid footing to not only hold onto the 14 percent advance over the last nine weeks, but to flirt with 1,400, a level it hasn't hit since mid-2008.

The gains, as expected, would not be in a straight line. But any weakness could be used by long-term investors as buying opportunities.

"The cross is an intermediate bullish event," Schlitz said. "You have to interpret it as constructive, but I caution people to take a bullish stance, if they have a short-term horizon ."

Less than halfway into the earnings season and with Greek debt talks over the weekend, payrolls data next week and the S&P 500 near its highest since July, there's plenty of room for something to go wrong. If that happens, the market could easily give back some of its recent advance.

But the benchmark's recent rally and momentum shift allow for a pullback before the technical picture deteriorates.

"We bounced off 1,325, which is resistance. We're testing 1,310, which should be support. We are stuck in that range," said Ken Polcari, managing director at ICAP Equities in New York.

"If over the weekend, Greece comes out with another big nothing, then you will see further weakness next week," he said. "A 1 (percent) or 2 percent pullback isn't out of the question or out of line."

On Friday, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite closed their fourth consecutive week of gains, while the Dow Jones industrial average dipped and capped three weeks of gains. For the day, the Dow dropped 74.17 points, or 0.58 percent, to close at 12,660.46. The S&P 500 fell 2.10 points, or 0.16 percent, to 1,316.33. But the Nasdaq gained 11.27 points, or 0.40 percent, to end at 2,816.55.

For the week, the Dow slipped 0.47 percent, while the S&P 500 inched up 0.07 percent and the Nasdaq jumped 1.07 percent.

Next week is filled with heavy-hitting data on the housing, manufacturing and employment sectors.

Personal income and consumption on Monday will be followed by the S&P/Case-Shiller home prices index, consumer confidence and the Chicago PMI ? all on Tuesday.

Wednesday will bring the Institute for Supply Management index on U.S. manufacturing and the first of three key readings on the labor market ? namely, the ADP private-sector employment report. Jobless claims on Thursday will give way on Friday to the U.S. government's non-farm payrolls report. The forecast calls for a net gain of 150,000 jobs in January, according to economists polled by Reuters.

Another hectic earnings week will kick into gear with almost a fifth of the S&P 500 components posting quarterly results. Exxon Mobil, Amazon, UPS, Pfizer, Kellogg and MasterCard are among the names most likely to grab the headlines.

With almost 200 companies' reports in so far, about 59 percent have beaten earnings expectations ? down from about 70 percent in recent quarters.

Copyright 2012 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46181761/ns/business-us_business/

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PEN writers condemn attacks on Mexico journalists (AP)

MEXICO CITY ? Several Nobel prize laureates are joining the PEN International writers group in condemning attacks on journalists in Mexico.

Mario Vargas Llosa and Toni Morrison are among those participating in a full-page ad in the newspaper El Universal, signed by 170 of the world's most acclaimed writers. It recognizes the courage of journalists in a country were attacks have increased dramatically with drug violence in recent years.

Friday's ad says attacks on journalists "impede the ability to live a secure life free of censorship."

Attacks on Mexican journalists generally go unprosecuted.

Mexico's national human rights commission says 74 journalists were killed from 2000 to 2011. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 51 were slain in that time.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/latam/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120127/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_mexico_journalist_attacks

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AP Exclusive: Vatican rewrites money launder law (AP)

VATICAN CITY ? The Vatican has rewritten its 2010 anti-money laundering law after European inspectors found that it didn't fully meet their tough standards to combat the financing of terrorism.

The new law, a copy of which was obtained Friday by The Associated Press, requires the Vatican to create a list of terror organizations based on the one issued by the United Nations and requires the Vatican to enter into agreements with other countries to exchange financial information.

The Holy See has been working for years to comply with European Union norms on money-laundering and terror financing in a bid to shed its image as a secrecy-obsessed tax haven and join the so-called "white list" of countries that share tax information to crack down on tax cheats.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/terrorism/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120127/ap_on_re_eu/eu_vatican_bank

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Primitive Attraction: Magnetized Moon Rock Points to Lunar Core's Active Past

News | Space

A lunar sample collected by Apollo astronauts suggests that other-Earthly geophysics drove the moon's churning interior

By John Matson ?| January 26, 2012?|

CHIP OFF THE OLD ROCK: A piece of lunar sample 10020, a rock that appears to carry the signature of a past magnetic field on the moon. Image: NASA

The moon of today is a static orb with little to no internal activity; for all intents and purposes it appears to be a dead, dusty pebble of a world. But billions of years ago the moon may have been a place of far more dynamism?literally.

A new study of a lunar rock scooped up by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their Apollo 11 mission indicates that the ancient moon long sustained a dynamo?a convecting fluid core, much like Earth's, that produces a global magnetic field. The age of the rock implies that the lunar dynamo was still going some 3.7 billion years ago, about 800 million years after the moon's formation.

That is longer than would be expected if the lunar dynamo were powered primarily by the natural churning of a cooling molten interior, as is the case on Earth. The moon's small core should have cooled off rather quickly and put an end to any dynamo-generated magnetic field within a few hundred million years. So researchers may have to explore alternate explanations for how a dynamo could be sustained?explanations that depart from thinking of the lunar interior in terms of Earthly geophysics.

A standard-issue, Earth-like dynamo "would have died out on the moon much, much before 3.7 billion years ago," says Erin Shea, a graduate student in geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author on a study in the January 27 issue of Science. "We have to start thinking outside the box about what generates a lunar dynamo."

The first clues that the moon had a dynamo came from a number of lunar samples that appear to record the presence of a magnetic field at the time of their formation. Specifically, the magnetic field is locked in metallic particles in similar orientations. But some of that magnetism could be explained by short-lived magnetic fields rather than by a dynamo. A meteor impact, for instance, can shock a magnetic signature into nearby rocks.

So researchers investigating whether the moon had a more long-lived magnetic field look for evidence of lunar paleomagnetism encoded in rocks that formed slowly in the presence of that field. Such slow-cooling rocks would remain largely unaffected by transient magnetic fields that came and went during solidification. Shea and her colleagues based their study on a rock collected July 20, 1969, the day that humankind took its first "giant leap" onto the lunar surface. The sample is a basalt from volcanic flows early in lunar geologic history, and it would have taken about two weeks to cool?roughly 10 times as long as a short-lived magnetic field from an impact would be expected to persist.

Using a high-resolution magnetometer, the researchers found that the lunar sample indeed formed in the presence of a magnetic field, perhaps even one as strong as Earth's magnetic field today. "What this sample tells us is that at some point the moon did have a dynamo," Shea says. "This magnetic field lasted much longer than we had considered before."

A similar paleomagnetic study in 2009 by some of Shea's co-authors demonstrated the presence of a lunar dynamo some 4.2 billion years ago. That is just at the cusp of what would be possible with an Earth-like dynamo driven by a cooling interior alone. "Even then it's not trivial," says Ian Garrick-Bethell, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz (U.C.S.C.), who was the lead author of the 2009 study.

"It's nice because this sample is also very pristine, like the previous sample that I studied," Garrick-Bethell says. He notes that the new sample not only cooled slowly but also shows no evidence of having been shocked and reheated since its initial formation. "It's a high-quality recorder of magnetic fields," Garrick-Bethell says. "If this sample does have any remnant [magnetization] in it, combined with the pristine nature of the sample, it suggests that there really was a dynamo."

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=5242ecbc123f1de925530d9bdd40bf6b

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