Online shoppers avoided long lines like this and boosted Web sales nearly 21%. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times)
By Shan Li
November 24, 2012, 11:04 a.m.
Black Friday shoppers headed to their laptops, tablet computers and mobile phones to scoop up deals.
On the day after Thanksgiving, traditionally the kickoff to the holiday shopping season, online sales jumped 20.7% over last year, according to study from IBM. That beat the 17.4% growth over Thanksgiving in Web sales.
That reflects a trend that has swept through the retail industry as shoppers increasingly go online to find the best bargains and deals, forcing traditional brick-and-mortar retailers to adapt in in order to retain customers.
Many consumers chose to shop on their mobile devices, with nearly a quarter of shoppers checking out retailers online.
The Apple iPad was top choice for online buyers, comprising almost 10% of total Web shopping. That's followed by the iPhone at 8.7% and Android-powered devices at 5.5%.
"This year's holiday shopper was hungry for great deals and retailers didn't disappoint, said Jay Henderson, strategy director at IBM Smarter Commerce.
ALSO:
Black Friday shoppers smash door at Urban Outfitters
Nine protesters arrested outside Wal-Mart in Paramount
Drivers, beware: Parking lot accidents increase on Black Friday
Follow Shan Li on Twitter @ShanLi
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The classic PC game Myst was known for drawing people in to its massive, surreal world. But maker Mike Ando took a little piece of that world and drew it into ours. He made a lovingly authentic replica of the Linking Book that helps the main character — you — navigate the world.
Myst was a ground-breaking point-and-click adventure game created by Cyan Worlds, made of hundreds of beautifully rendered scenes whose combined size made the game so big that it needed a CD-ROM to play, back when many computers didn’t have them. It was the first breakout hit in PC gaming and from its release in 1993 it held the title of best-selling PC game until 2002 when The Sims surpassed it.
The game spawned four sequels, along with novels, music, and an MMO that is still online and being powered by donations from the fan base. The games have been widely ported and the game — once so huge that you needed special hardware to run it — is now available for download on iOS (among other places). In other words, it’s a pretty big deal.
At the core of Myst’s story was a mystical technology called Linking Books that pulled players into other realms, called Ages. They were these beautiful old tomes that, when opened, showed an animated preview of the Age to which you’d be linked.
“Ever since I first played the game, I always wanted my own linking book,” says Ando, “Of course, there was no way my old bulky 486 would fit within a book, but as time marched on technology advanced and computers became smaller. Eventually technology caught up and it was possible to shrink everything down to fit inside the book.”
NEW YORK (Reuters) – “The Big Bang Theory” actress Mayim Bialik and her husband are divorcing after nine years of marriage, she said in a statement on her Facebook page.
Bialik, who starred in the 1990s sitcom “Blossom,” and Michael Stone have two sons together.
“Divorce is terribly sad, painful and incomprehensible for children,” Bialik, 36, said in the statement. “It is not something we have decided lightly.”
Bialik, a proponent of “attachment parenting” who authored a book on the subject that was published in September, said it “played no role” in the couple’s divorce.
Attachment parenting advocates the nurturing of strong bonds between parents and children, which can include extended breast-feeding and parents and children sleeping in the same bed until the children are as old as 7. A controversial Time magazine cover on the subject in May drew strong reactions across the United States.
“The main priority for us now is to make the transition to two loving homes as smooth and painless as possible,” Bialik wrote in the statement, which was posted to her Facebook page on Wednesday. “Our sons deserve parents committed to their growth and health and that’s what we are focusing on.”
“We will be OK,” the statement concludes.
Bialik is a former child star who appeared in the 1980s television series “Webster” and “The Facts of Life” before landing the title role in the coming-of-age television show “Blossom,” which ran from 1991 to 1995. The show was about a smart teenage girl whose parents have divorced and is learning about life.
The actress attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where she obtained a doctorate in neuroscience.
She met Michael Stone, a fellow graduate student, in calculus class, according to a description of her wedding she previously posted online.
In her most recent role on CBS comedy “The Big Bang Theory,” Bialik plays Amy Farrah Fowler, a neuroscientist who dates one of the two main stars of the show, the socially inept but brilliant physicist Sheldon Cooper.
(Reporting By Chris Francescani; Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Bill Trott)
TUCKED in the woods here, west of State Route 520, is a little piece of the Mario Kingdom.
Behind the unassuming doors is the business built by Mario, the pudgy plumber, and Luigi, his lanky brother, as well as characters like Link, wielder of the mystical Master Sword, and Princess Zelda, of the royal family of Hyrule. All of them, and more, are the pixelated children of Shigeru Miyamoto, the Walt Disney of video games and creative genius of the Nintendo Company of Japan.
But while Mr. Miyamoto is dreaming his dreams across the Pacific, an army of marketing types is at work here in Redmond, inside the shiny new headquarters of Nintendo of America. This palace of play is quiet, but there’s trouble brewing in the world around it: three decades after the mustachioed Mario burst into arcades via Donkey Kong, plucking countless quarters from people’s pockets, the kingdom is under siege.
Nintendo’s enemies have arrived by battalions. Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and other inexpensive, downloadable games, particularly for cellphones and tablets, have invaded its turf. Changing tastes and technology have called into question the economics of traditional game consoles, whether from Nintendo or Microsoft, maker of the Xbox. Nintendo recently posted the first loss in its era as a video games company, a prospect that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. And while game consoles aren’t going away, analysts are skeptical that the business will regain its former stature soon.
All of which makes Nintendo’s next move, and what is happening here, so crucial. Nintendo counterattacked on Nov. 18, when a new version of its Wii game console arrived in stores nationwide.
The original Wii, the first wireless, motion-capturing console, was nothing less than revolutionary. The simplicity of its controller, which Mr. Miyamoto helped design, attracted new audiences like women and older people. Customers lined up in stores for it — and then it simply faded. Now, the new console, the Wii U, may be Nintendo’s last, best hope for regaining its former glory. Executives are hoping for a holiday hit, and perhaps even another runaway success.
Initial demand appears high. GameStop, the video game retailer, opened 3,000 stores at midnight on Thursday for Black Friday sales, and before long almost all its Wii Us were sold out, according to Tony Bartel, GameStop’s president. “I think people are starving for innovation, and Wii U is giving them that innovation," Mr. Bartel says.
THE Wii U is a recognition that the living room is no longer the province of a single screen. More people, particularly the young, now watch TV with a smartphone or tablet in hand, the better to tweet a touchdown or update their Facebook status during a commercial. The Wii U looks like a mash-up of an iPad and a traditional console, with a touch screen embedded in the middle. It’s no mere festival of joysticks, buttons and triggers.
But will it be the blowout that Nintendo needs? Many industry veterans and game reviewers are skeptical. They question whether the Wii U can be as successful as the original, now that many gamers have moved on to more abundant, cheaper and more convenient mobile games.
“I actually am baffled by it,” Nolan K. Bushnell, the founder of Atari and the godfather of the games business, says of the Wii U. “I don’t think it’s going to be a big success.”
The bigger question is what the future holds for any of the major game systems, including new ones that Sony and Microsoft are expected to release next year. Echoing other industry veterans, Mr. Bushnell says that consoles are already delivering remarkable graphics and that few but the most hard-core players will be willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a new game box.
“These things will continue to sputter along, but I really don’t think they’ll be of major import ever again,” he says. “It feels like the end of an era to me.”
Nintendo is unbowed. Mr. Miyamoto was involved in developing the original Wii, and had a role in the Wii U as well. He rarely gives interviews, and was unavailable for comment for this article.
But one recent evening in Redmond, Corey Olcsvary, a Nintendo product marketing specialist, was slashing his fingers across the touch screen on the GamePad, as the Wii U controller is called, casting “throwing stars” at a ninja gang that sprang from the corners of a giant TV screen. In another game, a group of players chased Mario — one of the most popular video game characters ever — around a maze shown on a TV while Mr. Olcsvary stared at a bird’s-eye view of the maze on his GamePad and tried to help Mario dodge his pursuers. The players shouted when they caught sight of Mario’s red overalls and cheered when they tackled him.
Starting in December, people will also be able to use the GamePad as a remote control to set recordings and change channels on their cable and satellite TV services.
In a tradition that seems to take a bigger slice of Thanksgiving every year, hordes of deal-sniffing shoppers descended on Southland stores Thursday, elbowing their way in search of toys, video games and that time-honored Black Friday symbol: cut-rate television sets. As nightfall came, they huddled in long lines, clutching coupons and hatching shopping strategies.
Rebecca Abbott, 42, of Torrance had it down to a science Thursday night. The accountant said she was out the door of the local Toys R Us store in 20 minutes with a shopping cart full of Christmas gifts for her two daughters.
Her fourth time shopping on Black Friday, Abbott had spent a few hours in Toys R Us the day before scoping out her plan of attack. The first item on her list: a Rockstar Mickey Mouse doll, normally priced at $59.99 but selling for just $19.99.
"You have to have a strategy for this Black Friday madness," she said as she headed for the door. "First-timers will walk around all day looking at deals," Abbott said. "I got in, grabbed my stuff and got out." Her cart was overflowing with large toys — primarily Barbie and Mickey Mouse items.
PHOTOS: Black Friday shoppers hunt for deals
At a Wal-Mart in Panorama City, just after 8 p.m., "it was really crazy, but you could still walk," said Marya Huaman, 23, as she left the store with her dad, her two infant sons and three bags full of Fisher-Price toys.
"No, you couldn't," scoffed her father, Edward Huaman. "I didn't see anyone fighting, but they will be soon. This is madness."
Last year, Thanksgiving night was marred by a pepper spray "shopping rage" incident at a Wal-Mart in Porter Ranch that injured at least seven people and forced employees to evacuate part of the store. One person was hospitalized.
Los Angeles Police Cmdr. Andy Smith said Thursday that the night appeared to be running smoothly across Los Angeles. "In general, I think things have gone really well," he said. "It sounds like the stores have taken proper precautions and everyone is aware of the hazards of Black Friday."
After retailers last year moved the opening bell for Black Friday sales to midnight, this year there were even more customers eager to get a jump on the traditional kickoff to the holiday shopping season. Wal-Mart, Sears and Toys R Us began rolling out their door busters at 8 p.m. on Turkey Day, followed by Target at 9 p.m. Macy's, Kohl's and Best Buy were set to open at midnight.
A handful of chains such as Kmart and Old Navy also had daytime hours on Thursday. And online merchants were touting bargains all day and night.
About 147 million shoppers are expected this all-important holiday weekend, with more logging in for online specials by Cyber Monday, according to the National Retail Federation. In all, the trade group estimated that holidays sales will rise 4.1% this year, to $586 billion.
"Though the Black Friday tradition is here to stay, there's no question that it has changed in recent years," NRF Chief Executive Matthew Shay said in a statement.
Many shoppers were perfectly content to queue up. At Best Buy electronic stores across the Southland, people waited for hours — and sometimes days — in tents before the midnight opening.
But many workers were angry about spending Turkey Day away from loved ones.
Frustrated retail employees and families have taken to creating online petitions at Change.org to beg companies not to cut into Thanksgiving dinners. More than 20 online petitions have popped up in recent weeks. Lines grew throughout the afternoon and into the evening as anxious shoppers surveyed the competition in line.
Throughout Southern California there were reports of lines wrapped around stores. In Glendale, more than 750 shoppers were lined up outside the Target at the Galleria.
For shoppers who just couldn't wait until Thursday night — much less Black Friday — some retailers opened their doors all day on Thanksgiving.
The sales weren't quite as glorious as the Black Friday specials that stores promise to roll out later. But they were pretty good nonetheless, shoppers said.
JoAnne Garcia walked into Kmart in Burbank in search of a roasting pan in which to cook her turkey. She walked out 90 minutes later, having shelled out $491, including $329 for an RCA 39-inch LCD flat-panel TV.
"The roasting pan was $14.99," Garcia said, laughing at how much she spent as she rolled her cart to the parking lot.
To the 53-year-old aerospace machinist, shopping on Thanksgiving made perfect sense.
Standing near a store display touting "Freak Out Pricing," Garcia explained her theory about shopping while cooking. "You get up, throw your turkey in the oven, and you come back and it's all done."
walter.hamilton@latimes.com
joseph.serna@latimes.com
Contributing to this report were staff writers Wesley Lowery, Marisa Gerber, Nicole Santa Cruz and Andrew Khouri.
This colour-composite image was obtained by FORS1 on ANTU. It displays a sky area near the Chamaeleon I complex of bright nebulae and hot stars in the constellation of the same name, close to the southern celestial pole.This picture was taken a few days before the Paranal Inauguration and the "hand-over" to the astronomers on April 1, 1999.This colour composite photo of the Chamaeleon I area is based on six 1-min exposures obtained with VLT UT1 + FORS1 in the V, R and I bands. The sky field measures 6.8 x 11.2 arcmin2; North is up and East is left.
Image: ESO [high-resolution]
Caption: ESO
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – The father of Halle Berry‘s daughter is headed to court after he was arrested following a fistfight with her fiancé outside the Oscar winning actress’ Los Angeles home on Thanksgiving, police said.
Canadian model Gabriel Aubry, 37, was later released on $ 20,000 bail after being charged with misdemeanor battery following the punch-up with Berry’s fiancé, French actor Olivier Martinez, 46, in the driveway of her house on Thursday.
The altercation occurred during a custodial hand-off involving Berry’s 4-year-old daughter with Aubry, Nahla, according to Los Angeles police officer Julie Boyer.
Following the scuffle, Aubry and Martinez were both taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with “non-life-threatening injuries,” Boyer said. Aubry is due to appear in court on December 13.
Berry, 46, who won a best actress Oscar for her role in 2001 film “Monster’s Ball,” has been embroiled in a bitter custody battle with Aubry since they broke up in April 2010. Earlier this month, a judge denied Berry’s request to move to France with Nahla.
Berry and Martinez met while filming the movie “Dark Tide.” They announced their engagement in March.
A judge has since issued an emergency protective order requiring Aubry to stay at least 100 yards (meters) from Berry, their daughter and Martinez, according to celebrity website, TMZ.com.
(Reporting by Tim Gaynor; Editing by Sandra Maler)
DUBLIN — India’s ambassador here has agreed to ask Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland for an independent inquiry into the death of an Indian-born woman last month after doctors refused to perform an abortion when she was having a miscarriage, the lawyer representing the woman’s husband said Thursday.
The lawyer, Gerard O’Donnell, also said crucial information was missing from the files he had received from the Irish Health Service Executive about the death of the woman, Savita Halappanavar, including any mention of her requests for an abortion after she learned that the fetus would not survive.
The death of Dr. Halappanavar, 31, a dentist who lived near Galway, has focused global attention on the Irish ban on abortion.
Her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, has refused to cooperate with an investigation being conducted by the Irish health agency. “I have seen the way my wife was treated in the hospital, so I have no confidence that the H.S.E. will do justice,” he said in an interview on Wednesday night on RTE, the state television broadcaster. “Basically, I don’t have any confidence in the H.S.E.”
In a tense debate in the Irish Parliament on Wednesday evening, Robert Dowds of the Labour Party said Dr. Halappanavar’s death had forced politicians “to confront an issue we have dodged for much too long,” partly because so many Irish women travel to Britain for abortions.
“The reality is that if Britain wasn’t on our doorstep, we would have had to introduce abortion legislation years ago to avoid women dying in back-street abortions,” he said.
After the debate, the Parliament voted 88 to 53 against a motion introduced by the opposition Sinn Fein party calling on the government to allow abortions when women’s lives are in danger and to protect doctors who perform such procedures.
The Irish president, Michael D. Higgins — who is restricted by the Constitution from getting involved in political matters — also made a rare foray into a political debate on Wednesday, saying any inquiry must meet the needs of the Halappanavar family as well as the government.
In 1992, the Irish Supreme Court interpreted the current law to mean that abortion should be allowed in circumstances where there was “a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother,” including the threat of suicide. But that ruling has never been codified into law.
“The current situation is like a sword of Damocles hanging over us,” Dr. Peter Boylan, of the Irish Institute of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told RTE last week. “If we do something with a good intention, but it turns out to be illegal, the consequences are extremely serious for medical practitioners.”
Dr. Ruth Cullen, who has campaigned against abortion, said that any legislation to codify the Supreme Court ruling would be tantamount to allowing abortion on demand and that Dr. Halappanavar’s death should not be used to make that change.
Dr. Halappanavar contracted a bacterial blood infection, septicemia, and died Oct. 28, a week after she was admitted to Galway University Hospital with severe back pains. She was 17 weeks pregnant but having a miscarriage and was told that the fetus — a girl — would not survive. Her husband said she asked several times for an abortion but was informed that under Irish law it would be illegal while there was a fetal heartbeat, because “this is a Catholic country.”
With promotions, discounts and doorbusters already well under way on Thanksgiving Day itself, many big-box retailers are making Black Friday stretch longer than ever. The Lede is checking out the mood of American consumers in occasional vignettes Thursday and Friday as the economically critical holiday shopping season kicks off.
Members of the Attar family, Palestinians who were displaced during the eight-day conflict with Israel, return to their home in the Atatra area in the northern Gaza Strip on Thursday, a day after a cease-fire took hold. (Marco Longari / AFP/Getty Imagesa / November 22, 2012)
By Edmund Sanders
November 22, 2012, 10:14 a.m.
RAFAH, Gaza Strip – As the truce between Israel and Hamas appeared to be enduring through its first 24 hours, Gazans spent Thursday sweeping up, digging out and looking forward.
Hamas declared a public holiday, but most shops and many businesses opened their doors. Israeli warships were replaced on the horizon with Palestinian fishing boats for the first time in a week.
Having endured many conflicts, it’s a day-after drill Gazans know well. Residents who sought shelter in United Nations schools went home. A steady stream of families returning from Egypt arrived at the Rafah border crossing. Bulldozers tried to clear alternate roads around bombed-out bridges.
PHOTOS: Gaza conflict
Glass shop owner Kamal Habboush, 45, had seven walk-in customers by lunchtime to replace broken windows. Usually he’s lucky to have one.
But after 16 years in the business, he predicts the real rush won’t come for a few more days.
“People tend to wait to make sure the fighting is really over,’’ he said. “Just in case.”
TIMELINE: Israel-Gaza conflict
The eight-day conflict left at least 162 Palestinians and six Israelis dead. The Israeli military reported the sixth death Thursday, saying a soldier had died from injuries sustained in a rocket attack by Gazan militants, the Associated Press reported.
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Gaza City's Mukhabarat building defies Israeli airstrikes
Israel-Hamas cease-fire gives each side enough to claim success
Judge questions former French leader Sarkozy in fundraising probe
Your corn is sweeter, your potatoes are starchier and your turkey is much, much bigger than the foods that sat on your grandparents’ Thanksgiving dinner table.
Most everything on your plate has undergone tremendous genetic change under the intense selective pressures of industrial farming. Pilgrims and American Indians ate foods called corn and turkey, but the actual organisms they consumed didn’t look or taste much at all like our modern variants do.
In fact, just about every crop and animal that humans eat has experienced some consequential change in its DNA, but human expectations have changed right along with them. Thus, even though corn might be sweeter now, modern people don’t necessarily savor it any more than their ancestors did.
"Americans eat a pound of sugar every two-and-a-half days. The average amount of sugar consumed by an Englishman in the 1700s was about a pound a year," said food historian Kathleen Curtin of Plimoth Plantation, a historical site that recreates the 17th-century colony. "If you haven’t had a candy bar, your taste buds aren’t jaded, and your apple tastes sweet."
The traditional Thanksgiving dinner reflects the enormous amount of change that foods and the food systems that produce them have undergone, particularly over the last 50 years. Nearly all varieties of crops have experienced large genetic changes as big agriculture companies hacked their DNA to provide greater hardiness and greater yields. The average pig, turkey, cow and chicken have gotten larger at an astounding rate, and they grow with unprecedented speed. A modern turkey can mature to a given weight at twice the pace of its predecessors.
In comparison with old-school agriculture or single-gene genetic modification, these changes border on breathtaking. Imagine your children reaching full maturity at 10 years old.
This human-directed evolution has generated animals and plants that share little more than a name with their wild or pre-industrial farm-domesticated relatives. The accumulation of agricultural breeding knowledge and consumer testing has resulted in plants and animals that are physically shaped by consumer tastes. Americans like a medium-size corn kernel, so kernels aren’t too big or small. American consumers like white meat, so turkeys are grown with larger breasts.
The breeding programs of the last half-century are, in some ways, a tremendous scientific accomplishment. For example, the United States pumped out 33 times more pounds of turkey at a lower cost to consumers in 2007 than our farmers did in 1929.
Turkeys more than doubled in size in that time from an average of 13 pounds to an average of 29 pounds, and as seen in the chart above, show no signs of stopping. If the trend continues, we could see an average turkey size of 40 pounds by 2020. According to the National Wild Turkey Federation, the largest wild turkey on record is 38 pounds.
In fact, in commercial and academic turkey-breeding programs, adult male turkeys, called toms, can reach 50 pounds at the tender age of five months, said John Anderson, a longtime turkey breeder at Ohio State University.
"We get 50 pounders at 20 weeks, but that’s at the top edge of our normal distribution," Anderson said. "We’ve got some adult male-line birds that went over 80 pounds."
Anderson, who has bred the birds for 26 years, said the key technical advance was artificial insemination, which came into widespread use in the 1960s, right around the time that turkey size starts to skyrocket. The reason is that turkeys over 30 pounds are "inefficient" breeders: It’s difficult for them to actually perform the natural mating act. With artificial insemination, the largest birds can still be used as sires, even if they have a hard time walking, let alone engaging in sexual reproduction.
"You can spread the one tom around better. It adds a whole new level of efficiency. You can spread him over more hens," Anderson said. "It takes the lid off how big the bird can be. If the size of the bird keeps them from mating, then you’re stuck."
This process, compounded over dozens of generations, has yielded turkeys with genes that make them very big. In one study in the journal Poultry Science, turkeys genetically representative of old birds from 1966 and modern turkeys were each fed the exact same old-school diet. The 2003 birds grew to 39 pounds while the legacy birds only made it to 21 pounds. Other researchers have estimated that 90 percent of the changes in turkey size are genetic.
Perhaps the most obvious change in turkey genetics is that, unlike the colorful pictures we all drew in elementary school, modern, factory-farmed birds are all white. The Broad Breasted White turkey became the dominant commercial breed in the middle of the 20th century.
These fast-growing, big birds are more energy efficient than their forebears. They can convert 2.5 pounds of feed into a pound of body weight. Legacy breeds take a longer time to add weight and can need over 4 pounds of feed to add a pound of weight.
But all that bulk comes with consequences. Commercial turkeys can’t fly and researchers have even invented a way of quantifying how impaired the birds’ walking has become. The 1-to-5 scale ranges from "birds whose legs did not have any defect" to bowlegged birds who have "great difficulty walking." After 30 years of breeding, Ohio State’s big birds average a 3.
The birds also have a hard time regulating their own food intake. In essence, they eat too much and get fat.
"Commercial broiler breeder strains, selected for rapid growth and high meat yields, do not adequately regulate voluntary feed intake commensurate with their energy needs," wrote two USDA scientists last year. "Consequently, these birds must be given a limited amount of feed to avoid overconsumption that can lead to excessive accumulation of energy stores [fat tissue]."
And some food lovers argue that fast growth and genetic change have robbed turkey meat of its distinctive taste. Some are turning to heritage-breed turkeys like the Blue Slate variety that pack pre-industrial genomes.
"One thing I would say about a modern turkey is that they have a lot less flavor," said food historian Curtin. "If you’ve ever had a chance to taste a heritage breed, there’s subtleties in turkey."
Turkey isn’t the only element of the iconic Thanksgiving dinner that science has given an overhaul. Corn breeding has made corn six times sweeter than the variations that the Pilgrims probably encountered back in 1620.
We eat a type of corn called, appropriately enough, sweet corn. The maize that American Indians grew in the 17th century would have been more like the type we feed to animals now, said Bill Tracy, a corn agronomist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The maize would have looked like the ear pictured on the left. Eventually, this type of corn was crossed with the Virginia Southern dent on the right to create the field corn that we feed to animals. You wouldn’t want to eat any of these.
"It wouldn’t have been particularly sweet," Tracy said.
Sweet corn is the result of a mutation that replaces some of the corn’s starchiness with sugar. It spread from the Iroquois to European settlers in the late 1770s. While it’s considerably sweeter than the nasty stuff the Pilgrims ate — due to a mutation in a gene called Sugary1 — it wouldn’t taste much like the corn we know.
"From that time, it has gone through quite a few changes. Today, through conventional breeding, we have genes in it that make it sweeter, maintain its quality longer, and make it much more tender," Tracy said. "If people had the opportunity to taste Jeffersonian sweet corn and modern sweet corn, there’d be no question what they’d prefer."
That original sweet corn was only about 10 percent sugar, but it also was about 25 percent phytoglycogen, lending it a nice, creamy texture. In the next major corn transition — to supersweet corn in the 1970s through a variation in the Shrunken2 gene — that creamy texture was lost, even as the sweetness of the corn skyrocketed.
Among the thirteen genes known to affect corn sweetness, however, industrious agronomists have found an even better gene to work with, called SE, and they made "sugar enhanced corn."
"That’s the most popular for fresh market today," Tracy said. "It gives a sugar level of 20 to 25 percent and it turns out to be very tender."
But even as modern consumers prefer the SE corn — and often find the supersweet corn too sweet — the Shrunken2 corn is making a comeback as retailers prefer its longer shelf life.
Retailer and food processor demands, rather than your fresh-vegetable interests, play a major role in the evolutionary history of potatoes as well. Though they were not present at that original feast, they have been a major part of the holiday since Lincoln created it in 1863.
Potatoes are now driven by a decidedly nonfestive activity: the making of french fries and potato chips. Almost a mirror of corn genetics, agronomists have ratcheted up the starch in potatoes and turned down the sugar, said Gregory Porter, a potato specialist at the University of Maine.
"High-starch french fries, when they fry, don’t get soggy," Porter said. "Low sugars are important because high sugars in potatoes would result in a dark brown discoloration. High-starch potatoes result in a nice golden-colored fry."
So the modern potatoes of today, even the round ones that look more like their colonial predecessors, have undergone major biological changes.
"When you look at potatoes that would have initially come in the 1700s, those potatoes weren’t being selected for processing ability," Porter explained. "Those potatoes probably would have been round and had lower starch content and high sugars. They would not have made good french fries or potato chips."
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter , Google Reader feed, and webpage; Wired Science on Facebook.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The producers of “The Price is Right” owe a former model on the show more than $ 7.7 million in punitive damages for discriminating against her after a pregnancy, a jury determined Wednesday.
The judgment came one day after the panel determined the game show’s producers discriminated against Brandi Cochran. They awarded her nearly $ 777,000 in actual damages.
Cochran, 41, said she was rejected when she tried to return to work in early 2010 after taking maternity leave. The jury agreed and determined that FremantleMedia North America and The Price is Right Productions owed her more than $ 8.5 million in all.
“I’m humbled. I’m shocked,” Cochran said after the jury announced its verdict. “I’m happy that justice was served today not only for women in the entertainment industry, but women in the workplace.”
FremantleMedia said it was standing by its previous statement, which said it expected to be “fully vindicated” after an appeal.
“We believe the verdict in this case was the result of a flawed process in which the court, among other things, refused to allow the jury to hear and consider that 40 percent of our models have been pregnant,” and further “important” evidence, FremantleMedia said.
In their defense, producers said they were satisfied with the five models working on the show at the time Cochran sought to return.
Several other former models have sued the series and its longtime host, Bob Barker, who retired in 2007.
Most of the cases involving “Barker’s Beauties” — the nickname given the gown-wearing women who presented prizes to contestants — ended with out-of-court settlements.
Comedian-actor Drew Carey followed Barker as the show’s host.
___
Anthony McCartney can be reached at http://twitter.com/mccartneyAP .
Newly released documents add vivid detail to the emerging portrait of the Food and Drug Administration’s ineffective and halting efforts to regulate a Massachusetts company implicated in a national meningitis outbreak that has sickened nearly 500 people and killed 34.
In the documents, released on Tuesday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the agency would threaten to bring the full force of its authority down on the company, only to back away, citing lack of jurisdiction.
The company, the New England Compounding Center, at times cooperated with F.D.A. inspectors and promised to improve its procedures, and at other times challenged the agency’s legal authority to regulate it, refused to provide records and continued to ship a drug in defiance of the agency’s concerns.
Some of the documents were summarized last week by Congressional committees that held hearings on the meningitis outbreak. Republicans and Democrats criticized the F.D.A. for failing to act on information about unsafe practices at the company as far back as March 2002.
By law, compounding pharmacies are regulated primarily by the states, but the pharmacies have grown over the years into major suppliers of some of the country’s biggest hospitals. The F.D.A. is asking Congress for stronger, clearer authority to police them, but Republicans have said the agency already has enough power.
Records show that the agency was sometimes slow in pursuing its own inspection findings. In one case involving the labeling and marketing of drugs, the agency issued a warning letter to New England Compounding 684 days after an inspection, a delay that the company’s chief pharmacist complained was so long that some of the letter’s assertions no longer applied to its operations.
The agency said in a statement Wednesday that it “was not the timeline we strive for,” but that much of the delay was because of “our limited, unclear and contested authority in this area.” Because of litigation, it said, there was “significant internal discussion about how to regulate compounders.”
The agency first inspected the company in April 2002 after reports that two patients had become dizzy and short of breath after being injected with a steroid made by the company.
On the first day of the inspection, Barry Cadden, the chief pharmacist, was cooperative, but the next day, the agency inspectors wrote, Mr. Cadden “had a complete change in attitude & basically would not provide any additional information either by responding to questions or providing records,” adding that he challenged their legal authority to be at his pharmacy at all.
The F.D.A. was back at New England Compounding in October 2002 because of possible contamination of another of its products, methylprednisolone acetate, the same drug involved in the current meningitis outbreak.
While the F.D.A. had the right to seize an adulterated steroid, officials at the time said that action alone would not resolve the company’s poor compounding practices. In a meeting with Massachusetts regulators, F.D.A. officials left authority in the hands of the state, which “would be in a better position to gain compliance or take regulatory action,” according to a memo by an F.D.A. official summarizing the meeting.
David Elder, compliance branch director for the F.D.A.’s New England District, warned at the meeting that there was the “potential for serious public health consequences if N.E.C.C.’s compounding practices, in particular those relating to sterile products, are not improved.”
The company fought back hard, repeatedly questioning the F.D.A.’s jurisdiction. In a September 2004 inspection over concerns that the company was dispensing trypan blue, a dye used for some eye surgeries that had not been approved by the F.D.A., Mr. Cadden told the agency inspector that he had none in stock.
But in the clean room, the inspector noticed a drawer labeled “Trypan Blue,” which contained 189 vials of the medicine.
A few days later, Mr. Cadden was defiant. He told the agency that he was continuing to dispense trypan blue and that there was nothing in the law saying a compounder could not dispense unapproved products.
The conversation turned testy. “Don’t answer any more questions!” Mr. Cadden told another pharmacy executive, according to the F.D.A.’s report.
Mr. Cadden rejected many of the assertions in the warning letter that finally came in December 2006. The next correspondence from the agency did not come until almost two years later, in October 2008, saying that the agency still had “serious concerns” about the company’s practices, and that failing to correct them could result in seizure of products and an injunction against the company and its principals.
It is not known whether any corrective actions were taken. The agency did not conduct another inspection until the recent meningitis outbreak.
From left, Tara Niebeling, Sarah Schmidt, Bridget Jewell and Erin Vande Steeg are members of the social media team at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn.
Retailers are trying to lure shoppers away from the Internet, where they have increasingly been shopping to avoid Black Friday madness, and back to the stores. The bait is technological tools that will make shopping on the busiest day of the year a little more sane — and give shoppers an edge over their competition.
Those with smartphones in hand will get better planning tools, prices and parking spots. Walmart has a map that shows shoppers exactly where the top Black Friday specials can be found. A Mall of America Twitter feed gives advice on traffic and gifts, and the Macy’s app sends special deals for every five minutes a shopper stays in a store.
“The crazy mad rush to camp out and the crazy mad rush to hit the doorbusters have really made people think, ‘I’m just going to stay home on Black Friday,’ ” said Carey Rossi, editor in chief of ConsumerSearch.com, a review site. “This is going to invite some people back and say, ‘You know what? It doesn’t have to be that crazy.’ ”
Part of the retailers’ strategy is to slap back at online stores like Amazon.com, which last year used apps to pick off shoppers as they browsed in physical stores. But the stores are also recognizing that shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving need not require an overnight wait in line, a helmet and elbow pads. A smartphone gives shoppers enough of an edge.
“This takes away that frantic Black Friday anxiety,” said Lawrence Fong, co-founder of BuyVia, an app that sends people price alerts and promotions. “While there’s a sport to it, life’s a little too short.”
Denise Fouts, 45, who works repairing fire and water damage in Chandler, Ariz., is already using apps to prepare for Black Friday, including Shopkick, Target’s app and one called Black Friday. “There still are going to be the crowds, but at least I already know ahead of time what I’m going specifically for,” Ms. Fouts said.
Last week, Macy’s released an update to its app with about 300 Black Friday specials and their location. In the Herald Square store, for instance, the $49.99 cashmere sweater specials will be in the Broadway side of the fifth-floor women’s department.
“With the speed that people are shopping with on Black Friday, they need to be really efficient about how they’re spending their time,” said Jennifer Kasper, group vice president for digital media at Macy’s.
When shoppers keep the app open, Macy’s will start sending special deals to the phone every five minutes. The deals are not advertised elsewhere.
Walmart has had an app for several years, but recently introduced an in-store mode, which shows things like the current circular or food tastings when a shopper is near a certain location. Twelve percent of Walmart’s mobile revenue now comes from when a person is inside a store.
For Black Friday, the app will have a map of each store, with the precise location of the top sale items — so planners can determine the best way to run. “The blitz items are not where you think they would be, because for traffic reasons, maybe the hot game console is in the lawn and garden center,” said Gibu Thomas, senior vice president for mobile and digital for Walmart Global eCommerce.
Target is also testing a way-finding feature on its app at stores that include some in Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles. If a shopper types in an item, the app will give its location.
Other app makers are betting that shoppers want apps that pull in information from a range of stores.
RedLaser, an eBay app, lets shoppers use their phones to compare prices and recently started using location data to give shoppers personalized promotions when they walk into stores, including items not on store shelves at Best Buy, for instance. RetailMeNot, which offers e-commerce coupons, now has offline coupons that will pop up on users’ cellphones when they step near 500 malls on Black Friday.
“Consumers are not going to download 40 different apps for 40 different stores,” said Cyriac Roeding, co-founder of Shopkick, a location-based app that gives shoppers points, redeemable for discounts or gifts, when they walk into stores or scan certain items.
Rep. Jesse Jackson resigned from Congress Wednesday, saying in a letter that he is cooperating with a federal investigation "into my activities" but blaming his health problems for his decision to step down just two weeks after his re-election.
Jackson's letter to House Speaker John Boehner was his first acknowledgment of the ongoing corruption probe into his alleged misuse of campaign dollars.
"I am doing my best to address the situation responsibly, cooperate with the investigators, and accept responsibility for my mistakes, for they are my mistakes and mine alone," Jackson said in the two-page letter dated Nov. 21. "None of us is immune from our share of shortcomings or human frailties and I pray that I will be remembered for what I did right."
Despite his admission of "my share of mistakes," Jackson said his deteriorating health was the reason he was quitting. He has been on medical leave since June while receiving treatment for bipolar depression.
"Against the recommendations of my doctors, I had hoped and tried to return to Washington and continue working on the issues that matter most to the people of the Second District. I know now that will not be possible," Jackson said in the letter.
"My health issues and treatment regimen have become incompatible with service in the House of Representatives. Therefore, it is with great regret that I hereby resign as a member of the United States House of Representatives, effective today, in order to focus on restoring my health," Jackson wrote.
The congressman could not be reached.
Jackson, 47, won election this month while being treated at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. and issued a statement on election night saying he would return to work once his doctors approved.
"Once the doctors approve my return to work, I will continue to be the progressive fighter you have known for years," said Jackson, no longer a patient at Mayo. "My family and I are grateful for your many heartfelt prayers and kind thoughts. I continue to feel better every day and look forward to serving you."
He has not appeared in the House since June 8. Nor did he stage a campaign event -- or even run a TV Jackson advanced to the general election after defeating a one-term member of Congress, Debbie Halvorson, in a March primary.
The next Congress will be sworn in Jan. 3 and Jackson would have been required to take the oath of office before being allowed to vote.
News of the resignation on the eve of Thanksgiving, when Congress was not meeting and many Washingtonians were traveling, seemed to take even Jackson staffers by surprise.
His press secretary, Frank Watkins, said Wednesday morning that he didn’t know anything about a possible resignation. Watkins attributed the rumors to press speculation.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement that she had spoken to Jackson and his father, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, earlier in the afternoon.
“As he works to address his health, our thoughts and prayers are with him, his wife Sandi, his children as well as his parents," she said in a statement. "We are grateful to him and his family for their longstanding record of public service to our country.”
The House adjourned Friday and reconvenes at 2 p.m. Tuesday. Protocol calls for Jackson's letter to be placed before the House on Tuesday and his resignation noted then, an official said. Normally the House has 435 members, but there is now one vacancy, so Jackson's will be a second.
Under Illinois law, Gov. Pat Quinn, a fellow Democrat, would call a special election to fill Jackson’s 2nd District congressional seat, which extends from Chicago’s South Side to Kankakee.
Jackson's resignation, long suspected by political insiders, set off a scramble with as many as a dozen names of potential successors already surfacing. They range from political has-beens to up-and-comers in the south suburban district.
Jackson has been under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for alleged improprieties related to his bid to win appointment in 2008 to the Senate seat that had been held by President Barack Obama. A Jackson emissary is alleged to have offered to raise up to $6 million in campaign funds for disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich in exchange for the governor appointing Jackson to the Senate seat.
Blagojevich is serving a prison term for corruption convictions including trying to sell or trade the Senate seat.
After the March primary election, the congressman’s aides belatedly announced his medical leave, which at first was blamed on “exhaustion.”
He is the son of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, and the husband of Chicago Ald. Sandi Jackson, 7th.
It runs using gas-filled tubes, mechanical relays, and paper tape. It’s a giant, and it’s slow. But it runs, dammit.
On Tuesday, volunteers at Britain’s National Museum of Computing rebooted the Harwell Dekatron — a 2.5-metric-ton monster from the early 1950s — making it the oldest working digital computer in existence.
It took about half an hour to warm the machine up. Then the volunteers — who’d spent the past two-and-a-half years rebuilding the machine — fed in a program via paper tape. Gas-powered tubes lit up. There was some clicking and clunking. Lights flashed. And then the 61-year-old printer typed out the answer to a simple multiplication problem — its first job since the 1970s.
Two of the Dekatron’s original designers and a few of its former operators were on-hand yesterday at the National Museum of Computing’s Bletchley Park home to catch the reboot. “The machine worked perfectly,” says Kevin Murrell, who’s led the restoration effort.
The machine was built in 1951, and it served for six years as a number-cruncher for the U.K.’s main atomic research facility at Harwell. “This was used in the very early days of modeling atomic power plants,” Murrell says. It could do complex equations flawlessly, at about the speed of two mathematicians armed with mechanical calculators.
In 1957, the giant computer was shipped of to the nearby Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Technical College, where it served as a comp-sci teaching tool for a couple of more decades. That’s where it picked up the name the WITCH (Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell). Then, in 1973, the Guinness Book of World Records proclaimed it the world’s most durable computer. It was eventually mothballed in a museum.
About three years ago, Kevin Murrell was looking through photos of computer components the National Museum of Computing had in storage. Something popped out. “In the corner of one picture was a little control panel,” he remembers. “I looked at this an thought I know this control panel. That’s the machine I remembered from all those years ago.”
Amazingly, about 95 percent of the machine was still in the collection. So after a few years of cleaning the machine’s 4,000 connectors, and 828 Dekatron tubes, rewiring and repairing power supplies, the historic computer was good to go.
It uses gas-filled Dekatron counting tubes instead of the transistors you’d find in modern computers. As the six-person restoration team discovered, these tubes held up amazingly well after more than 60 years.
The clear tubes store values in one of 10 cathodes, grouped in a circle around a central node, so you can actually see what’s in memory. This combined with the Dekatron’s plodding pace, makes it a remarkable computer teaching tool, Murrell says.
“You can look at the memory location and say, ‘Yes, that contains the number three.’”
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is known for putting a dark twist on super heroes and children’s fantasy, but in “Rise of the Guardians” the producer brings together holiday heroes for a festive adventure.
“Rise of the Guardians,” which will be in theaters on Friday, is based on award-winning author William Joyce’s “The Guardians of Childhood” books. In the film, traditional characters such as Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Sandman and Jack Frost join forces to save earth’s children from the evil Pitch Black and his band of Nightmares.
In the movie that stars Chris Pine, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Isla Fisher and Hugh Jackman, del Toro, 48, steps back into the executive producer role after directing dark fantasy “Pan’s Labyrinth” and the “Hellboy” superhero franchise.
He spoke to Reuters about putting his own stamp on beloved holiday heroes, and why children’s films are important to him.
Q: In “Rise of the Guardians,” Santa has tattoos, the Easter Bunny is Australian and the Tooth Fairy is half-human, half bird. Not the way most of us grew up imagining them, is it?
A: “We didn’t want the characters to have the affections that are given to them in certain cultures. We didn’t want to go with the safe Easter Bunny that is now a marketing tool … We wanted them to represent the world and to geographically make sense. Where would a burrower live, the Outback? The original incarnation of Santa is almost that of a hunter and wild man. It comes from the Nordic and Eastern European notions so we thought it would be great to make him Slavic.”
Q: The film is about addressing fear, which is always a challenging lesson for parents to teach their children. Why make this the central theme?
A: “In order to address fear, parents always end up tiptoeing around the subject. Shielding our kids is not the way to go, but you also don’t want to send them out unprepared without a healthy sense of self. I thought the movie was a great analogy to many things. It’s a great metaphor for kids to interpret the world.”
Q: What attracts you to the children’s genre?
A: “Some of my favorite authors in literature are guys that are great portrayers of childhood, but not necessarily childish – Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl. And my movies like ‘Hellboy‘ and ‘Hellboy 2′ are about misfits coming together. Same with my Spanish movie ‘The Devil’s Backbone.’ So this movie is thematically very much within what I like to do.
“I think that for good or for bad, we spend the rest of our lives dealing with our first 13 years of life, trying to remedy or be lifted by whatever tools we were given when we were kids. Those first years are when we, as adults, sculpt the character of our kids … In reality, life puts kids in our lives for us to learn from them. There is no braver soul in the world than a kid.”
Q: Which “Guardian” do you identify with the most?
A: “I identify with North (Santa Claus). I have the greatest blessing in my life, which is the capacity to remain a child in the way I like to see the world. Like every artist, I have turmoil and I suffer. But ultimately I am able to find magic in the world. When North declares those principles, when he says ‘I feel it in my belly,’ it’s very much something I identify completely with.”
Q: Can we expect to see more of this band of heroes in future films?
A: “Obviously the possibility of telling another tale is completely dependent on the studio. But Bill Joyce has written many books on the characters and we are on board to create more and more adventures for them. We’ve been talking about some storylines. I am eager to tell everyone the story of North.”
Q: You recently finished shooting sci-fi adventure “Pacific Rim,” due in theaters in 2013, which is your first directing venture since 2008′s “Hellboy II: The Golden Army.” Why the break?
A: “I went to New Zealand to direct ‘The Hobbit’ and I was there for two years. I co-wrote the script, and at the end of the process there was a moment of decision where I really wanted to pursue something else and not keep waiting (‘The Hobbit’ production was delayed due to movie studio MGM’s financial troubles).
“Then I spent over a year trying to get a movie called ‘Mountains of Madness’ off the ground. That didn’t happen. Next it took another two years to get ‘Pacific Rim’ to the screen. But in the meantime, I co-wrote three novels, produced three movies and wrote a TV series. It’s been a very busy five years.”
(Reporting by Zorianna Kit, editing by Piya Sinha-Roy and Jeffrey Benkoe)
New infections with H.I.V. have dropped by half in the past decade in 25 poor and middle-income countries, many of them in Africa, the continent hardest hit by AIDS, the United Nations said Tuesday.
The greatest success has been in preventing mothers from infecting their babies, but focusing testing and treatment on high-risk groups like gay men, prostitutes and drug addicts has also paid dividends, said Michel Sidibé, the executive director of the agency U.N.AIDS.
“We are moving from despair to hope,” he said.
Despite the good news from those countries, the agency’s annual report showed that globally, progress is steady but slow. By the usual measure of whether the fight against AIDS is being won, it is still being lost: 2.5 million people became infected last year, while only 1.4 million received lifesaving treatment for the first time.
“There has been tremendous progress over the last decade, but we’re still not at the tipping point,” said Mitchell Warren, the executive director of AVAC, an advocacy group for AIDS prevention. “And the big issue, sadly, is money.”
Some regions, like Southern Africa and the Caribbean, are doing particularly well, while others, like Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East, are not. Globally, new infections are down 22 percent from 2001, when there were 3.2 million. Among newborns, they fell 40 percent, to 330,000 from 550,000.
The two most important financial forces in the fight, the multinational Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the domestic President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, were both created in the early 2000s and last year provided most of the $16.8 billion spent on the disease. But the need will soon be $24 billion a year, the groups said.
“Where is that money going to come from?” Mr. Warren asked.
The number of people living with H.I.V. rose to a new high of 34 million in 2011, while the number of deaths from AIDS was 1.7 million, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005. As more people get life-sustaining antiretroviral treatment, the number of people living with H.I.V. grows.
Globally, the number of people on antiretroviral drugs reached 8 million, up from 6.6 million in 2010. However, an additional 7 million are sick enough to need them. The situation is worse for children; 72 percent of those needing pediatric antiretrovirals do not get them.
New infections fell most drastically since 2001 in Southern Africa — by 71 percent in Botswana, 58 percent in Zambia and 41 percent in South Africa, which has the world’s biggest epidemic.
But countries with drops greater than 50 percent were as geographically diverse as Barbados, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, India and Papua New Guinea.
The most important factor, Mr. Sidibé said, was not nationwide billboard campaigns to get people to use condoms or abstain from sex. Nor was it male circumcision, a practice becoming more common in Africa.
Rather, it was focusing treatment on high-risk groups. While saving babies is always politically popular, saving gay men, drug addicts and prostitutes is not, so presidents and religious leaders often had to be persuaded to help them. Much of Mr. Sidibé’s nearly four years in his post has been spent doing just that.
Many leaders are now taking “a more targeted, pragmatic approach,” he said, and are “not blocking people from services because of their status.”
Fast-growing epidemics are often found in countries that criminalize behavior. For example, homosexuality is illegal in many Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, so gay and bisexual men, who get many of the new infections, cannot admit being at risk. The epidemics in Eastern Europe and Central Asia are driven by heroin, and in those countries, methadone treatment is sometimes illegal.
Getting people on antiretroviral drugs makes them 96 percent less likely to infect others, studies have found, so treating growing numbers of people with AIDS has also helped prevent new infections.
Ethiopia’s recruitment of 35,000 community health workers, who teach young people how to protect themselves, has also aided in prevention.
Mr. Sidibé acknowledged that persuading rich countries to keep donating money was a struggle. The Global Fund is just now emerging from a year of turbulence with a new executive director, and the American program has come under budget pressures. Also, he noted, many countries like South Africa and China are relying less on donors and are paying their own costs. The number of people on treatment in China jumped 50 percent in a single year.
Mr. Warren’s organization said in a report on Tuesday that the arsenal of prevention methods had expanded greatly since the days when the choice was abstain from sex, be faithful or use condoms. Male circumcision, which cuts infection risk by about 60 percent, a daily prophylactic pill for the uninfected and vaginal microbicides for women are in use or on the horizon, and countries need to use the ones suited to their epidemics, the report concluded.
WASHINGTON -- Federal prosecutors on Tuesday charged a former hedge fund portfolio manager with securities fraud in connection with what they said was the most lucrative insider-trading case ever prosecuted.
In complaints filed in New York, authorities said investment advisors and hedge funds made more than $276 million in illegal profits or avoided losses by trading before the announcement in 2008 of negative results from clinical trials for an Alzheimer's disease drug being developed by Elan Corp. and Wyeth.
Prosecutors charged Mathew Martoma, a former portfolio manager at CR Intrinsic, an unregistered investment adviser, with securities fraud for allegedly illegally using information about the clinical trial results that he obtained from a neurologist at a hospital involved in the testing.
The criminal complaint did not name the neurologist, which it said was a cooperating witness in the case.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a a related civil suit Tuesday against Martoma, CR Intrinsic and Dr. Sidney Gilman, a neurology professor at the University of Michigan Medical School. The SEC suit said Gilman was chairman of the safety monitoring committee overseeing the clinical trials of the Alzheimer's drug.
Martoma met Gilman some time between 2006 and 2008 through paid consultations, the SEC complaint says. "During these consultations, Gilman provided Martoma with material, nonpublic information about the ongoing trial," the SEC complaint said.
In mid-July 2008, "Gilman provided Martoma with the actual, detailed results of the clinical trial" before an official announcement on July 29, 2008, the SEC said.
The FBI, SEC and U.S. attorney's office in New York scheduled a 12:30 p.m. EST news conference to discuss the case.
"The charges unsealed today describe cheating coming and going – specifically, insider trading first on the long side, and then on the short side, on a scale that has no historical precedent," said Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for Manhattan. "As alleged, by cultivating and corrupting a doctor with access to secret drug data, Mathew Martoma and his hedge fund benefited from what might be the most lucrative inside tip of all time."
Follow Jim Puzzanghera on Twitter and Google+.
Also:
Senate moves insider trading bill to Obama's desk.
Baseball star Eddie Murray settles insider-trading investigation.
Former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta guilty of insider trading.
Electromagnetic pulse grenades are a favorite of sci-fi storytellers and videogame designers, a la Halo and Call of Duty. The Army evidently doesn’t want to be left out: It’s seeking a real-life version that can blast electromagnetic signals and fry insurgent bombs.
To be specific, the Army wants “High Power Microwave (HPM) grenades” to “generate an electromagnetic pulse that could be used to defeat the electronics used to activate [homemade bombs] or that could be used to attack blasting caps,” according to its latest round of research contracts with small businesses. In theory, the electrical components on improvised explosive devices, like radio transmitters, could be overwhelmed by surging electromagnetic radiation emitted by such a weapon.
If the Army can actually develop this kind of Halo weapon, it’ll take a step toward making each of its soldiers a kind of one-man bomb squad.
While the improvised bomb is the primary weapon used against U.S. troops fighting overseas, not every soldier or marine can destroy a bomb like he or she can shoot an insurgent. To defuse bombs, troops rely on explosive ordnance demolition specialists, bomb-disposing robots and vehicle-mounted jammers. The Pentagon has also desperately struggled to stay a step ahead of the bombs’ technical adaptations. But if the Army has working EMP grenades, any soldier could conceivably lob one into a room, around a corner or into a ditch to fry an awaiting booby-trap’s circuits. As the Army puts it, it could mean “defeating IEDs by the individual soldier, while minimizing the collateral damage to humans.” Easier said than done.
For instance: An EMP grenade has to be small and lightweight enough to carry. The Army is requiring companies participating in the project to design their prototypes to fit the size of “hand or robot delivered munitions, 40 mm grenades, Rocket Propelled Grenades (RPGs), and Stinger, Hydra, and Javelin missiles.” The next step is figuring out a working design itself.
The first thing to know is that an EMP grenade could be either explosive or non-explosive, with trade-offs for each. According to the 2011 textbook Explosive Pulse Power by Army engineer Larry Altgilbers, who is overseeing the project, a non-explosive device could use “pulse compression,” or blasting brief but fierce electrical pulses while compressing the electrical current and voltage, thereby making the pulses stronger. As the device continues to blast out signals, the pulses then gradually decrease in duration. For a bomb circuit without protection diodes, such a burst of energy could theoretically fry its circuits or cause it to detonate.
Unfortunately, non-explosive systems “tend to be massive, large in size and fairly expensive,” Altglibers wrote. But explosive systems are smaller, lighter and can generate a lot more electrical power. The Army solicitation refers to potentially using “energy stored in ferromagnetic, ferroelectric or superconducting materials.” Possibly, these various magnets and superconductors could trap an electrical field inside a grenade, and when exploding, the grenade could compress the field. That would cause rapid changes in the field’s structure, boosting its power and thus generating — and releasing — tremendous amounts of electromagnetic energy.
A downside to that, though, is superconducting materials have to stay cool. It’s also likely to be a one-shot weapon as explosive pulse devices “generally destroy themselves and, quite usually, the load they are driving,” according to Altgilbers. But if it’s a grenade, then that might be no loss.
Less certain is how such a device would be used neuter a bomb detonated with minimal electrical parts, like the Taliban bombs that detonate when someone compresses a wooden pressure plate; whether it would inadvertently fry U.S. troops’ own electronic circuits; or how difficult (or expensive) it’ll be to develop an EMP grenade. One Israeli company has developed a much more conventional IED-jamming “grenade,” but it uses tiny antennas to scram bomb signals instead of exploding out EMP waves. Perhaps if all else fails, the Army could consider it. If not, it might play another round of Halo in order to brainstorm.
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