Elephants Vanish in Congo Reserve

The Okapi Faunal Reserve was thought to be a safe haven for forest elephants in the otherwise conflict-stricken eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. But a new report finds that unabated poaching has sent the population into serious decline. Just 1,700 elephants are left inside the reserve, and that number could be zero within 10 years, conservationists warn.

A lucrative black-market trade in ivory drives the hunt for elephants in the region. In the last 15 years, 75 percent of the Okapi population, or 5,100 animals, have been killed, and in the last five years, the population has declined 37 percent, according to a Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) survey.

WCS officials say the numbers are surprisingly grim because the Okapi Faunal Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site covering more than 5,000 square miles (14,000 square km), is considered the best protected conservation area in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Before a civil war broke out in the region in the late 1990s, the WCS counted about 6,800 forest elephants in the reserve. In 2007, after the war officially ended, the WCS's elephant count was down to 2,700.

Since then, park rangers have reduced the number of elephants killed in the reserve each year from 400 to 170, but conservationists warn that instability in the Ituri region could spell more trouble for the animals. In one unsettling incident last June, armed attackers descended on the park headquarters, killing park rangers and villagers and looting the park's offices before setting them ablaze. [Elephant Images: The Biggest Beasts on Land]

The WCS says it's working with the country's wildlife department (the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature, or ICCN) to keep the reserve secure.

"We salute our partners at ICCN for their dedication and commitment to protect wildlife under the most difficult circumstances," James Deutsch, executive director for the WCS's African programs, said in a statement. "We remain stalwart in our partnership with them and will continue to work in their country to protect elephants and the landscapes where they live. We urge the international community to support the DRC in the fight against the threat of extinction of the forest elephant."

On the other end of the ivory trade, the WCS says more work is needed to plug the demand for ivory, especially in East Asian countries like China.

The forest elephant is a subspecies of the African elephant, which is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In addition to poaching, the massive mammals are threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation.

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/elephants-vanish-congo-164428010.html

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Golden Frog VyprVPN

VyprVPN from Golden Frog easily protects your online activity from digital snoops and hides your geographic location. Your computer and mobile devices communicate with Websites and other systems online by sending and receiving data packets. Anyone with a packet sniffer?your Internet Service Provider, the owner of the WiFi network you are using, or someone up to no good?could intercept that data stream and see what you are up to. Businesses rely on the Virtual Private Network to protect remote employees and their networks; a VPN service such as VyprVPN extends that protection to end-users. VyprVPN supports all major operating systems and provides users with varying degrees of protection.

When the VPN service is active, all the packets travel through a protected tunnel between the user's computer and Golden Frog servers. The servers handle all communications with the destination site, and responses are sent back to the PC through the same encrypted tunnel. Sites that try to identify you by your IP address see one of Golden Frog's IP addresses instead.

VyprVPN has servers in the U.S. (Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Austin, TX), Europe (London, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Paris), Canada (Toronto), and Asia (Hong Kong).

Pricing Plans
VyprVPN comes in two flavors, basic and Pro. Plain VyprVPN, at $14.99 a month, is available only for Windows and Mac OS X systems. It uses the PPTP protocol standard 128-bit encryption for its VPN connections. PPTP is widely deployed as it is built into most desktop and mobile operating systems, making it easy to set up. Since it uses basic encryption, it is the fastest among VyprVPN's options.

Users who want to use the VPN service on their iOS and Android devices must sign up for VyprVPN Pro, at $19.99 a month. The Pro version supports PPTP, OpenVPN SSL, and L2TP/IPSec. While PPTP uses 128-bit encryption, L2TP/IPSec uses 256-bit encryption and OpenVPN offers both 160-bit and 256-bit. L2TP/IPSec relies on the highest encryption so it has slower performance. OpenVPN, which relies on digital certificates, is reliable and performs very well. However, OpenVPN is not available for iOS.

Both Pro and basic versions offer users free 5GB online storage on Golden Frog's cloud storage service, Dump Truck. With Dump Truck, users can securely upload and share files with others. Unlike many of its competitors, Golden Frog does not offer free trial or ad-supported versions.

Getting Started
Users sign up for a Golden Frog account after buying either the basic or the pro version. An account confirmation email contains the link to the dashboard and to setup instructions. When I logged into the portal, I saw a well-laid out dashboard with information about VyprVPN on the left side of the screen and the Dump Truck cloud storage service on the right.

While you can use the VyprVPN credentials on multiple devices, only one device can be connected at a time. I can see if a device is currently using the service on this dashboard. Suppose you left your home PC connected and now you want to switch to your tablet. I can just log in to the dashboard and disconnect the PC. It would have been nice to be able to use devices simultaneously, the way Norton Hotspot Privacy does. At least VyprVPN sends a notification to the disconnected PC the connection has been dropped.

Users download the client applications for VyprVPN for Mac and for Windows from the dashboard, or for Pro users, click on links back to Google Play and iTunes for the Android and iOS apps. I can just use the client applications or follow the set up instructions to manually configure the VPN clients that came with my operating system. This means that as long as the device supports VPN, I should be able to configure it with VyprVPN credentials. If my router has DD-WRT firmware, I could just install VyprVPN and protect all users on the network in one step. I like this uncommon feature; I've seen it in only HideIPVPN and PrivateInternetAccess so far.

Installing the client application took only a few moments. Since VyprVPN also supports the OpenVPN protocol, the installer adds the TAP-WIN32 adapter, in the same way as competitors VPN Direct and HideIPVPN

Starting the software for the first time opens up a settings window where you enter the login credentials and select the connection settings, such as the geographic location of the server and the connection type. By default, the VPN settings are set to PPTP. There are also other settings, such as automatically reconnecting if the connection ever drops and automatically enabling the VPN service whenever the user connects to an unsecured wireless network.

The software is extremely lightweight, so it is easy to forget it is running. Like Private Internet Access, VyprVPN did not have an actual application window when I launched the program. All I got was a tiny lock icon in the system tray, and when I right-clicked on the icon, I saw a menu listing my current network settings and the option to go back into the Settings screen.

Golden Frog offers NAT Firewall as a separate add-on for $5 to block unrequested inbound traffic, such as bots scanning for open ports to exploit. Most wireless routers use Network Address Translation to share the single Internet connection across all connected devices, and when it receives unrequested inbound scans, it doesn't know which device it is for and blocks it automatically. Since VyprVPN bypasses the router and establishes a direct connection with the Golden Frog server, users aren't protected from malicious inbound traffic via the router's NAT. The NAT Firewall add-on protects users from these scans while connected to VyprVPN?Next: Using VyprVPN, Performance

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/hcCbfzkrvzE/0,2817,2385182,00.asp

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TMN Go launches on iOS and the web, brings HBO Go-style ...

Ready, Set, The Movie Network GO! - New Video Streaming Service Gives Subscribers Access to The Movie Network, HBO Canada and TMN Encore from their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC Whenever, Wherever
TORONTO, Feb. 27, 2013 /CNW Telbec/ - Astral's The Movie Network today announced the launch of The Movie Network GO (TMN GO), HBO GO Canada and TMN Encore GO, three new video streaming services that put more than 1,500 hours of high-definition quality programming from The Movie Network, HBO Canada and The Movie Network Encore (TMN Encore) at subscribers' fingertips. Available at no additional cost with a subscription to The Movie Network and TMN Encore, TMN GO offers instant and unlimited access to more than 1,200 titles comprised of Hollywood hit movies, exclusive series from HBO, CINEMAX and Showtime, and classics from every era. With the launch of TMN GO, subscribers can now watch what they want, when they want, where they want from their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC. TMN GO is currently available in Eastern Canada to customers of Bell Fibe TV, Bell Satellite TV and Cogeco Cable, with Rogers launching the service in the coming weeks and additional television providers expected to join shortly thereafter.

"TMN GO with HBO GO Canada and TMN Encore GO are extensions of Astral's commitment to providing Canadians with unparalleled premium content across multiple platforms," said Domenic Vivolo, Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Astral Television Networks. "TMN was the first movie service in Canada to offer a dedicated HD channel with TMN HD, the first in Canada to launch an SVOD service with TMN OnDemand, and the first in North America to offer subscribers an authenticated broadband streaming service with TMN OnLine. TMN GO is the latest such innovation from Astral and TMN and we believe it will be a game changer for our business - providing subscribers with a value and entertainment proposition that represents the ultimate in choice, control and convenience."

With a sleek cinematic design and interface that offers superior functionality, TMN GO, HBO GO Canada and TMN Encore GO are best-in-class services that allow subscribers to engage with over 1,200 titles and 1,500 hours of premium content. TMN GO, HBO GO Canada and TMN Encore GO can all be accessed at www.tmngo.ca or by downloading the TMN GO App from the App Store. Key features of the service include:

Pick-up-and-play technology which allows users to start watching on one device and continue on another;
The Watchlist function which lets users keep up with their favourite series throughout the run. Once a series is added to the Watchlist, new episodes are automatically added and the user is notified when they are available. Upcoming movie titles can also be tracked and added to the Watchlist, with reminder notices when the title is available;
Parental controls which allow users to manage the content that family members of every age have access to;
Social networking functionality that enables users to share and like favourite titles instantly with friends over Facebook, Twitter and email;
Multiple members of the household can enjoy the service with up to three simultaneous streams and five registered devices per subscriber household, each with their own Watchlist;
The ability to stream over WiFi and 3G (or above) networks, allowing users to manage their data consumption;
Adaptive streaming which automatically switches video quality to ensure the best viewing experience available based on the user's Internet connection.
Video quality control which gives users control over video quality, allowing them to further control their bandwidth consumption.
TMN GO's selection mirrors the programming offering from The Movie Network OnDemand, HBO Canada OnDemand and TMN Encore OnDemand, with new content refreshed weekly. TMN GO will also be home to new, never-before-seen bonus material and content such as an exclusive collection of four short digital HBO comedies - The Boring Life of Jacqueline, Brody Stevens: Enjoy It!, Garfunkel and Oates, and Single Long - from the likes of Zach Galifianakis and Mike White.

At the time of launch, programming available on TMN GO includes hit series, movies, sports programming and documentaries from HBO including full seasons and current episodes of Game of Thrones, Girls, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Eastbound & Down, Enlightened, The Newsroom, Real Time with Bill Maher, Treme and VEEP; all seasons and episodes of HBO's genre-defining Band of Brothers, The Sopranos and The Wire; HBO films and documentaries such as Beyonc?: Life is But A Dream, In Vogue: The Editor's Eye, Game Change and The Girl; CINEMAX series such as Banshee and Hunted; acclaimed Showtime series such as Californication, Dexter, House of Lies, Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States, Nurse Jackie and Shameless; hit Starz series Spartacus: Vengeance and Spartacus: War of the Damned; Hollywood hit movies and family favourites such as The Artist, Battleship, Conan The Barbarian, Dolphin Tale, Drive, Fast Five, The Five Year Engagement, Goon, Happy Feet Two, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, The Ides of March, The Lucky One, Moneyball, Mirror, Mirror, The Muppets, Snow White and The Huntsman, That's My Boy, The Vow, Wanderlust and War Horse; acclaimed, award-winning Canadian series and movies like Barney's Version, Call Me Fitz, The Captains, The Crimson Petal & The White, Funny As Hell, Good God, Goon, Less Than Kind, Monsieur Lazhar, Starbuck, Transporter: The Series, The Whistleblower, and many more; and hundreds of classic movies from every era and genre offered by The Movie Network Encore such as Bad Boys, The English Patient, Jaws, Life Is Beautiful, Out of Sight, The Sting, To Kill a Mockingbird, True Romance and many more.

TMN GO is supported by the iPhone 3GS and subsequent models, iPod touch (3rd and 4th generation) and the iPad and iPad Mini (running iOS 5.0 or higher).

The TMN GO App is available for free from the App Store on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch or at www.AppStore.com/TMNGO.

The Movie Network is a pay television service available in eastern Canada. With premiere access to Hollywood hit movies, new and exclusive HBO content, critically acclaimed Showtime series and first-rate Canadian programming, this pay-television service presents Canadians with some of the best television entertainment available. The Movie Network service includes five 24-hour multiplex channels - The Movie Network, HBO Canada, MExcess, MFun! and MFest - which deliver diverse and entertaining programs in an uncut and commercial-free television environment. All five multiplex channels are also simulcast in High Definition and are joined by The Movie Network OnDemand, a Subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) service, available in select areas across eastern Canada; TMN OnLine an Internet-based content streaming service available to BellTV, Rogers and Videotron subscribers; and TMN GO, a video streaming service currently available to Bell TV and Cogeco Cable subscribers. For more information, please visit www.themovienetwork.ca.

TMN GO and The Movie Network are members of the Astral family. Astral Media Inc. (TSX:ACM.A/ACM.B) is one of Canada's largest media companies. It operates several of the country's most popular pay and specialty television, radio, out-of-home advertising and interactive media properties. Astral plays a central role in community life across the country by offering diverse, rich and vibrant programming that meets the tastes and needs of consumers and advertisers. To learn more about Astral, visit astral.com.

SOURCE: THE MOVIE NETWORK

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/01/tmn-go-launches-on-ios-and-the-web-brings-hbo-go-style-experien/

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Investing News: Expert Analysis, Investment Tools, Stock Screeners ...

It increasingly appears that the rise of ?shareholder democracy? is leading, in some cases, to a perverse game in which so-called activist investors take to the media to pump or dump stocks in hopes of creating a fleeting rise or fall in a company?s stock price.

Source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/15839069/Investing_News_Expert_Analysis_Investment_Tools_Stock_Screeners_and_Financial_Strategy_Information__CNBC

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Video: Changing shape makes chemotherapy drugs better at targeting cancer cells

Thursday, February 28, 2013

Bioengineering researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara have found that changing the shape of chemotherapy drug nanoparticles from spherical to rod-shaped made them up to 10,000 times more effective at specifically targeting and delivering anti-cancer drugs to breast cancer cells.

Their findings could have a game-changing impact on the effectiveness of anti-cancer therapies and reducing the side effects of chemotherapy, according to the researchers. Results of their study were published recently in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Conventional anti-cancer drugs accumulate in the liver, lungs and spleen instead of the cancer cell site due to inefficient interactions with the cancer cell membrane," explained Samir Mitragotri , professor of chemical engineering and Director of the Center for BioEngineering at UCSB. "We have found our strategy greatly enhances the specificity of anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells."

Changing Shape Makes Chemotherapy Drugs Better at Targeting Cancer Cells from UCSB Engineering on Vimeo.

To engineer these high-specificity drugs, they formed rod-shaped nanoparticles from a chemotherapeutic drug, camptothecin, and coated them with an antibody called trastuzumab that is selective for certain types of cancer cells, including breast cancer. The antibody-coated camptothecin nanorods were 10,000-fold more effective than tratsuzumab alone and 10-fold more effective than camptothecin alone at inhibiting breast cancer cell growth.

"This unique approach of engineering shapes of anti-cancer drugs and combining them with antibodies represents new direction in chemotherapy," Mitragotri added.

Mitragotri and collaborators at UCSB, including post-doctoral researchers Sutapa Barua and Jin-Wook Yoo, and former graduate student Poornima Kolhar, looked to human breast cancer cells to examine how shape works in synergy with molecular recognition to perform complex tasks within the human body.

"We were inspired to look at the shape as a key parameter by natural objects. In nature, all key particles such as viruses, bacteria, red blood cells, platelets are non-spherical," said Mitragotri. "Their shape plays a key role in their function."

Their research was performed in collaboration with Yatin Gokarn and Aditya Wakankar of Genentech, a member of the Roche group. "The work of Professor Mitragotri and his collaborators exemplifies the groundbreaking contributions bioengineers at UC Santa Barbara are making in medical research, and of how our model of industry partnership delivers results," said Rod Alferness, Dean of the College of Engineering.

###

University of California - Santa Barbara: http://www.ucsb.edu

Thanks to University of California - Santa Barbara for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127056/Video__Changing_shape_makes_chemotherapy_drugs_better_at_targeting_cancer_cells

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Several killed in Swiss factory shooting, police say

By Emma Thomasson, Reuters

Three people, including the suspected assailant, have been killed in a shooting at a factory near the Swiss city of Lucerne, police said on Wednesday.

Seven others were injured in the attack, which happened just after 9 a.m. local time (3 a.m. ET) at a wood-processing company in the town of Menznau, west of Lucerne, the police said in a statement.

Emergency services were at the scene and the area had been cordoned off. A news conference had been scheduled for the afternoon.

Last month, a gunman killed three women and injured two men in the Swiss village of Daillon, stirring a debate about Switzerland's firearm laws, which allow men to keep guns after their mandatory military service.

There is no national gun register, but some estimates indicate that at least one in every three of Switzerland's 8 million inhabitants keeps a gun, many stored at home. Citizens outside the military who are 19 and over can apply for a permit to purchase up to three weapons. Sharpshooting and hunting are popular sports here.

A shooting in the Zug regional parliament in 2001, in which 14 people were killed, prompted calls to tighten laws, but the majority of Swiss citizens rejected a proposal in 2011 for extra measures such as mandatory locked storage of guns not in use.

Related:

Three women killed after gunman's drunken rampage in Swiss village

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Source: http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/27/17115096-several-killed-seriously-injured-in-swiss-factory-shooting-police-say?lite

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Fermi's motion produces a study in spirograph

Feb. 27, 2013 ? NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope orbits our planet every 95 minutes, building up increasingly deeper views of the universe with every circuit. Its wide-eyed Large Area Telescope (LAT) sweeps across the entire sky every three hours, capturing the highest-energy form of light -- gamma rays -- from sources across the universe. These range from supermassive black holes billions of light-years away to intriguing objects in our own galaxy, such as X-ray binaries, supernova remnants and pulsars.

Now a Fermi scientist has transformed LAT data of a famous pulsar into a mesmerizing movie that visually encapsulates the spacecraft's complex motion.

Pulsars are neutron stars, the crushed cores of massive suns that destroyed themselves when they ran out of fuel, collapsed and exploded. The blast simultaneously shattered the star and compressed its core into a body as small as a city yet more massive than the sun. The result is an object of incredible density, where a spoonful of matter weighs as much as a mountain on Earth. Equally incredible is a pulsar's rapid spin, with typical rotation periods ranging from once every few seconds up to hundreds of times a second. Fermi sees gamma rays from more than a hundred pulsars scattered across the sky.

One pulsar shines especially bright for Fermi. Called Vela, it spins 11 times a second and is the brightest persistent source of gamma rays the LAT sees. Although gamma-ray bursts and flares from distant black holes occasionally outshine the pulsar, they don't have Vela's staying power. Because pulsars emit beams of energy, scientists often compare them to lighthouses, a connection that in a broader sense works especially well for Vela, which is both a brilliant beacon and a familiar landmark in the gamma-ray sky.

Most telescopes focus on a very small region of the sky, but the LAT is a wide-field instrument that can detect gamma rays across a large portion of the sky at once. The LAT is, however, much more sensitive to gamma rays near the center of its field of view than at the edges. Scientists can use observations of a bright source like Vela to track how this sensitivity varies across the instrument's field of view.

With this in mind, LAT team member Eric Charles, a physicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University in California, used the famous pulsar to produce a novel movie. He tracked both Vela's position relative to the center of the LAT's field of view and the instrument's exposure of the pulsar during the first 51 months of Fermi's mission, from Aug. 4, 2008, to Nov. 15, 2012.

The movie renders Vela's position in a fisheye perspective, where the middle of the pattern corresponds to the central and most sensitive portion of the LAT's field of view. The edge of the pattern is 90 degrees away from the center and well beyond what scientists regard as the effective limit of the LAT's vision.

The pulsar traces out a loopy, hypnotic pattern reminiscent of art produced by the colored pens and spinning gears of a Spirograph, a children's toy that produces geometric patterns.

The pattern created in the Vela movie reflects numerous motions of the spacecraft. The first is Fermi's 95-minute orbit around Earth, but there's another, subtler motion related to it. The orbit itself also rotates, a phenomenon called precession. Similar to the wobble of an unsteady top, Fermi's orbital plane makes a slow circuit around Earth every 54 days.

In order to capture the entire sky every two orbits, scientists deliberately nod the LAT in a repeating pattern from one orbit to the next. It first looks north on one orbit, south on the next, and then north again. Every few weeks, the LAT deviates from this pattern to concentrate on particularly interesting targets, such as eruptions on the sun, brief but brilliant gamma-ray bursts associated with the birth of stellar-mass black holes, and outbursts from supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.

The Vela movie captures one other Fermi motion. The spacecraft rolls to keep the sun from shining on and warming up the LAT's radiators, which regulate its temperature by bleeding excess heat into space.

The braided loops and convoluted curves drawn by Vela hint at the complexity of removing these effects from the torrent of data Fermi returns, but that's a challenge LAT scientists long ago proved they could meet. Still going strong after more than four years on the job, Fermi continues its mission to map the high-energy sky, which is now something everyone can envision as a celestial Spriograph traced by a pulsar pen.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center.

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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_technology/~3/Kd6-_fYbEqw/130227183532.htm

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