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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In this Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2013, photo, a woman sits on an eCooltra Connected electric scooters at the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest mobile phone trade show, in Barcelona, Spain. The first wave of the wireless revolution was getting people to talk to each other through cellphones. The second, it seems, will be getting things to talk to each other, with no human intervention: cars that talk to your insurance company?s computers, bathroom scales that talk to your phone, and electric meters that talk to your air conditioners. So-called machine-to-machine technology all the buzz at this year?s largest wireless trade show, and some analysts believe these types of connection will outgrow the traditional phone business in less than a decade. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
In this Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2013, photo, a woman sits on an eCooltra Connected electric scooters at the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest mobile phone trade show, in Barcelona, Spain. The first wave of the wireless revolution was getting people to talk to each other through cellphones. The second, it seems, will be getting things to talk to each other, with no human intervention: cars that talk to your insurance company?s computers, bathroom scales that talk to your phone, and electric meters that talk to your air conditioners. So-called machine-to-machine technology all the buzz at this year?s largest wireless trade show, and some analysts believe these types of connection will outgrow the traditional phone business in less than a decade. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) ? A car that tells your insurance company how you're driving. A bathroom scale that lets you chart your weight on the Web. And a meter that warns your air conditioner when electricity gets more expensive.
Welcome to the next phase of the wireless revolution.
The first wave of wireless was all about getting people to talk to each other on cellphones. The second will be getting things to talk to each other, with no humans in between. So-called machine-to-machine communication is getting a lot of buzz at this year's wireless trade show. Some experts believe these connections will outgrow the traditional phone business in less than a decade.
"I see a whole set of industries, from energy to cars to health to logistics and transportation, being totally redesigned," said Vittorio Colao, the CEO of Vodafone Group PLC, in a keynote speech at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. The British cellphone company has vast international interests, including its 45 percent ownership stake in Verizon Wireless.
Companies are promising that machine-to-machine, or M2M, technology will deliver all manner of services, from the prosaic to the world-changing. At U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm Inc.'s booth here at the show, there's a coffeepot that can be ordered to start brewing from a tablet computer, or an Internet-connected alarm clock. A former president of Costa Rica is also at the show, talking about how M2M can save massive amounts of greenhouse gases by making energy use more efficient ? enough to bring mankind halfway to the goal of halting global warming.
The M2M phenomenon is part of the larger drive to create an "Internet of Things" ?a global network that not only links computers, tablets and phones but that connects everything from bikes to washing machines to thermostats. Machina Research, a British firm, believes there will be 12.5 billion "smart" connected devices, excluding phones, PCs and tablets, in the world in 2020, up from 1.3 billion today.
But how does this transformation happen, and who stands to profit?
First, the devices have to be able to connect. That's not a trivial undertaking, especially considering that people don't upgrade washing machines or renovate their homes as often as they change cellphones and PCs. One company at the show, a Los Angeles-based startup named Tethercell, has an ingenious solution for battery-powered devices: a "fake" AA battery that houses a smaller AAA battery in an electronic jacket. It can be placed in a battery compartment with other batteries. Within a distance of 80 feet, some smartphones and tablets can then signal the "battery" to turn the device on or off. For instance, parents whose kids have a lot of noisy toys can turn all of them off with touch of a single button. A fire alarm could send a text-message warning that its battery is running low, rather than blaring an audio signal.
Unfortunately, a Tethercell from the first production run costs $35. Co-founder Kellan O'Connor believes the price can come down to $10, but that's still a non-trivial cost, and symptomatic of the high price of building out the Internet of Everything. For devices that need to connect at long range over a cellular network, the cost of radio components alone ranges from $10 to $70, according to analyst Dan Shey of ABI Research.
That's not expensive in the context of some big-ticket items, like cars, which have been forerunners when it comes to non-phone wireless connections. General Motors Corp. started equipping cars with OnStar wireless calling and assistance services in the mid-90s. At the show, it announced it is updating the service for faster data connections, enabling services like remote engine diagnostics and upgrades to the control software. AT&T Inc., which has been aggressive about getting into the M2M business, is ousting Verizon Wireless as the network provider for OnStar.
Colao, the CEO of Vodafone, gave an example of another "smart" car application that might seem intrusive to some: the company has been trying out a service in Italy that lets an auto insurance company know how much a car is being used, and charges premiums accordingly. It can also score the driver based on his or her driving style, and give pointers on how to handle the car more safely.
Cellular connections are creeping into smaller, cheaper devices. Ecooltra, which rents out electric scooters by the day in Spain, wants to connect them to the Internet, which would let renters figure out through their phones where there's a scooter for rent and how much of a charge is in its battery. The feature is perfect for quick, impromptu rentals by the hour. Adding "smarts" to the scooters in the shape of a cellular modem would turn the company from a conventional rental service to a "scooter-sharing" business, much like car-sharing services like Zipcar.
Once devices are connected, the next problem is getting them to talk to each other, and making sense of what they're saying. ABI's Shey says this is the real business opportunity in M2M, more valuable than making the modems or providing the wireless connections. He believes that's driving a behind-the-scenes scramble of deal-making at the show, as companies like AT&T seek to bolster their ability to support M2M by acquiring companies that provide a "middle layer" of software between the devices and their owners.
For connections between devices in the home, like that remote-controlled coffee-pot, Qualcomm touts its AllJoyn project, which it seeks to make an industry standard. Currently, the main ways for devices to connect to each other and figure out what they can do, like Bluetooth and DLNA, are too limited and difficult to use, said Rob Chandhok, president of Qualcomm Innovation Center.
With AllJoyn, "there's nothing to stop you from making a speaker that listens for notifications and turns them into speech, so you hear, 'Hey, you left the refrigerator door open!'" Chandhok said. "You take very simple things and connect them, and people build experiences on top of them. That's what we're trying to do."
Jose Maria Figueres, the former president of Costa Rica, is now the president of the Carbon War Room, an organization co-founded by billionaire Richard Branson to promote cutbacks in greenhouse-gas emissions through smart private enterprise. Figueres believes M2M has huge potential to wring efficiency out of energy-guzzling activities, and could reduce emissions equivalent to 9.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2020 ? roughly equal to the combined emissions of India and the U.S. today.
Vodafone provided one example of how this might be done. The city of Groningen in the Netherlands has put sensors in the trash containers that serve public-housing units. They alert trash haulers when they need to be emptied, saving on unnecessary trips and reducing fuel use by 18 percent.
With M2M, "in many cases you have information moving instead of us moving," Figueres said.
In another example, Dutch authorities started controlling their street lights wirelessly rather than with "dumb" timers. They save on energy by dimming the lights if traffic is scant, but can also turn them on early if the day is dark.
Could M2M be overhyped ? a promise that won't deliver? The wireless industry is no stranger to rosy projections that don't pan out. Shey, the ABI analyst, thinks M2M will deliver, but perhaps not in a sexy, flashy way. When machine-to-machine connections are created, he said, it's usually not because someone is making a big bet on the future, but because they save money.
"It's about gaining more out of the asset that you have, like a truck. When it needs maintenance it gets maintenance at the right point. Or ensuring that the vending-machine guy only goes to the vending machine when it's empty," he said.
Inbound marketing is all the rage at the moment. It is the notion that you get customers to come to you, rather than you go out and find them. That has been a ?holy grail? for business for decades. Indeed, one of my favourite books is ?Getting Business To Come To You? which was published before much of this Internet malarkey had been invented. Wouldn?t it be marvellous if people just discovered your business, that you did not have to go out and promote yourself?
Just think of it ? no more cold calls, no more trudging round door-to-door, no more dreary networking meetings, no more stale exhibition halls. Instead, you just sit at your desk and the phone rings and the online cash register keeps on going ?ka-ching?.? It sounds a dream world, yet many online businesses are discovering that you can certainly reduce your marketing efforts if you use ?inbound marketing?, which means people come to you because they already know about you. But how?
The answer to inbound marketing is simply adding content to your web presence. The more web content you add, the more frequently you do it, then the greater the chances of people stumbling across your stuff as they wander the web. But each time I talk to businesses about that they say ?tried that, but it doesn?t really work?.
Yet, I can show them examples of businesses who have turned their marketing department into an online publishing business and who have seen significant growth as a result. I can give them links? to business blogs in tiny niche areas which have become the principal source of new business leads for those firms. Even so, business leaders still say to me ?tried it, but it didn?t work for us?.
However, new research from the folks at HubSpot now reveals why businesses think like that. The study involved over 5,000 companies who use the Internet to market their products and services, so it is substantial information. The research also includes input from over 250 business marketing experts, so the data is significant. And this is what it tells us:
Inbound Marketing Takes Six Months To Work
That?s right ? you are not going to start to see the benefits from any inbound marketing activity for around six months. True, the study did show that 17% of companies did get more traffic to their website in a few weeks, but for 68% of firms it was 7 months before anything happened. That?s over 200 days of relentless, continual adding content before most firms see anything happen in terms of additional interest in their online business.
Few business leaders want to wait that long. They are fuelled with the ?instant? online world we live in and expect to see additional traffic and new lead generation within weeks, if not days. They want to see a return on their investment in content production far sooner than the back end of the year.
The reason why so many businesses are saying ?we tried that, but it didn?t work? is because they are giving up too soon.
To be fair to HubSpot, they have always said that inbound marketing is a ?slow burn? ? indeed, they say they are surprised by the data, because it does show that some people do indeed get a rapid benefit from inbound marketing. The company has always preached patience.
So, what do you need to do in order to get business to come to you online?
Firstly, as the HubSpot research shows, the biggest benefit comes from blogging. And the companies who receive the most benefit blog EVERY DAY or MORE. So get your scribbling pens out?!
Secondly, the research confirms that you need regular ?calls to action? in order to benefit from inbound marketing.
So, if you don?t know how to organise them, please contact me?! Oh whoops ? there?s a call to action for you?!
But whatever you do ? be patient?! As this study shows, for the vast majority of people to benefit from inbound marketing it takes six or seven months. Inbound marketing is NOT a quick fix. But it certainly does lead business to come to you.
Jhaqueil Reagan, 18, scored a new job and a wave of media attention after an Indianapolis restaurant owner was impressed by his work ethic.
By Laura T. Coffey, TODAY
You know those stories parents and grandparents tell about the times they walked uphill both ways in the snow? A modern-day teenager braved a slog like that just the other day ? and it changed his life forever.
Jhaqueil Reagan, 18, needed to make his way to a job interview last Friday. It was 10 miles away from his home in Indianapolis, and he didn?t have enough money for bus fare. So, the enterprising teen ? who had to drop out of high school after his mother died so he could help support his younger brother and sister ? gave himself a few hours to trudge through the ice and slush.
About three miles into the journey, Reagan passed the Papa Roux Cajun restaurant in Indianapolis. Restaurant owner Art Bouvier, 43, was outside, working to melt ice in his parking lot. Reagan asked Bouvier how far it was to his destination: a thrift store that had advertised a minimum-wage job opening.
?I told him it was at least six or seven miles,? Bouvier told TODAY.com. ?I said, ?You?re gonna want a bus, you can?t be walking out in this.??
Reagan thanked Bouvier and kept going. About 15 minutes later, Bouvier and his wife were driving down the street when they spotted Reagan marching along in the cold.
?I said, ?Honey, pull over, let?s pick him up,?? Bouvier said. ?I asked him, ?Why aren?t you on the bus?? He said, ?I don?t have money for the bus. I?m heading to an interview because I need a job.??
An idea began to form in Bouvier?s mind: Wow, I should hire this kid. He asked for Reagan?s phone number and began thinking about what he could do with another restaurant employee.
WTHR
"When you see (a strong work ethic) in a person, you don't pass it up," said Art Bouvier, owner of the Papa Roux Cajun restaurant in Indianapolis. Bouvier just hired 18-year-old Jhaqueil Reagan at his restaurant.
As he dropped Reagan off, Bouvier asked the teen whether he?d eaten anything yet that day. He hadn?t. So, Bouvier gave him some money for lunch at a Dairy Queen near the thrift store.
?I think he was in shock,? Bouvier said.
After the encounter, Bouvier ??a self-described ?chronic over-sharer? on Facebook ??wrote a lengthy post about how much the teen?s work ethic inspired him.?
?It was a classic ?too long, didn?t read? post ... but we watched it go viral that day,? Bouvier said. ?It was surreal!?
As of this writing, Bouvier?s Facebook post has more than 20,000 likes and 5,000 shares. On the very same day he posted it, local television news stations scrambled to cover the story about the restaurant owner who wanted to hire the determined teen.
?It was his work ethic that got me,? Bouvier said. ?You don?t get a feel for that on an application or a resume, but when you see that in a person, you don?t pass it up. He?ll definitely get here for a shift if he?ll do that much for an interview.?
With cameras rolling, Bouvier called Reagan on the phone last Friday. He offered Reagan a job and Reagan happily accepted ??especially because the thrift store had already filled its opening by the time he got there.
Reagan now has two distinctions he never anticipated: a much-publicized crew member position at the Papa Roux restaurant ??(which, incidentally, is paying him more than minimum wage) ??and a flash of stardom on the Internet and multiple TV news shows. Papa Roux also got something unexpected: lines of customers waiting outside the standing-room-only restaurant, and calls from investors and real-estate agents who want to help the establishment expand.?
?I think we?ll keep this location, too, as we expand,? Bouvier said. ?That could mean more jobs for this community.?
Reagan started his new job busing tables, serving drinks and doing light kitchen prep on Monday. On Tuesday evening he told TODAY.com that he can already tell how much he likes his co-workers and his new boss.
?I do appreciate him a lot,? Reagan said. ?He?s helped me out so much already.?
Reagan said he earned his GED after he left high school in the wake of his mom?s death at age 39. His 16-year-old brother and his 7-year-old sister are now living with his grandmother. Reagan said he?s been homeless and couch-surfing for the past seven or eight months; he?s staying at a friend?s place at the moment.
?He?s one of the hardest working new hires I?ve had in a long time,? Bouvier said. ?My hope is that every time Jhaqueil?s story airs, someone is moved to do something good for someone else in their community.?
Need a Coffey break? Connect with TODAY.com writer Laura T. Coffey on?Facebook, follow her on?Twitter?or read more of her stories at?LauraTCoffey.com.
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This story was originally published on Tue Feb 26, 2013 3:53 PM EST
Final verdict for U.S. under-20 men?s national team in its drive for redemption, after the notorious qualification failure for the FIFA U-20 World Cup last time out: not the best performance in the world, and not exactly pretty, but job done.
Tab Ramos? young bunch of Yanks downed Canada tonight in Mexico, 4-2, qualifying for this summer?s FIFA Under-20 World Cup in Turkey.
The CONCACAF qualifying tournament goes on, but this was the money match; all four quarterfinal winners move on Turkey.
While the run has been less-than-perfect, Ramos? side has managed to improve each time out, which is certainly something to take away from the team?s trip into Mexico. Further credit, too, for not getting undone by Canada?s 23rd-minute goal Tuesday.
U.S. attacker Luis Gil was strong once again, recording the equalizer six minutes after Canada?s first-half strike. We told you about him earlier today on the blog, about this being a big year for the young man at Real Salt Lake.
The LA Galaxy?s Jose Villarreal had two goals for the United States.
'Network' analysis of the brain may explain features of autismPublic release date: 27-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Meghan Weber Meghan.Weber@childrens.harvard.edu 617-919-3110 Boston Children's Hospital
EEGs show structural differences in brain connections
A look at how the brain processes information finds a distinct pattern in children with autism spectrum disorders. Using EEGs to track the brain's electrical cross-talk, researchers from Boston Children's Hospital have found a structural difference in brain connections. Compared with neurotypical children, those with autism have multiple redundant connections between neighboring brain areas at the expense of long-distance links.
The study, using a "network analysis" like that used to study airlines or electrical grids, may help in understanding some classic behaviors in autism. It was published February 27 in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine, accompanied by a commentary.
"We examined brain networks as a whole in terms of their capacity to transfer and process information," says Jurriaan Peters, MD, of the Department of Neurology at Boston Children's Hospital, who is co-first author of the paper with Maxime Taquet, a PhD student in Boston Children's Computational Radiology Laboratory. "What we found may well change the way we look at the brains of autistic children."
Peters, Taquet and senior authors Simon Warfield, PhD, of the Computational Radiology Laboratory and Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD, of Neurology, analyzed EEG recordings from two groups of autistic children: 16 children with classic autism, and 14 children whose autism is part of a genetic syndrome known as tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC). They compared these readings with EEGs from two control groups46 healthy neurotypical children and 29 children with TSC but not autism.
In both groups with autism, there were more short-range connections within different brain region, but fewer connections linking far-flung areas.
A brain network that favors short-range over long-range connections seems to be consistent with autism's classic cognitive profilea child who excels at specific, focused tasks like memorizing streets, but who cannot integrate information across different brain areas into higher-order concepts.
"For example, a child with autism may not understand why a face looks really angry, because his visual brain centers and emotional brain centers have less cross-talk," Peters says. "The brain cannot integrate these areas. It's doing a lot with the information locally, but it's not sending it out to the rest of the brain."
Network analysisa hot emerging branch of cognitive neuroscienceshowed a quality called "resilience" in the children with autismthe ability to find multiple ways to get from point A to point B through redundant pathways.
"Much like you can still travel from Boston to Brussels even if London Heathrow is shut down, by going through New York's JFK airport for example, information can continue to be transferred between two regions of the brain of children with autism," says Taquet. "In such a network, no hub plays a specific role, and traffic may flow along many redundant routes."
This quality of redundancy is consistent with cellular and molecular evidence for decreased "pruning" of brain connections in autism. While it may be good for an airline, it may indicate a brain that responds in the same way to many different kinds of situations and is less able to focus on the stimuli that are most important.
"It's a simpler, less specialized network that's more rigid, less able to respond to stimulation from the environment," says Peters.
The study showed that both groups of children with tuberous sclerosis complex had reduced connectivity overall, but only those who also had autism had the pattern of increased short-range versus long-range connections (See image).
Under a recently announced NIH Autism Center of Excellence Grant, Peters and his colleagues will repeat the analysis as part of a multicenter study, taking EEG recordings prospectively under uniform conditions.
The current study builds on recent work by Peters, Sahin and colleagues, which imaged nerve fibers in autistic patients and showed structural abnormalities in brain connectivity. Other recent work at Boston Children's, led by Frank Duffy, PhD, of Neurology, looked at "coherence," or the degree of synchrony between any two given EEG signals, and found altered connectivity between brain regions in children with autism.
Yet another recent study, led by Boston Children's informatics researcher William Bosl, PhD, and Charles A. Nelson, PhD, research director of the Developmental Medicine Center, looked at the degree of randomness in EEG signals, an indirect indicator of connectivity, and found patterns that distinguished infants at increased risk for autism from controls.
###
The current study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grant #s R01 RR021885, R01 LM010033, R03 EB008680, UL1 RR025758 to Warfield; P20 RFA-NS-12-006, 1U01NS082320-01 to Sahin and Peters); the National Institute of Mental Health (grant #K23MH094517 to coauthor Shafali Jeste); the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (grant #DC 10290 to Charles Nelson, PhD) and the Department of Defense (grant #W81XWH-11-1-0365 to Nelson).
Boston Children's Hospital is home to the world's largest research enterprise based at a pediatric medical center, where its discoveries have benefited both children and adults since 1869. More than 1,100 scientists, including nine members of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 members of the Institute of Medicine and 12 members of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute comprise Boston Children's research community. Founded as a 20-bed hospital for children, Boston Children's today is a 395-bed comprehensive center for pediatric and adolescent health care grounded in the values of excellence in patient care and sensitivity to the complex needs and diversity of children and families. Boston Children's also is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. For more information about research and clinical innovation at Boston Children's, visit: http://vectorblog.org/.
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'Network' analysis of the brain may explain features of autismPublic release date: 27-Feb-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Meghan Weber Meghan.Weber@childrens.harvard.edu 617-919-3110 Boston Children's Hospital
EEGs show structural differences in brain connections
A look at how the brain processes information finds a distinct pattern in children with autism spectrum disorders. Using EEGs to track the brain's electrical cross-talk, researchers from Boston Children's Hospital have found a structural difference in brain connections. Compared with neurotypical children, those with autism have multiple redundant connections between neighboring brain areas at the expense of long-distance links.
The study, using a "network analysis" like that used to study airlines or electrical grids, may help in understanding some classic behaviors in autism. It was published February 27 in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Medicine, accompanied by a commentary.
"We examined brain networks as a whole in terms of their capacity to transfer and process information," says Jurriaan Peters, MD, of the Department of Neurology at Boston Children's Hospital, who is co-first author of the paper with Maxime Taquet, a PhD student in Boston Children's Computational Radiology Laboratory. "What we found may well change the way we look at the brains of autistic children."
Peters, Taquet and senior authors Simon Warfield, PhD, of the Computational Radiology Laboratory and Mustafa Sahin, MD, PhD, of Neurology, analyzed EEG recordings from two groups of autistic children: 16 children with classic autism, and 14 children whose autism is part of a genetic syndrome known as tuberous sclerosis complex (TSC). They compared these readings with EEGs from two control groups46 healthy neurotypical children and 29 children with TSC but not autism.
In both groups with autism, there were more short-range connections within different brain region, but fewer connections linking far-flung areas.
A brain network that favors short-range over long-range connections seems to be consistent with autism's classic cognitive profilea child who excels at specific, focused tasks like memorizing streets, but who cannot integrate information across different brain areas into higher-order concepts.
"For example, a child with autism may not understand why a face looks really angry, because his visual brain centers and emotional brain centers have less cross-talk," Peters says. "The brain cannot integrate these areas. It's doing a lot with the information locally, but it's not sending it out to the rest of the brain."
Network analysisa hot emerging branch of cognitive neuroscienceshowed a quality called "resilience" in the children with autismthe ability to find multiple ways to get from point A to point B through redundant pathways.
"Much like you can still travel from Boston to Brussels even if London Heathrow is shut down, by going through New York's JFK airport for example, information can continue to be transferred between two regions of the brain of children with autism," says Taquet. "In such a network, no hub plays a specific role, and traffic may flow along many redundant routes."
This quality of redundancy is consistent with cellular and molecular evidence for decreased "pruning" of brain connections in autism. While it may be good for an airline, it may indicate a brain that responds in the same way to many different kinds of situations and is less able to focus on the stimuli that are most important.
"It's a simpler, less specialized network that's more rigid, less able to respond to stimulation from the environment," says Peters.
The study showed that both groups of children with tuberous sclerosis complex had reduced connectivity overall, but only those who also had autism had the pattern of increased short-range versus long-range connections (See image).
Under a recently announced NIH Autism Center of Excellence Grant, Peters and his colleagues will repeat the analysis as part of a multicenter study, taking EEG recordings prospectively under uniform conditions.
The current study builds on recent work by Peters, Sahin and colleagues, which imaged nerve fibers in autistic patients and showed structural abnormalities in brain connectivity. Other recent work at Boston Children's, led by Frank Duffy, PhD, of Neurology, looked at "coherence," or the degree of synchrony between any two given EEG signals, and found altered connectivity between brain regions in children with autism.
Yet another recent study, led by Boston Children's informatics researcher William Bosl, PhD, and Charles A. Nelson, PhD, research director of the Developmental Medicine Center, looked at the degree of randomness in EEG signals, an indirect indicator of connectivity, and found patterns that distinguished infants at increased risk for autism from controls.
###
The current study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grant #s R01 RR021885, R01 LM010033, R03 EB008680, UL1 RR025758 to Warfield; P20 RFA-NS-12-006, 1U01NS082320-01 to Sahin and Peters); the National Institute of Mental Health (grant #K23MH094517 to coauthor Shafali Jeste); the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (grant #DC 10290 to Charles Nelson, PhD) and the Department of Defense (grant #W81XWH-11-1-0365 to Nelson).
Boston Children's Hospital is home to the world's largest research enterprise based at a pediatric medical center, where its discoveries have benefited both children and adults since 1869. More than 1,100 scientists, including nine members of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 members of the Institute of Medicine and 12 members of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute comprise Boston Children's research community. Founded as a 20-bed hospital for children, Boston Children's today is a 395-bed comprehensive center for pediatric and adolescent health care grounded in the values of excellence in patient care and sensitivity to the complex needs and diversity of children and families. Boston Children's also is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. For more information about research and clinical innovation at Boston Children's, visit: http://vectorblog.org/.
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The aircraft carriers USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), USS George H.W. Bush (CVN 77), USS Enterprise (CVN 65),??Roughly two out of three Americans say that automatic spending cuts set to trigger Friday will have a major negative effect on the economy, according to a new public opinion poll. And more would blame congressional Republicans (45 percent) than President Barack Obama (32 percent), the non-partisan Pew Research Center found in its survey.
But there are signs that Americans are growing tired with Washington?s seemingly boundless appetite for manufactured crises: Only 25 percent said they are following the news about the so-called sequestration cuts very closely. That?s down from 40 percent of respondents saying they were following the so-called fiscal cliff standoff in early December, weeks before a January 1 deadline.
With just days before the cuts start coming into force on Friday, Obama was taking the political fight Tuesday to the pivotal swing-state of Virginia. The president was to visit Newport News Shipbuilding, Virginia's largest manufacturing employer, as part of an aggressive public relations campaign to warn that the sequester will harm jobs.
The White House and its Republican opponents have stepped up their war of words over sequestration. The president describes the looming spending reductions as catastrophic (though independent analysts sharply question his rhetoric), while the GOP has alternately tried to blame him as the person who first proposed it (Congress voted to approve it) and played down the overall impact. The two sides are profoundly at odds with how to replace it ? Obama wants a blend of spending cuts and tax hikes, Republican leaders have flatly rejected any tax increases. The public, meanwhile, basically backs the president but can't figure out what it wants to cut.
How bad would it be? Fifty-eight percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats said sequestration would have a ?major impact? on the economy. Sixty percent of Republicans and 56 percent of Democrats said the same about the military. But just 28 percent of Republicans and 36 percent predicted a major impact on their household finances.
Sixty percent of Republicans and 61 percent of Democrats said the impact on the economy would be ?mostly negative.?
Who would be to blame?
Forty-five percent said Republicans in Congress, 32 percent pointed the finger at Obama, 13 percent said both. But among independent voters the gap narrows, with 39 percent blaming the GOP and 32 percent saying Obama?s at fault. That?s a shift from a week ago, when it was 47 percent GOP, 29 percent Obama.
Pew's poll, released late Monday, had error margins of 7.4 percentage points for Republicans, 6.7 percentage points for Democrats, 6.1 percentage points for independents, and 3.7 percentage points for the total sample.
The White House crafted the sequester during the summer 2011 battle over government spending that almost saw the country default on its debt payments for the first time in its history. The idea was to force a ?supercommittee? of Democrats and Republicans to do what Congress as a whole had failed to do: find a compromise approach to reducing the government?s deficits and the national debt.
Force them how? By making it the law of the land that failure to find a compromise would automatically trigger utterly unacceptable cuts to domestic programs and defense?enough to reduce spending by $1.2 trillion over 10 years. (This works out to about $500 billion in cuts from each category, which will mean less borrowing, which in turn will mean about $200 billion less in interest payments.) Mandatory programs?Social Security, for instance?are either exempt from sequestration or, as in the case of Medicare, face a relatively modest 2 percent cut.
So is Obama to blame? Not really?or at least, not alone. The Congress, including Republican leaders now denouncing the sequester, passed it, and Obama signed it into law. And it wouldn?t have happened if the supercommittee had found a compromise. Among the major roadblocks: unyielding GOP opposition to raising tax revenue.
Wasn?t it supposed to start in January? As part of a New Year's compromise on the "fiscal cliff," Congress and the president basically gave themselves some breathing room by agreeing to some deficit reduction?enough to push the sequester?s trigger date to March 1.
Republicans working hard to ensure that Obama bears the lion?s share of the blame for the sequester note that the GOP-held House of Representatives twice passed legislation to replace the sequester. But those bills stalled in the Democrat-led Senate and died at the dawn of the new Congress in January. It?s not clear that the House could pass them again, and even if it could there?s no sign the legislation would advance in the Senate.
But some strategists on both sides say the cuts need to start happening, and the public needs to start feeling the impact, or Washington won?t act.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia in the original "Star Wars" trilogy, was briefly hospitalized due to her bipolar disorder, the actress' spokeswoman said on Tuesday after video emerged of Fisher giving an unusual stage performance. The video came from a show Fisher gave aboard a cruise ship in the Caribbean last week, according to celebrity website TMZ, which posted the clip. The clip shows Fisher, 56, singing "Skylark" and "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," at times appearing to struggle to remember the lyrics. ...
A boring old cube doesn't exactly seem like the ideal form factor for a robot. But that didn't stop a group of students from the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control at ETH Zurich from designing and building this unique automaton that can stand and balance on a single corner, and even hobble across a room. More »
In his 1958 bestseller, The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith, the American economics professor, satirist and (later) diplomat, painted a very vivid picture of his adopted country in which most people would be relatively rich or, in his more elegant term, affluent.
Prof Galbraith, a Canadian by birth, was one of a team of the so-called ?action intellectuals? who helped shape the major policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations of the 1960s. More than half a century later, Galbraith?s enlightened vision has more or less become the reality in the United States.
Is it possible for Kenya to visualise and build what could loosely be referred to as the ?OK Society? along the lines of Galbraith?s Affluent Society? What would such a society actually be like? Would it be affluent in the sense of Galbraith?s America or would every Kenyan citizen be equal, economically, to everybody else?
Apparently, none of the above.
According to Dr Nzioki Kibua, the former long-serving deputy governor of the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) who is now running for governor of Machakos County, and is certainly one of our very own action intellectuals, the OK Society would be a society in which every Kenyan family received a legitimately earned income of at least Sh500 per day and had access to both clean running water and electricity within the home.
Such a family would also have to be in a position to take all its children to school all the way up to university; have ready access to appropriate health care and live in the peace and tranquility that would be both provided and guaranteed by our national and county governments.
This country would then cease to be a nation of beggars and handout-seekers and the endemic corruption that has embedded itself into both our politics and economics would be wiped out.
But what would we need to do to transform this country so fundamentally? According to Kibua, we need to do at least four things if this country is to be transformed into an OK Society within the next 30 years.
Money printing
First, we need to get our macro-economic policies and structures correct and build the national infrastructure around the pillars, which have been spelled out in Vision 2030, the national development blueprint.
Second, we need to empower our people economically, by providing the economic opportunities through which they can generate their own incomes without depending on handouts from their political or community leaders.
Third, we need to review and strengthen our public financial management systems and procedures, particularly with respect to revenue generation and collection, and to ensure that we spend our tax revenues in the most efficient and transparent manner.
Finally, we need a moral transformation that can enable us to generate the resolve to face corruption squarely and then move on to fight it with all the legal, administrative and moral weapons we can muster.
The rumors you might've heard are true: Samsung's got a new 8-inch tablet, appropriately named the Galaxy Note 8.0, on the way.
The new tablet will sit between the 5.5-inch Galaxy Note 2 smartphone and the 10.1-inch Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet. It competes with Apple's 7.9-inch iPad Mini and Google's 7-inch Nexus 7.
Like the other devices in Samsung's Galaxy Note line, the Galaxy Note 8.0 will include the S Pen, which Samsung emphasizes is not merely a stylus. You can use the pressure-sensitive digital pen ? which is powered by technology created by Wacom, the company behind professional-grade digital drawing tablets ? to add notes, manipulate content on the screen, and even preview videos and emails by simply hovering it close to the Galaxy Note 8.0's screen.
The Galaxy Note 8.0 will run Android 4.1.2 (better known as Jellybean). Under the hood, it has a 1.6GHz quad-core processor, a 5 megapixel camera in the back, a 1.3 megapixel camera in the front, 2GB of RAM, and a microSD slot. The tablet's 8-inch display offers 1280x800 pixels, which breaks down to 189 pixels per inch (ppi). (In comparison, the iPad Mini and Nexus 7 have 163 ppi and 216 ppi displays, respectively.)
Those who were intrigued by the Galaxy Note 10.1's multi-app split-screen feature will likely jump for joy when they hear that it is included on the Galaxy Note 8.0 and that it now supports nearly any app ? not just Samsung's included suite of tools. (This means that you can take notes while watching a video, type out emails while editing a spreadsheet on the side, scribble over a photo while checking out instructions in a document, and so on.)
The Galaxy Note 8.0 will come in 16GB and 32GB versions. No word yet on pricing details, but since we should see the tablet hit shelves in the second quarter of this year, it won't be too long before we find out how much Samsung wants for its latest gadget.
Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.
A scientist nibbled away at Sen. Rand Paul on Friday after the Kentucky Republican blasted his research on schools of fish as wasteful federal spending.
?He got the funding wrong and the species wrong, and he misrepresents the work we?ve done,? Princeton science professor Iain Couzin told POLITICO. ?He?s done some serious cherry-picking here. That?s one study, we?ve had a series of studies that have taken many years.?
On Fox News on Thursday night, Paul said the military has spent $5.2 million studying goldfish and advocated yanking funding for such programs to cut the budget.
?In the military they have $5.2 million they spent on goldfish ? studying goldfish to see how democratic they were and if we could learn about democracy from goldfish,? Paul said on Fox. ?I would give the president the authority to go ahead and cut all $5 million in goldfish studies.?
The problem: if President Obama had the authority to ?authority to go ahead and cut? funding for military goldfish studies, he?d be able to cut zero studies. The species being studied is the golden shiner. But I suppose ?goldfish? sounds more ridiculous, so Rand figured he?d lie and go with that.
Unfortunately, that?s not the only fact Paul stretched or got wrong, which was pretty much everything. Couzin said that the research was for applications in artificial intelligence and robotics. Understanding how simple intelligences like fish work together would be tremendously important in fighting oil spills and radioactive leaks, for example.
?Our work aims to understand the principles of collective control in animal groups and what this can inform us about collective robotics,? he said. ?It has nothing at all to do with human politics.?
Couzin also said that the $5.2 million figure cited by Rand was false. Funding for the project is mixed, with a portion coming from federal grants. You assume the rest would come from private industry, which would benefit from the research as well.
?If you think about it, schools of fish have been on the planet for much longer than we have and they?ve evolved to find solutions to problems. They can sense the environments in ways that we simply didn?t know how to do that,? Couzin said. ?From ant colonies to schooling fish, it?s not that complicated but the feats they can achieve are extraordinary. The collective of a whole can solve problems in ways individuals cannot.?
He added: ?Perhaps Sen. Paul should read our papers before he comments on them and perhaps he should consider more broadly how science can help society.?
Or maybe the next time Paul feels the need to act like an ignorant blowhard on Fox, he should check the impulse toward demagoguery and just not do it.
Chomping at Bits comes stocked with the best Florida Gators links and news we can find. Got a link we should check out? Email us at AlligatorArmy@gmail.com, subject line CAB.
Florida loses series opener to Florida Gulf Coast: The Gators have now lost to Duke and FGCU with Jonathon Crawford starting on the mound, and he turned in 5.1 innings of no-hit ball last night before Florida relievers yielded eight runs, including two inherited from Crawford. No, this does not inspire confidence. (GatorZone)
Gators men still No. 1 at SEC Swimming and Diving Championships: Florida's women sit third, and well back of Georgia and Texas A&M. (GatorZone)
Softball drops first game in program's longest: After a morning victory over Syracuse, Florida lost to No. 7 Missouri in 12 innings on...
A deal to reduce emissions from the San Juan Generating Station, the huge coal plant polluting the Four Corners region, was announced last week. The deal?marks potentially significant progress,?but it left open major questions. First among them: How long will New Mexico run on dirty coal??
Recent analysis of government weather data shows at least 3,527 monthly weather records were broken for heat, rain, and snow throughout the United States last year. In New Mexico, there were a total of 26 broken heat records, five broken precipitation records, and 27 large wildfires. There?s no doubt that global warming is here and one of the main causes of climate distruption is carbon dioxide pollution like the millions of tons of it spewing from the San Juan plant not only over New Mexico, but also portions of Colorado, Arizona and Utah.
The plant is one of the largest coal power plants in the west and affects the entire southwest.? It is a massive polluter: It dumps 13,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide ? a key cause of climate disruption -- into the atmosphere each year. The emissions are equal to the amount released by 2.3 million passenger vehicles, which is more than all of the cars registered in New Mexico. Pollution from the plant is also responsible for 33 premature deaths, 600 asthma attacks, 31 asthma-related emergency room visits, at an estimated cost of more than $254,000,000.?
Although it often seems debates on energy and climate change are centered far away in Washington, D.C., some of the biggest decisions about New Mexico?s energy future are decided much closer to home. Those decisions include whether the state should:
Continue to rely on climate-warming coal and gas power? or develop clean, renewable energy, harvesting the huge potential of New Mexico?s sun and wind; or
Invest in making our homes and businesses more energy-efficient to save money, energy and reduce pollution.?
Last week, New Mexico state officials released a pollution control deal for the behemoth San Juan Generating Station coal plant, which is operated and half-owned by Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM. (The other portion is owned by a variety of utilities in New Mexico, Arizona and California). The deal would close half the plant (two of the four generators) and reduce the pollution control requirements on the remaining units.
The deal has several more hurdles, including sign off in federal court, including at nearby parks. So far, no details on whether and how the deal complies with federal air quality laws have been released.? If that occurs, the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission will determine whether to approve the expenditures required by the deal. Without question, this resolution will largely determine the fate of clean, renewable energy in our state because San Juan provides so much of New Mexico?s energy, whether PNM and the other utilities retire their share or not will determine whether they can replace the plant with clean energy.
While the deal represents a step forward for the plant with significant emissions reductions, big questions remain:
Which owners will retire their interest in the plant and which will stay in??
Why does PNM want to continue investing in San Juan even though other utilities in Arizona and California?that also own the facility have indicated they would rather retire it? The California utilities, MSR, SCCPA and Anaheim have all indicated they are getting out. That is good news for California, but it may mean PNM owns just as much coal at the facility as ever.
Will there be an economic supply of coal at the plant?s mine after its expensive contract ends in 2017?
The deal includes support for a new gas plant, but is another new gas plant necessary? Why not include renewable energy?
And perhaps most importantly, just how long do PNM and any other continuing owners intend to continue providing energy from coal? Coal remains the dirtiest fossil fuel available with serious health and air quality threats to New Mexicans and harm to our parks.
A move in the right direction would be for the New Mexico Commission, which is also charged with implementing New Mexico?s renewable energy law, to ensure New Mexico[s utilities that currently provide less than 10 percent of their energy from renewable sources get to at least the legally mandated 20 percent by 2020 as a condition of approving any new expenses at San Juan- or approval of any new gas plant. Replacing power from San Juan with clean energy such as solar and wind power would be a significant step forward. To put things in perspective: PNM?s recent renewable plan recommended adding only enough renewable energy ?to match about 2% of the dirty coal power they own at the San Juan plant.
Meanwhile, there?s no doubt that the cheapest, cleanest and fastest way to power New Mexico is from investing in renewable sources and making our homes, schools and businesses more energy efficient to reduce the need for power plants.
We don?t have to wait on Washington to make progress on clean energy: These decisions will all be made in New Mexico.?The?New Mexico?Commission can and should make the decisions necessary to help New Mexico set clean energy records, instead of scorching weather record breakers like last year.
SamMobile came up with a report saying it had leaked the Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean test firmware I9300XXUFMB3 for the Samsung Galaxy S3 (GT-I9300) with the help of XDA-Developers forum member Saturn, who had provided ?the dump files from his device.?
In addition, the report interestingly stated that while Samsung is still testing the Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean, the official final release of the firmware update for the Galaxy S3 could be expected after the launch of the next-generation Galaxy S smartphone, aka the Galaxy S4.
In terms of the Samsung Galaxy S4 release date, a March 14 event in New York is being highly rumored. However, a recent report has brought in a twist in the tale saying the device might be delayed due to issues with the eight-core Exynos Octa processor.
When it comes to the leaked Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean firmware in question, it?s available for download. Here?s a list of key enhancements in the Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean firmware I9300XXUFMB3, provided by SamMobile:
- Android 4.2.1 ? JOP40D
- Improved Ripple effect on Lockscreen
- New Android 4.2.1 Lockscreen with widgets
- Daydream (Settings>Display)
- New Additions in Notification Center
- Notifications are more actionable
- Voice Command (Let?s you control various parts of the phone using voice commands)
According to a report?from Ars Technica, the implementation of the voice command feature will be interesting to see ?considering the handset already uses its native S-voice.?
?There also seems to be new additions to the Notifications center, though we're not too keen on the implementation as seen in the screenshot above because it appears bloated with icons and options. Fortunately, it looks like it will live beyond a second screen in the Notifications shade,? the report added.
Based on the screenshots, provided by SamMobile, the first look of the Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean seems more like the TouchWiz on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean currently. However, the inclusion of the lockscreen widgets will likely give the oomph!
While all the new features from Android 4.2 are apparently included, the only exception seems to be the Photo Sphere feature. The quick settings panel has also been overhauled with TouchWiz, looking handier than stock Android, Android Community reported.
?All those toggles should really come in handy ? and keep the regular notification pulldown bar clear for those expanding notifications,? said the report.
How To Install
The steps for installing Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean I9300XXUFMB3 on the Samsung Galaxy S3 (GT-I9300) are given below. But before trying out the tutorial there are some aspects that must be noted:
- Proper backups must be taken for personal data, apps and settings
- The phone must have at least 80 percent of battery power
- The firmware will increase the device?s binary counter
- The firmware will change the device status to modified
- The firmware does not have any modem; therefore the Modem being used before flashing the firmware will remain
- The firmware is a pre-release version, not official from Samsung Kies
- Being a pre-release version, the firmware will likely have some minor bugs
It must be kept in mind that this tutorial is only for Samsung Galaxy S3, model number GT- I9300. In addition, the users must proceed at their own risk. IBTimes cannot be held responsible for anything that goes wrong.
Let?s get started!
Step 1: Download I9300XXUFMB3_I9300OJKFMB3_ILO.zip and unzip the file.
Step 2: Open Odin 3.04 (included in the firmware package).
Step 3: Power off Galaxy S3 and put it on the Download Mode. To do this, press and hold the Volume Down and Home buttons while pressing the Power button until the Samsung Galaxy logo appears on the screen.
Step 4: Connect phone to the computer and wait until you get a blue sign in Odin.
Step 5: Add I9300XXUFMB3_I9300OJKFMB3_HOME.tar.md5 to PDA.
Step 6: Make sure re-partition is NOT ticked.
Step 7: Start flash and wait a few minutes.
Step 8: If you encounter any issues with the firmware boot into recovery mode (Home + power + volume up).
At long last, Sony has revealed its newest home video game machine ? the PlayStation 4. Well, sort of.
At a flashy, big-screen-filled event in New York City on Wednesday, the electronics giant told a crowd full of journalists that the PlayStation 4 will arrive in stores this holiday season. And while Sony revealed a number of details about the successor to the PlayStation 3, it also left us with plenty of questions.
For example, what does the PlayStation 4 look like?
But since the big announcement (which you can read more about here), some new details about the machine ? and some new questions ? have emerged. Here's a look at the PlayStation 4 intel so far.
What we know
Game prices: Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, told CNBC that PlayStation 4 game prices would range from 99 cents to $60. We expect that $60 applies to the standard AAA game titles ? which makes it in line with what gamers are currently paying and less than the $70 (or higher) that some rumors had pegged PS4 games at.
Not backwards compatible but ... The PlayStation 4 will not be backwards compatible with PlayStation 3 games, Shuhei Yoshida ? President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios ? told a group of game journalists after Wednesday's event. However, he said the machine may make older PS1, PS2 and PS3 games available on the PS4 via streaming. (Sony did purchase streaming game service Gaikai last year, after all.)
A new DualShock controller: There's a new controller in town. Sony gave us a good look at its motion-control enabled DualShock 4 controller on Wednesday and has since revealed some pretty pictures showing off the "share" button that will allow players to instantly broadcast their game live, as well as the touchpad.
The controller also features a built-in speaker and headset jack and a lightbar on the front that will be used for things like showing players when their character has taken damage during a game. The lightbar will also be used in conjunction with ...
A new PlayStation Eye camera: Sony's PlayStation Eye camera has been redesigned and, it must be said, it looks a bit like Microsoft's motion-and-voice-sensing Kinect peripheral. AmIright?
In a post on the official PlayStation blog, Yoshida says of the dual-camera peripheral, "it can sense the depth of the environment in front of it and also track the 3D location of the controller via its light bar. The new camera incorporates four microphones capable of accurate sound detection and source origination, and it will support the PlayStation Move motion controller with more precision than ever before."
The camera will also be able to track the 3D location of the DualShock 4 controller thanks to the controller's lightbar.
Some of the technical specs: Following Wednesday's reveal, Sony issued a press release outlining the PS4's technical specs ? or at least the specs they're willing to reveal at the moment. Here's the official geeky outline of the console's guts:
Main Processor Single-chip custom processor CPU : x86-64 AMD "Jaguar", 8 cores GPU : 1.84 TFLOPS, AMD next-generation Radeon based graphics engine
Memory GDDR5 8GB
Hard Disk Drive Built-in
Optical Drive (read only) BD 6xCAV DVD 8xCAV I/O Super-Speed USB (USB 3.0) ?AUX
Communication Ethernet (10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, 1000BASE-T) IEEE 802.11 b/g/n Bluetooth 2.1 (EDR)
AV output HDMI Analog-AV out Digital Output (optical)
Onlinewon't be required: While rumors have been circulating claiming that Microsoft's forthcoming competing game machine ? the yet-to-be-announced successor to the Xbox 360 ? will require owners to have a connection to the internet to play games, Sony has gone on the record saying that will not be the case with the PlayStation 4.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Yoshida said, "Oh yes, yes, you can go offline totally. Social is big for us, but we understand there are some people who are anti-social! So if you don't want to connect to anyone else, you can do that."
Some of the games: We don't yet know exactly what the launch-day lineup of games is going to look like when the PS4 arrives in stores, but we did get a look at a number of games that are in the works. Ubisoft's open-world hacker game "Watch Dogs" will arrive on the day of launch, and Bungie's new project "Destiny" is coming to the machine as well.
For a full run-down of the PS4 games that were revealed and a look at them in action, check out this story.
WHAT WE DON'T KNOW
What the PlayStation 4 looks like: The PlayStation 4 itself was conspicuously missing from its own coming-out party. We saw the new controller, we saw the new camera, we saw a bunch of games and tech demos. But we didn't get a single glimpse of the machine.
Apparently we didn't get to see the PS4's design because it hasn't been finalized yet.
"We don?t have a mass-production box that we can bring out and pull out," Tretton told AllThingsD. "That?s still in development in terms of final specs and design."
Furthermore, Yoshida told game site Kotaku.com, "we have to keep something new for later. Otherwise you'd get bored." (We predict that means Sony will show off the machine itself at the big Electronic Entertainment Expo this summer.)
But as InGame editor Todd Kenreck points out in his video below, the external shape of the machine is not what really matters.
How much it willcost: Sony has not yet put a price tag on its future game machine, though recently leaked information suggests it will come in two versions, priced at $429 and $529
Sony misfired in a big way when it introduced the PlayStation 3 at $500 and a whopping $600 for the top-end model. The good news is, it sounds like the company has perhaps learned its lesson.
"I think our goal with this is to debut at a more consumer-friendly price," Tretton told AllThingsD, when asked about the PS4 price. "But we haven?t made any final decisions about what the price will be at launch."
The state of used games? Rumors have been circulating for some time that Sony and Microsoft's new game machines will block the use of used games. Needless to say, that does not sit well with many gamers, who feel that if they buy a game disc that means they own that game and should be able to share and resell it as they please. Meanwhile, used games are a great way for people on tight budgets to pick up a title at a more affordable price.
Sony didn't reveal anything about the PS4 and used games during its main event. However, Eurogamer popped the question to Yoshida and got an answer ... of sorts. Here's how the conversation went:
Eurogamer: One of the questions my readers really want an answer to is whether you're going to block the use of second-hand or 'used' games, because it's a huge concern for them.
Shuhei Yoshida: Do you want us to do that?
Eurogamer: No. I think if you buy something on a disc you have a kind of moral contract with the person you've bought it from that you retain some of that value and you can pass it on. Do you agree?
Shuhei Yoshida: Yes. That's the general expectation by consumers. They purchase physical form, they want to use it everywhere, right? So that's my expectation.
Eurogamer: So if someone buys a PlayStation 4 game, you're not going to stop them reselling it?
Shuhei Yoshida Aaaah. [Asks PR adviser.] So what was our official answer to our internal question? [Consults adviser.] So, used games can play on PS4. How is that?
So take from that what you will. It looks good for used game fans, but there's certainly plenty of wiggle room in the way he phrased his answers.
Winda Benedetti writes about video games for NBC News. You can follow her tweets about games and other things on Twitter here @WindaBenedetti and you can follow her on Google+. Meanwhile, be sure to check out the IN-GAME FACEBOOK PAGE to discuss the day's gaming news and reviews.
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Public release date: 27-Feb-2013
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