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Thursday, November 29, 2012

Nationwide Internet blackout in Syria

BEIRUT (AP) ? Two US-based Internet-monitoring companies say Syria has shut off the Internet nationwide.

Activists in Syria reached Thursday by satellite telephone confirmed the unprecedented blackout, which comes amid intense fighting in the capital, Damascus.

Renesys, a U.S.-based network security firm that studies Internet disruptions, says Syria effectively disappeared from the Internet at 12:26 p.m. local time.

Akamai Technologies Inc., another U.S-based company that distributes content on the Internet, also confirmed a complete outage for Syria.

Syria has partially cut Internet connections during the 20-month uprising against President Bashar Assad but a nationwide shutdown is unprecedented.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/nationwide-internet-blackout-syria-151512176--finance.html

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Cancer and Metabolism 2013

This meeting will cover the field of cancer metabolism and discuss the link between cell signalling and metabolism, as well as metabolic adaptations of cancer cells to autonomous proliferative demands and environmental stresses.

Event website

Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Organisers: Eyal Gottlieb, Karen Vousden and Christian Frezza
Event dates: 24-25 June 2013

Source: http://www.ecco-org.eu/Global/Events/Other-Events/Cancer-and-Metabolism-2013.aspx

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Wednesday, November 28, 2012

How To Be Successful In Internet Marketing

Affiliate promotion is an ever-changing strategy in the online world. Many website owners have benefited from their involvement in web marketing programs. You will find that there is a plethora of online marketing out there because of how fast it has developed and how long it has been around. Regardless of whether or not you are just starting out in internet marketing, or are already doing it successfully, these tips may be useful to you.

Build up trust with your readers. Readers support authors who provide them with quality contact by purchasing through your affiliates.

Knowing your audience will make you successful through internet marketing. Meet the needs of your audience. Find out why they visit your site in the first place. What are your visitors viewing?

Only keep the affiliates that are extremely profitable, to make the most of your affiliate marketing. Make sure to review your affiliates to see their performance. Taking out the least effective affiliate partners makes room for better ones.

TIP! Understand that simply reading good tips does nothing for you; rather you should select a few to act on. Even after all the time you?ve invested, without compensation, you still run the risk of not turning a profit.

Don?t become complacent just because your affiliate site is highly successful. It is still important to carefully research new partners. The new ones may hold your future success. You need to be sure you can market the product easily and without problems.

Affiliate Programs

Joining several different affiliate programs that share one target customer base can be a way to get better results out of your web marketing campaign. Implementing several affiliate programs that are related gives your target audience a greater selection of products to choose from.

Banner ads can be used creatively to encourage more users to visit your webpage. Include an interesting trivia question in the ad and entice users to visit your website to find the answer. You will have people who will just have to click through on that banner advertisement to find the answer. If someone answers correctly, give them a freebie.

TIP! Do everything you can to make your readers trust you. If the readers really like what you produce, they will uphold you by finding referral links and following them should they want to buy the product still.

You should focus on using positive, assertive language in the content that you create for your marketing program. Wording that has negative connotations (for example empty.

If you live in California and had an affiliate program that was suspended, you can now replace those links on your website. Amazon is again able to participate in the program in California after the law that resulted in the dropping of clients changed. Be certain to do so if you were impacted by the developments.

Asses the products you might link to and be sure they are the right fit for what you trying to accomplish. It may take you a while to learn the best way to arrange your site?s affiliate links, but once you?ve struck upon a successful formula, your profits will rise accordingly.

In order to increase your sales volume, consider creating a special website solely for affiliates. If you put pride and effort into your affiliate promotions, you?ll have no trouble finding good partners. Affiliates who are unaware about your product can be attracted by using SEO in the proper manner.

TIP! Before you sign up with an affiliate, get confirmation that you will get a commission for all sales that you generate regardless of how the purchases were made. Does your affiliate enable tracking of telephone orders, mail orders or faxed in orders? You must be sure to be compensated appropriately for your efforts.

Finding the affiliate advertisements that work most effectively for your audience will take time. Some people will click on glitzy ads, while others want something a bit more subtle. When creating your ads, be sure to remember who is going to be seeing them.

Try writing an ad out on paper, then scan it into the computer as an image file. Upload the image to your website. Personal touches are welcomed by consumers. They increase business and make your site feel ?real?, appealing to a diverse audience. If you do not have good handwriting, ask a friend or a family member to help you design your ad.

Do not allow yourself or your partners in internet marketing to take advantage of that fact. In the best case, it irritates your customers. In a worst case scenario, cookie stuffing can spread a nasty virus and lose you your whole customer base.

Affiliate marketers have to be honest about their business. If you are endorsing a product that you are profiting from, let the audience know and don?t attempt to mislead their choices. When visitors feel that you are dishonest about the relationship you have with your retailers, they may bypass your site, purchasing the product they desire directly from the merchant.

TIP! Find a affiliate that is always putting out new items. You are more likely to earn repeat business when you use reputable companies that create a multitude of products which are interesting to your consumers.

Google Plus

Build your followers on Google Plus to get a head start on the competition. Link your Google Plus information to your other social media sites, and add a Google Plus icon next to your other links. Great content will get you followers!

Employing online marketing strategies can enable you to generate more online sales. Affiliates can drive visitors to your site, more than any other technique. When evaluating an affiliate program, check to see how much money you get per referral, as well as the reputation and design of the vendor?s site.

Tell your readers right from the start that you receive a commission from the your affiliate link sales. Your readers aren?t stupid; they?ll recognize affiliate marketing links when they see them, and pretending you?re not doing it will just make you seem dishonest. If you are honest you are more apt to get visitors that will come back to you.

TIP! Use a multitude of mediums when promoting your products. Lots of people prefer the convenience of online shopping.

Constant communication between you and your affiliates can build a solid working relationship. Building relationships through communication is an important part of ensuring continued profitability. Lucrative affiliate partnerships are invaluable, and therefore it makes sense to do everything possible to keep them happy.

Once you have generated a good amount of sales as an affiliate promoter, consider asking for a higher commission percentage from the affiliate program you belong to. If you are a star performer and convert lots of customers, the company may be very willing to pay you more to keep you happy.

Affiliate Promotion

Use the power of stealth links. Methods exist that permit you to place affiliate links into your content in an inconspicuous way. If you do this, make sure your readers understand what?s going on. Inform your site visitors what will happen if they click on a link.

TIP! Use reviews from individuals that have tried these products and make sure you use shots of the product. You are more like to sell a product to an interested buyer if you provide detailed information on the products you sell.

Be upfront about your use of affiliate promotion, and observe the impact it has on the behavior of your audience. Being upfront and truthful regarding your affiliate promotion is the best approach. If your visitors see that you are using affiliate marketing in a positive way, they will mostly respond in a positive way as well.

You will be a more prosperous affiliate when you learn proper marketing techniques. There are many people that will use the first free program that they find. Some free methods are very good; however, do your homework to find out which ones really work well before you waste a lot of time and energy.

Do not be tricked into using another person?s tracking program. This fiasco can be avoided by simply using a reliable tracking system.

One way for affiliate marketers to see success is by creating a contest or giveaway. This is a great way to get your visitors to return.

TIP! Avoid depending on just a handful of affiliate partners to support your entire marketing campaign. Use a wide range of vendors, and offer a diversity of products, as well.

You should always try and connect with affiliates that sell products that you are interested in selling. Using a variety of affiliate networks increases your chance of earning more income. Thoroughly investigate the reputation and past performance of any affiliate before signing on the dotted line.

You can make a lot of money with internet marketing. It is just like any other marketing venture in the sense that research, education, and knowledge are the keys to developing a proficient grasp of the inner workings of the business and maximizing your profit potential.

Source: http://www.monopolizingmarketing.com/459/how-to-be-successful-in-internet-marketing/

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British company claims biggest engine advance since the jet

By Chris Wickham

LONDON | Wed Nov 28, 2012 11:39am EST

LONDON (Reuters) - A small British company with a dream of building a re-usable space plane has won an important endorsement from the European Space Agency (ESA) after completing key tests on its novel engine technology.

Reaction Engines Ltd believes its Sabre engine, which would operate like a jet engine in the atmosphere and a rocket in space, could displace rockets for space access and transform air travel by bringing any destination on Earth to no more than four hours away.

That ambition was given a boost on Wednesday by ESA, which has acted as an independent auditor on the Sabre test program.

"ESA are satisfied that the tests demonstrate the technology required for the Sabre engine development," the agency's head of propulsion engineering Mark Ford told a news conference.

"One of the major obstacles to a re-usable vehicle has been removed," he said. "The gateway is now open to move beyond the jet age."

The space plane, dubbed Skylon, only exists on paper. What the company has right now is a remarkable heat exchanger that is able to cool air sucked into the engine at high speed from 1,000 degrees Celsius to minus 150 degrees in one hundredth of a second.

This core piece of technology solves one of the constraints that limit jet engines to a top speed of about 2.5 times the speed of sound, which Reaction Engines believes it could double.

SHROUDED IN SECRECY

With the Sabre engine in jet mode, the air has to be compressed before being injected into the engine's combustion chambers. Without pre-cooling, the heat generated by compression would make the air hot enough to melt the engine.

The challenge for the engineers was to find a way to cool the air quickly without frost forming on the heat exchanger, which would clog it up and stop it working.

Using a nest of fine pipes that resemble a large wire coil, the engineers have managed to get round this fatal problem that would normally follow from such rapid cooling of the moisture in atmospheric air.

They are tight-lipped on exactly how they managed to do it.

"We are not going to tell you how this works," said the company's chief designer Richard Varvill, who started his career at the military engine division of Rolls-Royce. "It is our most closely guarded secret."

The company has deliberately avoided filing patents on its heat exchanger technology to avoid details of how it works - particularly the method for preventing the build-up of frost - becoming public.

The Sabre engine could take a plane to five times the speed of sound and an altitude of 25 km, about 20 percent of the speed and altitude needed to reach orbit. For space access, the engines would then switch to rocket mode to do the remaining 80 percent.

IT COULD EVEN MAKE THE TEA

Reaction Engines believes Sabre is the only engine of its kind in development and the company now needs to raise about 250 million pounds ($400 million) to fund the next three-year development phase in which it plans to build a small-scale version of the complete engine.

Chief executive Tim Hayter believes the company could have an operational engine ready for sale within 10 years if it can raise the development funding.

The company reckons the engine technology could win a healthy chunk of four key markets together worth $112 billion a year, including space access, hypersonic air travel, and modified jet engines that use the heat exchanger to save fuel.

The fourth market is unrelated to aerospace. Reaction Engines believes the technology could also be used to raise the efficiency of so-called multistage flash desalination plants by 15 percent. These plants, largely in the Middle East, use heat exchangers to distil water by flash heating sea water into steam in multiple stages.

The firm has so far received 90 percent of its funding from private sources, mainly rich individuals including chairman Nigel McNair Scott, the former mining industry executive who also chairs property developer Helical Bar.

Chief executive Tim Hayter told Reuters he would welcome government investment in the company, mainly because of the credibility that would add to the project.

But the focus will be on raising the majority of the 250 million pounds it needs now from a mix of institutional investors, high net worth individuals and possibly potential partners in the aerospace industry.

STANDING START

Sabre produces thrust by burning hydrogen and oxygen, but inside the atmosphere it would take that oxygen from the air, reducing the amount it would have to carry in fuel tanks for rocket mode, cutting weight and allowing Skylon to go into orbit in one stage.

Scramjets on test vehicles like the U.S. Air Force Waverider also use atmospheric air to create thrust but they have to be accelerated to their operating speed by normal jet engines or rockets before they kick in. The Sabre engine can operate from a standing start.

If the developers are successful, Sabre would be the first engine in history to send a vehicle into space without using disposable, multi-stage rockets.

Skylon is years away, but in the meantime the technology is attracting interest from the global aerospace industry and governments because it effectively doubles the technical limits of current jet engines and could cut the cost of space access.

The heat exchanger technology could also be incorporated into a new jet engine design that could cut 5 to 10 percent - or $10-20 billion - off airline fuel bills.

That would be significant in an industry where incremental efficiency gains of one percent or so, from improvements in wing design for instance, are big news.

Source: http://feeds.reuters.com/~r/reuters/scienceNews/~3/RaOlB-NJ5tM/us-science-spaceplane-idUSBRE8AR0V220121128

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Researchers synthesize new kind of silk fiber, and use music to fine-tune material's properties

ScienceDaily (Nov. 28, 2012) ? Pound for pound, spider silk is one of the strongest materials known: Research by MIT's Markus Buehler has helped explain that this strength arises from silk's unusual hierarchical arrangement of protein building blocks.

Now Buehler -- together with David Kaplan of Tufts University and Joyce Wong of Boston University -- has synthesized new variants on silk's natural structure, and found a method for making further improvements in the synthetic material.

And an ear for music, it turns out, might be a key to making those structural improvements.

The work stems from a collaboration of civil and environmental engineers, mathematicians, biomedical engineers and musical composers.?

"We're trying to approach making materials in a different way," Buehler explains, "starting from the building blocks" -- in this case, the protein molecules that form the structure of silk. "It's very hard to do this; proteins are very complex."

Other groups have tried to construct such protein-based fibers using a trial-and-error approach, Buehler says. But this team has approached the problem systematically, starting with computer modeling of the underlying structures that give the natural silk its unusual combination of strength, flexibility and stretchiness.

Buehler's previous research has determined that fibers with a particular structure -- highly ordered, layered protein structures alternating with densely packed, tangled clumps of proteins (ABABAB) -- help to give silk its exceptional properties. For this initial attempt at synthesizing a new material, the team chose to look instead at patterns in which one of the structures occurred in triplets (AAAB and BBBA).

Making such structures is no simple task. Kaplan, a chemical and biomedical engineer, modified silk-producing genes to produce these new sequences of proteins. Then Wong, a bioengineer and materials scientist, created a microfluidic device that mimicked the spider's silk-spinning organ, which is called a spinneret.

Even after the detailed computer modeling that went into it, the outcome came as a bit of a surprise, Buehler says. One of the new materials produced very strong protein molecules -- but these did not stick together as a thread. The other produced weaker protein molecules that adhered well and formed a good thread. "This taught us that it's not sufficient to consider the properties of the protein molecules alone," he says. "Rather, [one must] think about how they can combine to form a well-connected network at a larger scale."

The results are reported in a paper published in the journal Nano Today.

The team is now producing several more variants of the material to further improve and test its properties. But one wrinkle in their process may provide a significant advantage in figuring out which materials will be useful and which ones won't -- and perhaps even which might be more advantageous for specific uses. That new and highly unusual wrinkle is music.

The different levels of silk's structure, Buehler says, are analogous to the hierarchical elements that make up a musical composition -- including pitch, range, dynamics and tempo. The team enlisted the help of composer John McDonald, a professor of music at Tufts, and MIT postdoc David Spivak, a mathematician who specializes in a field called category theory. Together, using analytical tools derived from category theory to describe the protein structures, the team figured out how to translate the details of the artificial silk's structure into musical compositions.

The differences were quite distinct: The strong but useless protein molecules translated into music that was aggressive and harsh, Buehler says, while the ones that formed usable fibers sound much softer and more fluid.

Buehler hopes this can be taken a step further, using the musical compositions to predict how well new variations of the material might perform. "We're looking for radically new ways of designing materials," he says.

Combining materials modeling with mathematical and musical tools, Buehler says, could provide a much faster way of designing new biosynthesized materials, replacing the trial-and-error approach that prevails today. Genetically engineering organisms to produce materials is a long, painstaking process, he says, but this work "has taught us a new approach, a fundamental lesson" in combining experiment, theory and simulation to speed up the discovery process.

Materials produced this way -- which can be done under environmentally benign, room-temperature conditions -- could lead to new building blocks for tissue engineering or other uses, Buehler says: scaffolds for replacement organs, skin, blood vessels, or even new materials for use in civil engineering.

Elliott Schwartz, professor emeritus of music at Bowdoin College, says: "For centuries, mathematics, logic and science have provided important models for musical structures, processes, and our understanding of sonic materials. The present research may well lead to one more important chapter in this ongoing story of mutual interaction."

It may be that the complex structures of music can reveal the underlying complex structures of biomaterials found in nature, Buehler says. "There might be an underlying structural expression in music that tells us more about the proteins that make up our bodies. After all, our organs -- including the brain -- are made from these building blocks, and humans' expression of music may inadvertently include more information that we are aware of."

"Nobody has tapped into this," he says, adding that with the breadth of his multidisciplinary team, "We could do this -- making better bio-inspired materials by using music, and using music to better understand biology."

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:

Joyce Y. Wong, John McDonald, Micki Taylor-Pinney, David I. Spivak, David L. Kaplan, Markus J. Buehler. Materials by design: Merging proteins and music. Nano Today, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.nantod.2012.09.001

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

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/biochemistry/~3/JH39QKo8_v8/121128112157.htm

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Tuesday, November 27, 2012

BlackBerry Patagonia 9620 leaks, says hola Nextel

BlackBerry 10 may be just around the bend, but it seems that's not going to stop RIM from launching a new handset. A leaked document posted by Crackberry has revealed the specs of the QWERTY-toting BlackBerry Patagonia 9620 -- there's BB OS 7.1 running the show with a 1.2GHz Qualcomm MSM8655 processor under the hood, mated with 768MB RAM. Par for the course, the display is a 2.44-inch, 480 x 360 affair, and you can also find 2GB of storage augmentable via microSD, a 5-megapixel rear snapper, GPS, WiFi and PTT support along for the ride -- if the source is to be believed. Info on pricing and the exact release date of the apparently budget smartphone is MIA as yet, but Nextel Mexico has it pegged for a December outing. You can sign up for a release notification if you're covered and can't curb your buying itch before BB10's entry-level offerings land.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, RIM