Marc Toberoff, a tightly wound man with thinning hair and an expansive grin, is an attorney who specializes in suing movie studios on behalf of artists and writers. For 11 years he has represented the heirs of the late Jerome Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, in a campaign to regain the rights to the original superhero from Warner Bros.
WASHINGTON -- The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on Friday made public what it calls the most extensive collection of records on offshore accounts in history, encouraging sleuths to ferret out possible tax evasion.
The online portal, called the Offshore Leaks Database, contains hundreds of thousands of records showing corporations set up in so-called "tax-haven" countries, gleaned from the contents of about 2.5 million emails and financial documents that ICIJ said it received in early 2012. Over the past year, the data have been used by journalists around the world to detail alleged tax evasion by billionaires, oligarchs, emirs, princes and multinational corporations on nearly every continent.
Publication of the documents may heighten scrutiny of some of the world's largest financial institutions and their clients. Governments worldwide have renewed efforts to stamp out tax avoidance as fiscal authorities, including those from Europe and the United States, confront record budget deficits and slow-growth economies.
Click here to search the Offshore Leaks Database.
A 2012 report by the Tax Justice Network (TJN) found that untaxed wealth invested in offshore tax havens ran between $28 and $32 trillion dollars, equal to two years? worth of U.S. economic output. The report estimated that if the money were to have been invested in home countries, even at low rates of return, it could have generated hundreds of billions of dollars per year in tax revenue.
The TJN report also described the secrecy enveloping the world of offshore tax havens as a "subterranean system that ? is the economic equivalent of an astrophysical black hole."
The new ICIJ OffShore Leak Database provides a small window into that world for the public to peruse. The database contains documents covering 30 years from the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Singapore, Hong Kong, Samoa, Seychelles, Mauritius, Labuan and Malaysia. According to ICIJ, the information came from a leak of documents from two offshore service companies, Singapore-based Portcullis TrustNet and British Virgin Islands-based Commonwealth Trust Limited (CTL).
The documents have been used to unearth stories, starting in April 2013, about tax evasion by politicians in Canada, France, Malaysia, Mongolia, Pakistan and the Philippines; how offshore companies are used to hide the foreign investors in London's real estate market; the use of tax havens to buy and sell on the fine art market; the involvement of companies like Deutsche Bank to help create offshore entities; arms trading in war zones; and how the world's ultra-rich hide their money from taxation.
In making the database freely available, ICIJ hopes to engage the public in its ongoing work to expose the use of offshore tax havens by international corporations and wealthy individuals. Readers are encouraged to contact journalists if they come across promising leads.
Tax havens are nations that offer favorable tax treatment to assets held within their boundaries, often offering zero or near-zero tax rates with very few questions asked. Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Dubai and the micro-state of Jersey, off the coast of England, are just a few of the countries that host corporate entities and trusts created by the world's wealthy and powerful to shield their money from taxes in their home-country.
While the transactions listed in the database likely are legal in countries considered to be tax havens, use of offshore accounts by a corporation or individual often are decried as tax evasion in home countries, regardless of the circumstances.
In some cases, authorities have targeted offshore accounts when accusing banks of facilitating illegal tax evasion.
UBS, Switzerland?s largest bank, in 2009 avoided criminal prosecution by entering into a deferred-prosecution agreement and paying $780 million to settle allegations it defrauded the U.S. government. The bank admitted it participated in a scheme to defraud the federal government by "actively assisting or otherwise facilitating" tax evasion by Americans from 2000 to 2007.
Peter Kurer, then-chairman of UBS, said at the time: "UBS sincerely regrets the compliance failures in its U.S. cross-border business that have been identified by the various government investigations in Switzerland and the U.S., as well as our own internal review. We accept full responsibility for these improper activities."
Thousands of wealthy U.S. customers eventually turned themselves in. The Swiss government also turned over the identities of U.S. account holders to U.S. officials.
In 2010, Deutsche Bank, Germany?s largest lender, agreed to pay $554 million to U.S. authorities to settle criminal accusations that it helped create fraudulent tax shelters for clients from 1996 to 2002 that deprived the U.S. Treasury of revenue. The bank admitted wrongdoing and entered into a non-prosecution agreement.
At the time, the bank said it was ?pleased that this investigation, which concerned transactions that ceased more than eight years ago, has come to a resolution.?
?Since 2002, the bank has significantly strengthened its policies and procedures as part of an ongoing effort to ensure strict adherence to the law and the highest standards of ethical conduct,? it added.
In response to growing allegations of evasion, the U.S. in 2010 enacted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) to enlist financial institutions in the government?s fight to recoup lost tax revenues.
FATCA forces foreign banks to report information on overseas accounts held by U.S. individuals and businesses, and foreign corporations in which U.S. taxpayers hold a substantial ownership stake.
Other nations are now following suit. The eight leading industrialized nations that comprise the Group of Eight (G8) are due to discuss efforts to combat tax dodging at their coming meeting June 17-18 in Northern Ireland.
?The upcoming G8 summit is poised to deliver a hammer blow to offshore corporate tax avoidance," Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said.
?The G8 summit should take advantage of the emerging international consensus that we can no longer allow profitable multinational corporations to play one country off another, ducking corporate taxes and leaving other taxpayers to pick up the slack,? he added.
Banks that structure and facilitate offshore corporate entities designed to minimize tax payments may feel the brunt of the pressure.
A review by The Huffington Post of the ICIJ database, which comprises only a portion of the total data trove in the leak, revealed that UBS was linked to more than 3,000 offshore accounts. It allegedly served as a "master client? -- defined by the ICIJ as "an intermediary or go-between who helps a client set up an offshore entity? -- or as a "nominee shareholder," a shareholder who is not the real owner or beneficiary of the corporation.
The bank declined to comment.
The database shows Deutsche Bank linked to more than 1,000 offshore accounts. A spokesman declined to comment.
Though not all of the offshore accounts listed in the database are currently active -- many are listed as defunct or dissolved -- the data covers three decades of offshore accounts, potentially providing tax authorities with a road map to discover tax cheats.
A slew of ICIJ-inspired reporting in April had dramatic effects.
Herbert Stepic, Raiffeisen Bank International chief executive, resigned his post after news reports alleged he had numerous offshore accounts.
A month later, police in South Korea raided the home of business titan Lee Jay-Hyun, CJ Group chairman and a billionaire grandson of Samsung founder Lee Byung-Chul, as part of a tax evasion probe.
The revelations unearthed by ICIJ and journalists around the world also prompted stern responses from a number of European leaders, and in some cases helped lead to calls for changes in laws to promote banking transparency and prevent tax evasion.
In May, British Prime Minister David Cameron said at a White House press conference that ?we need to know who really owns a company, who profits from it, whether taxes are paid.?
Algirdas ?emeta, the European commissioner for taxation, said: ?Recent developments, fueled by the outcome of the Offshore Leaks, confirms the urgency for more and better action against tax evasion."
?emeta further called for European nations operating as tax havens, including Luxembourg and Monaco, as well as protectorates controlled by European countries like the British Virgin Islands, to adopt the European Union's standard of banking transparency.
After ?emeta's statements, Luxembourg announced that it would end secret banking for investments by European nationals. Britain's overseas territories also announced that they would begin sharing banking information with the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.
In Washington, ongoing congressional hearings on American companies' use of offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes appeared to reach an apex in May, when Apple CEO Tim Cook testified before Levin?s Senate investigative subcommittee on the company?s aggressive use of strategies allegedly for the sole purpose of minimizing taxes.
?We pay all the taxes we owe, every single dollar. We not only comply with the laws, but we comply with the spirit of the laws,? Cook said.
LONDON (Reuters) - Britons' real net incomes fell to their lowest level in a decade in the year ending in March 2012, annual data from the country's labour ministry showed on Wednesday.
Average net incomes including social benefits fell 3 percent during the 2011/12 tax year to their lowest level since 2001/02 on an inflation-adjusted basis.
"Income fell as earnings and benefit income grew more slowly than the cost of living as measured by RPI (retail price inflation)," the Department for Work and Pensions said.
The fall in living standards is likely to have continued into the current tax year, as wages have continued to grow at a slower pace than inflation, and many benefits have been raised by less than the rate of inflation.
The proportion of Britons in absolute poverty - defined as a weekly income of under 251 pounds - rose by one percentage point to 17 percent in 2011/12.
However the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a leading economic think tank, said the figures may be slightly less bleak than at first glance as the Office for National Statistics has said RPI overstates inflation due to outdated statistical methods.
Looking at changes in the cost of living as measured by the modernised RPIJ index, also produced by the ONS, median net incomes are the lowest since 2004-05, the IFS said.
(Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Catherine Evans)
GAINESVILLE, Fla. ? The murder trial of George Zimmerman in the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin is scheduled to begin today in Sanford, Fla. Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder for last year?s shooting death of the unarmed African-American teenager. Zimmerman?s defense team has argued that their client was acting in self-defense when the teenager was shot. The University of Florida Levin College of Law has faculty who can address the sometimes-difficult legal issues surrounding this case, including criminal law, self-defense, and race and race relations.
University of Florida Levin College of Law experts available
Bob Dekle, Senior Legal Skills Professor; Director, Criminal Prosecution Clinic
Cell: 386-365-4611
Email: dekle@law.ufl.edu
Areas of expertise include issues related to criminal law, self-defense, evidence, police tactics and interrogation.
Michelle Jacobs, Professor of Law
Office: 352-273-0940
Email: jacobsm@law.ufl.edu
Areas of expertise include issues related to critical race theory and criminal law.
Kenneth Nunn, Professor of Law; Associate Director, Center on Children and Families
Office: 352-273-0910
Email: nunn@law.ufl.edu
Areas of expertise include criminal law, criminal procedure and race and race relations.
Katheryn Russell-Brown, Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law; Director, UF Levin Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations
Office: 352-273-0912
Email: russellbrownk@law.ufl.edu
Areas of expertise include issues related to race and crime, criminal law.
Jennifer Zedalis, Senior Legal Skills Professor; Director, Trial Practice Team
Office: 352-273-0814
Email: zedalis@law.ufl.edu
Areas of expertise include issues related to criminal law and trial practice.
lawlevin college of lawtrayvon martinUFUF college of lawUniversity of Florida
KABUL (Reuters) - Insurgents launched a pre-dawn attack on Afghanistan's main international airport in the capital, Kabul, on Monday, police said, with explosions and gunfire heard coming from an area that also houses major foreign military bases.
There were no immediate reports of casualties and there was also no early claim of responsibility for the attack.
Attacks on the heavily guarded airport, used by civilians and the military, are relatively rare and would represent an ambitious target for insurgents, with recent assaults staged against less well-protected targets.
The airport, by comparison, is home to a major operational base for NATO-led forces that have been fighting Taliban and other insurgents for 12 years and is bristling with soldiers and police, guard towers and several lines of security checkpoints.
Police said the attack appeared to be centered on the military side of the airport, to the west of the civilian terminal.
"Gunmen have entered a house under construction in the west of Kabul airport and are fighting with security forces," Kabul police spokesman Hashmatullah Stanekzai said.
"Their target is Kabul airport and all roads to it are sealed," he said.
A spokesman for the Afghan Air Force, which is also based at the facility, also said the airport was the target of the attack. There are also a number of logistics bases in the area.
The attack began at about 4.30 a.m. (2400 GMT). Embassies in the diplomatic zone in the centre of Kabul were quickly locked down and emergency alarms were heard ringing loudly from the British embassy.
Reuters witnesses reported hearing explosions at the airport, with reports of rocket-propelled grenades and gunfire. Blasts still being heard an hour after the attack was launched.
Concerns are mounting over how the 352,000-strong Afghan security forces will cope with an intensifying insurgency once most foreign combat troops leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
The airport attack came soon after assaults on the International Organisation for Migration in Kabul and against the International Committee of the Red Cross in the eastern city of Jalalabad.
Four people were killed and three wounded in those attacks.
In April 2011, a rogue Afghan air force officer shot and killed eight U.S. servicemen and a civilian contractor in the worst attack at the airport since the war began.
(Additional reporting by Dylan Welch and Omar Sobhani; Writing by Dylan Welch; Editing by Paul Tait)
Rockford Fire responded to a structure fire at 121 Washington Street in the early morning hours Sunday.? Upon arrival they found a detached garage behind the home fully engulfed.? Firefighters took control of the fire within ten minutes of being there.
In total, the fire resulted in $25,000 in damage including a car that was in the garage.? There were no injuries to residents or firefighters.?
An investigation was completed but the cause of the fire is unknown at this time.
Reduced brain volume in kids with low birth-weight tied to academic strugglesPublic release date: 10-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Barlow jebarlow@uoregon.edu 541-346-3481 University of Oregon
EUGENE, Ore. -- (June 10, 2013) -- An analysis of recent data from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 97 adolescents who were part of study begun with very low birth weight babies born in 1982-1986 in a Cleveland neonatal intensive care unit has tied smaller brain volumes to poor academic achievement.
More than half of the babies that weighed less than 1.66 pounds and more than 30 percent of those less than 3.31 pounds at birth later had academic deficits. (Less than 1.66 pounds is considered extremely low birth weight; less than 3.31 pounds is labeled very low birth weight.) Lower birth weight was associated to smaller brain volumes in some of these children, and smaller brain volume, in turn, was tied to academic deficits.
Researchers also found that 65.6 percent of very low birth weight and 41.2 percent of extremely preterm children had experienced academic achievement similar to normal weight peers.
The research team -- led by Caron A.C. Clark, a scientist in the Department of Psychology and Child and Family Center at the University of Oregon -- detected an overall reduced volume of mid-brain structures, the caudate and corpus callosum, which are involved in connectivity, executive attention and motor control.
The findings, based a logistic regression analyses of the MRIs done approximately five years ago, were published in the May issue of the journal Neuropsychology. The longitudinal study originally was launched in the 1980s with a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (National Institutes of Health, grant HD 26554) to H. Gerry Taylor of Case Western University, who was the senior author and principal investigator on the new paper.
"Our new study shows that pre-term births do not necessarily mean academic difficulties are ahead," Clark said. "We had this group of children that did have academic difficulties, but there were a lot of kids in this data set who didn't and, in fact, displayed the same trajectories as their normal birth-weight peers."
Academic progress of the 201 original participants had been assessed early in their school years, again four years later and then annually until they were almost 17 years old. "We had the opportunity to explore this very rich data set," Clark said. "There are very few studies that follow this population of children over time, where their trajectories of growth at school are tracked. We were interested in seeing how development unfolds over time."
The findings, Clark added, provide new insights but also raise questions such as why some low-birth-weight babies develop normally and others do not? "It is very difficult to pick up which kids will need the most intensive interventions really early, which we know can be really important."
The findings also provide a snapshot of children of very low birth weights who were born in NICU 30 years ago. Since then, technologies and care have improved, she said, meaning that underweight babies born prematurely today might have an advantage over those followed in the study. However, she added, improving NICUs also are allowing yet smaller babies to survive.
Clark now is exploring these findings for early warning clues that might help drive informed interventions. "Pre-term birth does mean that you are much more likely to experience brain abnormalities that seem to put you at risk for these outcomes," she said. "They seem to be a pretty strong predictor of poor cognitive development as children age. We really need to find ways to prevent these brain abnormalities and subsequent academic difficulties in these kids who are born so small."
###
Co-authors were Kimberly Andrews Espy, professor of psychology and vice president for research and innovation, and dean of the graduate school at the UO; Hua Fang of the University of Massachusetts Medical School; Pauline A. Filipek and Jenifer Juranek, both of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston; and Barbara Bangert, Maureen Hack and Taylor, all of Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Case Medical Center, in Cleveland.
About the University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is among the 108 institutions chosen from 4,633 U.S. universities for top-tier designation of "Very High Research Activity" in the 2010 Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The UO also is one of two Pacific Northwest members of the Association of American Universities.
Source: Caron "Carrie" Clark, assistant research professor of psychology, 541-346-8079, carrie4@uoregon.edu
Links:
AUDIO: Clark on primary message of study (26 seconds): http://bit.ly/11ifpsD
Department of Psychology: http://psychweb.uoregon.edu/
Child and Family Center: http://cfc.uoregon.edu/index.htm
Follow UO Science on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/UniversityOfOregonScience
UO Science on Twitter: http://twitter.com/UO_Research
More UO Science/Research News: http://uoresearch.uoregon.edu
Note: The University of Oregon is equipped with an on-campus television studio with a point-of-origin Vyvx connection, which provides broadcast-quality video to networks worldwide via fiber optic network. In addition, there is video access to satellite uplink, and audio access to an ISDN codec for broadcast-quality radio interviews.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Reduced brain volume in kids with low birth-weight tied to academic strugglesPublic release date: 10-Jun-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Barlow jebarlow@uoregon.edu 541-346-3481 University of Oregon
EUGENE, Ore. -- (June 10, 2013) -- An analysis of recent data from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 97 adolescents who were part of study begun with very low birth weight babies born in 1982-1986 in a Cleveland neonatal intensive care unit has tied smaller brain volumes to poor academic achievement.
More than half of the babies that weighed less than 1.66 pounds and more than 30 percent of those less than 3.31 pounds at birth later had academic deficits. (Less than 1.66 pounds is considered extremely low birth weight; less than 3.31 pounds is labeled very low birth weight.) Lower birth weight was associated to smaller brain volumes in some of these children, and smaller brain volume, in turn, was tied to academic deficits.
Researchers also found that 65.6 percent of very low birth weight and 41.2 percent of extremely preterm children had experienced academic achievement similar to normal weight peers.
The research team -- led by Caron A.C. Clark, a scientist in the Department of Psychology and Child and Family Center at the University of Oregon -- detected an overall reduced volume of mid-brain structures, the caudate and corpus callosum, which are involved in connectivity, executive attention and motor control.
The findings, based a logistic regression analyses of the MRIs done approximately five years ago, were published in the May issue of the journal Neuropsychology. The longitudinal study originally was launched in the 1980s with a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (National Institutes of Health, grant HD 26554) to H. Gerry Taylor of Case Western University, who was the senior author and principal investigator on the new paper.
"Our new study shows that pre-term births do not necessarily mean academic difficulties are ahead," Clark said. "We had this group of children that did have academic difficulties, but there were a lot of kids in this data set who didn't and, in fact, displayed the same trajectories as their normal birth-weight peers."
Academic progress of the 201 original participants had been assessed early in their school years, again four years later and then annually until they were almost 17 years old. "We had the opportunity to explore this very rich data set," Clark said. "There are very few studies that follow this population of children over time, where their trajectories of growth at school are tracked. We were interested in seeing how development unfolds over time."
The findings, Clark added, provide new insights but also raise questions such as why some low-birth-weight babies develop normally and others do not? "It is very difficult to pick up which kids will need the most intensive interventions really early, which we know can be really important."
The findings also provide a snapshot of children of very low birth weights who were born in NICU 30 years ago. Since then, technologies and care have improved, she said, meaning that underweight babies born prematurely today might have an advantage over those followed in the study. However, she added, improving NICUs also are allowing yet smaller babies to survive.
Clark now is exploring these findings for early warning clues that might help drive informed interventions. "Pre-term birth does mean that you are much more likely to experience brain abnormalities that seem to put you at risk for these outcomes," she said. "They seem to be a pretty strong predictor of poor cognitive development as children age. We really need to find ways to prevent these brain abnormalities and subsequent academic difficulties in these kids who are born so small."
###
Co-authors were Kimberly Andrews Espy, professor of psychology and vice president for research and innovation, and dean of the graduate school at the UO; Hua Fang of the University of Massachusetts Medical School; Pauline A. Filipek and Jenifer Juranek, both of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston; and Barbara Bangert, Maureen Hack and Taylor, all of Case Western Reserve University and University Hospitals Case Medical Center, in Cleveland.
About the University of Oregon
The University of Oregon is among the 108 institutions chosen from 4,633 U.S. universities for top-tier designation of "Very High Research Activity" in the 2010 Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The UO also is one of two Pacific Northwest members of the Association of American Universities.
Source: Caron "Carrie" Clark, assistant research professor of psychology, 541-346-8079, carrie4@uoregon.edu
Links:
AUDIO: Clark on primary message of study (26 seconds): http://bit.ly/11ifpsD
Department of Psychology: http://psychweb.uoregon.edu/
Child and Family Center: http://cfc.uoregon.edu/index.htm
Follow UO Science on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/UniversityOfOregonScience
UO Science on Twitter: http://twitter.com/UO_Research
More UO Science/Research News: http://uoresearch.uoregon.edu
Note: The University of Oregon is equipped with an on-campus television studio with a point-of-origin Vyvx connection, which provides broadcast-quality video to networks worldwide via fiber optic network. In addition, there is video access to satellite uplink, and audio access to an ISDN codec for broadcast-quality radio interviews.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
The folks behind such games as the original Max Payne and Alan Wake are crafting a next-gen experience for the Xbox One in Quantum Break. The tease video we saw showed a young girl, in real life, with her parents -- she apparently sees through time, and is able to convey what she sees. She places a hand on her mother and shows her a massive war ship crashing through a bridge. We're then taken to an office building lobby being shot up. It's... not clear at all what all this has to do with anything, but there you have it. We'll have more details as soon as possible.
One of the most challenging cases that lawyers deal with is an injury case. This caters to getting legal representation from a person who has been injured either physically or psychologically. When this is caused by the negligence of others, consulting a los angeles personal injury attorney works best to check your legal options.
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Olympia Circuits is best known for its Arno board and Arno Shield, which are designed to ease the Arduino learning curve by providing a bevy of pre-wired sensors and controls along with detailed instructions for several DIY projects. The company announced a couple of new products at Maker Faire this past weekend: the Arno Digital RGB Add-On and the SODA HE-1.0 Arduino datalogger. With the former, your Arno simply gains three RGB LEDs, while the latter stands for "Simple, Open Data Acquisition, High Efficiency." It's an Arduino board with screw terminals designed around Atmel's ATmega32u4 that features a real-time clock (RTC) with battery backup, a high-precision ADC and a microSD card slot. The RTC can either wake the entire board or trigger an interrupt at set intervals, which makes the board very power efficient when used in the field. Olympia Circuits will be updating its website with more info shortly (including availability and pricing). Until then, don't miss our hands-on gallery below.
May 19, 2013 ? One of the basic principles of nanotechnology is that when you make things extremely small -- one nanometer is about five atoms wide, 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair -- they are going to become more perfect.
"Perfect in the sense that their arrangement of atoms in the real world will become more like an idealized model," says University of Vermont engineer Frederic Sansoz, "with smaller crystals -- in for example, gold or copper -- it's easier to have fewer defects in them."
And eliminating the defects at the interface separating two crystals, or grains, has been shown by nanotechnology experts to be a powerful strategy for making materials stronger, more easily molded, and less electrically resistant -- or a host of other qualities sought by designers and manufacturers.
Since 2004, when a seminal paper came out in Science, materials scientists have been excited about one special of arrangement of atoms in metals and other materials called a "coherent twin boundary" or CTB.
Based on theory and experiment, these coherent twin boundaries are often described as "perfect," appearing like a perfectly flat, one-atom-thick plane in computer models and electron microscope images.
Over the last decade, a body of literature has shown these coherent twin boundaries -- found at the nanoscale within the crystalline structure of common metals like gold, silver and copper -- are highly effective at making materials much stronger while maintaining their ability to undergo permanent change in shape without breaking and still allowing easy transmission of electrons -- an important fact for computer manufacturing and other electronics applications.
But new research now shows that coherent twin boundaries are not so perfect after all.
A team of scientists, including Sansoz, a professor in UVM's College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, and colleagues from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere, write in the May 19 edition of Nature Materials that coherent twin boundaries found in copper "are inherently defective."
With a high-resolution electron microscope, using a more powerful technique than has ever been used to examine these boundaries, they found tiny kink-like steps and curvatures in what had previously been observed as perfect.
Even more surprising, these kinks and other defects appear to be the cause of the coherent twin boundary's strength and other desirable qualities.
"Everything we have learned on these materials in the past 10 years will have to be revisited with this new information," Sansoz says
The experiment, led by Morris Wang at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, applied a newly developed mapping technique to study the crystal orientation of CTBs in so-called nanotwinned copper and "boom -- it revealed these defects," says Sansoz.
This real-world discovery conformed to earlier intriguing theoretical findings that Sansoz had been making with "atomistic simulations" on a computer. The lab results sent Sansoz back to his computer models where he introduced the newly discovered "kink" defects into his calculations. Using UVM's Vermont Advanced Computing Center, he theoretically confirmed that the kink defects observed by the Livermore team lead to "rather rich deformation processes at the atomic scale," he says, that do not exist with perfect twin boundaries.
With the computer model, "we found a series of completely new mechanisms," he says, for explaining why coherent twin boundaries simultaneously add strength and yet also allow stretching (what scientists call "tensile ductility") -- properties that are usually mutually exclusive in conventional materials.
"We had no idea such defects existed," says Sansoz. "So much for the perfect twin boundary. We now call them defective twin boundaries."
For several decades, scientists have looked for ways to shrink the size of individual crystalline grains within metals and other materials. Like a series of dykes or walls within the larger structure, the boundaries between grains can slow internal slip and help resist failure. Generally, the more of these boundaries -- the stronger the material.
Originally, scientists believed that coherent twin boundaries in materials were much more reliable and stable than conventional grain boundaries, which are incoherently full of defects. But the new research shows they could both contain similar types of defects despite very different boundary energies.
"Understanding these defective structures is the first step to take full use of these CTBs for strengthening and maintaining the ductility and electrical conductivity of many materials," Morris Wang said. "To understand the behavior and mechanisms of these defects will help our engineering design of these materials for high-strength applications."
For Sansoz, this discovery underlines a deep principle, "There are all manner of defects in nature," he says, "with nanotech, you are trying to control the way they are formed and dispersed in matter, and to understand their impact on properties. The point of this paper is that some defects make a material stronger."
While it was missing the skydiving antics of last year’s event, Google’s I/O keynote last week wasn’t short on product launches. In between the splashy updates to Google Maps, Search, Android and everything else Google announced, the company also briefly talked about Web Components for a few minutes. While Google’s Sundar Pichai noted that it’s still early days for this technology, he also said he believes that “the vision for it is clear” and that it will allow developers to build “elegant user interfaces that work across all form factors.” Web Components are clearly a topic that’s close to the heart of a number of Chrome developers. Many of them, for example, cited it as one of the Chrome features they are most excited about at a fireside chat later in the week. A number of Google engineers are also working on Project Polymer, which aims to write a web application framework that’s built upon the idea of Web Components and will allow developers to use the ideas behind Web Components on browsers that don’t even feature all of the necessary technologies yet. The fact that it made an appearance during the keynote, right next to WebGL and other more established web development techniques, makes it pretty obvious that this is a technology that Google believes has the potential to change how developers write web apps going forward. So what is this all about? Essentially, Web Components give developers an easier way to create web sites and recyclable widgets on these sites with the help of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript they already know. The ideas behind Web Components have been around for a while (and a few years back, Microsoft backed a similar initiative that never got any traction), but even today, this is still a topic that’s pretty foreign to most. Building large, single-page web apps with a smart component models isn’t easy today. Web Components help developer encapsulate they HTML, CSS and JavaScript so it doesn’t interfere with the rest of the page and the page doesn’t interfere with it. It’s worth noting that, for the time being, developers can’t rely on this to work in all browsers. Chrome Canary includes support for Web Components, but it’s hidden behind a number of flags. Mozilla will likely start adding support for it in Firefox soon, too. Most importantly, though, the Polymer project aims to bring the concept to
On sale today, prices start at £399 for 16GB + Wifi
A couple of months after Sony first started taking pre-orders, its Xperia Tablet Z slate is now available to buy in the UK. Prices start at £399 for 16GB of storage and Wifi connectivity (black only), or you can opt for 32GB with Wifi (black and white) or 16GB with Wifi and 4G LTE connectivity (black only). The Tablet Z isn't the cheapest Android tablet option around, but it does boast a Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-core CPU inside, a 1080p display and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, backed up by Sony's suite of apps. For the hacking crowd, there's also AOSP support through Sony's GitHub.
Across the Atlantic, Sony's still taking pre-orders for the Xperia Tablet Z through its official online store, with devices expected to ship out this Friday, May 24.
Students at the University of California, Los Angeles campus, which has faced steep state cuts. (David McNew/Getty??
When high school senior Jenny Bonilla got her college acceptance letter in March, she felt shock and heartbreak rather than joy. That?s because the letter from Goucher College, a private liberal arts school in Baltimore, also brought news that she would owe an unaffordable $20,000 a year in tuition and board, even with a scholarship the college was offering.
Bonilla had been in the running for a full ride to Goucher but eventually lost out because her parents? combined income of $57,000 a year was deemed too high.
?That was heartbreaking,? she said.
Bonilla?s experience is all too familiar to many students and their parents contemplating college, as higher education price increases have far outpaced the growth in middle-class wages over the past three decades.
The average tuition and fees at a public, four-year university rose to $8,655 in 2012-13, not counting the costs of room and board, according to the College Board. That?s 250 percent more than it would have cost in 1982, when a year of college would have set the average student back just $2,423 in today?s dollars.
The tuition at private colleges has increased at a slightly lower rate over the same period: The average four-year private institution costs $29,056, not counting room and board. It would have cost $10,901 in 2012 dollars in 1982.
The pricey degree comes with big returns, on average: College-educated workers earned 79 percent more than high-school-educated workers in 2012 and were much less likely to be unemployed.
The pain of the price hikes has been partly offset by an increase in federal grants and tax breaks for college, as well as by private schools offering deeply discounted tuition rates to lower-income students. But even with that help, some students like Bonilla are finding themselves locked out of the system.
Why is college so much more expensive now than it was 30 years ago? Economists fall into two main schools of thought in explaining the trend.
One theory, referred to as the ?Bowen Rule,? says the decisions made by many colleges and universities?such as how many administrators to hire and how to spend its cash?primarily drive the cost.
A competing theory, called ?Baumol?s cost disease,? posits that higher education is expensive because of outside macroeconomic factors that affect other businesses, specifically that it costs more to hire highly educated workers even in fields that have not grown more productive.
In other words, it?s either the colleges? fault, or it isn?t.
In their book, ?Why Does College Cost So Much?? Robert Archibald and David Feldman, economists at the College of William & Mary, are firmly in the Baumol camp. They argue that a college?s hefty price tag isn?t actually surprising at all, given that it depends on the performance of its workforce?highly educated professors and teachers who provide a face-to-face service, not a material good.
Larger economic trends have jacked up the salaries of highly educated workers across the board in recent decades, while the cost of face-to-face services has also remained high, because technological advances do not necessarily make these services cheaper.
Feldman used the example of the cost of a haircut, which has also outpaced inflation in the past 30 years.
While technology has made factories vastly more efficient at producing goods for less money, technological advances have not been able to make the time a haircut takes shorter or replace the skilled person who has to give the haircut. College is like a haircut on steroids, because the barbers have PhDs.
?Higher education is an industry where there?s not a whole lot of productivity growth and not a whole lot of scope for productivity growth,? Feldman said.
The vast majority of most colleges? budgets go to personnel, and that cost is unlikely to come down any time soon.
Benjamin Ginsberg, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, takes the Bowen view.
In his book, ?The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters,? Ginsberg argues that a significant increase in administrative employees is in part responsible for college?s runaway pricing.
He writes that between 1975 and 2005, the faculty to student ratio has remained fairly constant at universities, while the student to professional staffer (such as an admissions officer) ratio increased from 1-to-50 to 1-to-24.
?As colleges and universities have had more money to spend, they have not chosen to spend it on expanding their instructional resources?that is, on paying faculty,? Ginsberg writes. ?They have chosen, instead, to enhance their administrative and staff resources.?
Feldman discounts this argument. He points out that students demand a broader bundle of services from college now than they did 50 years ago and that the price reflects that. Students want staffers to plan student life activities, career counselors, fancy dorms, nice gyms and up-to-date technology.
The economy as a whole, not just higher education, has also shifted to include more administrative positions in the past decades, he argues.
Some argue that colleges have had no choice but to hire more administrative staff, in part because they are so thoroughly regulated by both state and federal governments. Colleges are required to report to the government all gifts accepted from foreign governments, supply information about the salaries of coaches and prove they commemorated Constitution Day every September 17, among other rules. Complying with the regulations requires staff.
?Externally imposed regulations increase the cost of doing business, and that cost is passed on to consumers,? Terry Hartle, one of the chief lobbyists for the higher education industry, said. Hartle is senior vice president for the American Council on Education.
State budget woes have also hiked the cost of many colleges. Sandy Baum, an economist and independent policy analyst for the College Board, says the price increases at public institutions have been driven by declining support from states, which have cut higher education in order to balance their budgets.
?It?s not actually that the colleges are spending more money on the students, it?s that they?re getting ? much less money per student from the state government,? Baum said.
That means students aren?t necessarily getting more for their money, especially at public institutions.
Advances in technology might help colleges cut costs in the future, either by allowing them to have fewer in-person classes as more people take classes online or by streamlining some library costs, among other possibilities. But higher education experts say there?s no silver bullet.
?Colleges are looking at how to save money, and they need to look harder because it?s just so expensive,? said Baum. She mentioned increasing technology, streamlining government regulations and cutting back on administrators as some possible things to help costs. ?There?s no miracles there,? she said.
Jenny Bonilla didn?t have time to wait for a miracle. Bonilla?s father lost his job just days after she received her letter from Goucher, reducing the family?s annual income to $40,000.
Bonilla?s parents didn?t want her to take on $60,000 in debt and knew they couldn?t come up with the money to help her on their own. They decided she should enroll in nearby Prince George's Community College for two years and then try to transfer to a four-year public school from there.
?I applied to so many schools, and then for me to end up at community college is kind of devastating,? Bonilla says.
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ? Afghan President Hamid Karzai will seek increased military aid from India during a three-day visit starting Monday and will discuss recent cross-border clashes with Pakistan, India's archrival, an aide said.
The comments follow a weekend report by the Times of India that said Afghanistan's ambassador to India had said the country needs India's help with "equipment and weapons to fight." The Press Trust of India later quoted a spokesman for India's foreign ministry as saying the country is ready to meet any such request.
"Yes, we will ask for assistance for the strengthening of our security forces," Karzai spokesman Aimal Faizi said in a briefing Saturday ahead of the trip. He did not comment on the Indian reports.
Karzai's visit could irk Pakistan, especially if any arms deal materializes. Pakistan considers Afghanistan its own backyard and suspects rival India of seeking greater influence there as a strategy to hem in the country from both sides. Pakistan and India have fought three wars since they were divided into two countries when they gained independence from Britain in 1947.
Afghanistan and India signed a strategic partnership agreement in 2011 that has included Indian military training of Afghan security forces. Faizi indicated Saturday that Karzai would seek to expand that cooperation. "Whatever our Afghan security forces would need for assistance and help, India would help us," he said.
Afghan analyst Wadir Safi, a political science professor at Kabul University, says the timing of Karzai's India trip is likely related to recent border skirmishes with Pakistan. Each side has been accusing the other of firing across the mountainous border region for months, including a skirmish earlier this month that killed an Afghan border policeman. Both countries have also accused each other of providing shelter for insurgents fighting on the other side of the border.
Afghan accusations that Pakistan is allegedly trying to torpedo efforts to start peace talks with the Taliban have also contributed to deteriorating relations. Pakistan is considered crucial to nudging Taliban leaders, many of which are in hiding in Pakistan, to the table ? a key goal of the United States and its allies ahead of the final pullout of foreign combat forces by the end of next year.
Karzai has long been deeply suspicious of the motives of Pakistan's government and military, which backed the Taliban regime before it was toppled in the 2001 U.S.-led intervention and has since seemed unable or unwilling to go after militant leaders taking refuge inside its borders. The killing of al-Qaida chief, Osama bin Laden, in Pakistan only strengthened Afghan wariness of his neighbor.
"Maybe at this moment, Karzai wants to show to the neighbor (Pakistan) that if they don't take part in bringing peace in Afghanistan, then he can increase relations with other countries with whom Pakistan has longtime disagreements," Safi said.
Safi warned, however, that any increased military cooperation with India would likely only contribute to tensions. "Of course, it will anger Pakistan," he said.
Aside from regional strategic rivalries, Karzai is expected to discuss economic issues and will visit an engineering university where he will receive an honorary degree, Faizi said.
India has invested more than $2 billion in Afghan infrastructure, including highways and hospitals and rural electricity projects. New Delhi is hoping to gain some influence in the country after 2014, when Afghan forces become responsible for the entire country's security.
Karzai, who earned his college degree in India, has visited New Delhi more than a half dozen times in the past few years, most recently in November 2012.
Engineered microbes grow in the darkPublic release date: 19-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Sliwa jsliwa@asmusa.org 202-942-9297 American Society for Microbiology
Scientists at the University of California, Davis have engineered a strain of photosynthetic cyanobacteria to grow without the need for light. They report their findings today at the 113th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
"In this work, we used synthetic biology approaches to probe and rewire photoautotrophic (exclusively relying on carbon dioxide and light energy for growth) cyanobacterial metabolism for the ability to grow without light energy," says Jordan McEwen, the lead researcher on the study. He is part of Shota Atsumi's lab at the university, a research group focused on developing synthetic organisms capable of converting carbon dioxide directly to biofuels.
The cyanobacterium strain Synechococcus elongatus strain PCC 7942 has been well characterized as a model photoautotroph. Previous work by Atsumi's lab has engineered this organism to recycle carbon dioxide into a variety of biofuels and valuable chemicals in the presence of light. Any cost-effective, cyanobacterial biofuel production scheme would use natural lighting conditions, limiting how much biofuel could be produced in a 24-hour period.
"To overcome this constraint, we installed foreign genes into S. elongatus to allow this cyanobacterium to grow and generate biofuels in diurnal (light or dark) conditions," says McEwen. "With recent, increased focus on cyanobacteria-based industrial applications, this advancement is desirable for more efficient, economical and controllable bioproduction systems."
###
This work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (1132442).
This research was presented as part of the 2013 General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology held May 18-21, 2013 in Denver, Colorado. A full press kit for the meeting, including tipsheets and additional press releases, can be found online at http://bit.ly/asm2013pk.
The American Society for Microbiology is the largest single life science society, composed of over 39,000 scientists and health professionals. ASM's mission is to advance the microbiological sciences as a vehicle for understanding life processes and to apply and communicate this knowledge for the improvement of health and environmental and economic well-being worldwide.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Engineered microbes grow in the darkPublic release date: 19-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jim Sliwa jsliwa@asmusa.org 202-942-9297 American Society for Microbiology
Scientists at the University of California, Davis have engineered a strain of photosynthetic cyanobacteria to grow without the need for light. They report their findings today at the 113th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
"In this work, we used synthetic biology approaches to probe and rewire photoautotrophic (exclusively relying on carbon dioxide and light energy for growth) cyanobacterial metabolism for the ability to grow without light energy," says Jordan McEwen, the lead researcher on the study. He is part of Shota Atsumi's lab at the university, a research group focused on developing synthetic organisms capable of converting carbon dioxide directly to biofuels.
The cyanobacterium strain Synechococcus elongatus strain PCC 7942 has been well characterized as a model photoautotroph. Previous work by Atsumi's lab has engineered this organism to recycle carbon dioxide into a variety of biofuels and valuable chemicals in the presence of light. Any cost-effective, cyanobacterial biofuel production scheme would use natural lighting conditions, limiting how much biofuel could be produced in a 24-hour period.
"To overcome this constraint, we installed foreign genes into S. elongatus to allow this cyanobacterium to grow and generate biofuels in diurnal (light or dark) conditions," says McEwen. "With recent, increased focus on cyanobacteria-based industrial applications, this advancement is desirable for more efficient, economical and controllable bioproduction systems."
###
This work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (1132442).
This research was presented as part of the 2013 General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology held May 18-21, 2013 in Denver, Colorado. A full press kit for the meeting, including tipsheets and additional press releases, can be found online at http://bit.ly/asm2013pk.
The American Society for Microbiology is the largest single life science society, composed of over 39,000 scientists and health professionals. ASM's mission is to advance the microbiological sciences as a vehicle for understanding life processes and to apply and communicate this knowledge for the improvement of health and environmental and economic well-being worldwide.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
In April NASA's Landsat Data Continuity Mission took a huge panorama. From 438 miles above the Earth, the satellite shot a 6,000-mile-long, 120-mile-wide strip of planet from Russia to South Africa. It is aptly named ?The Long Swath.? Oh and it's 19.06 gigapixels.
Since the Landsat moves at 17,000 miles an hour it only took about 20 minutes to shoot the whole thing. That means that unlike satellite images on Google Earth or elsewhere that are taken over time and patched together, the swatch is actually pretty representative of what was happening at basically the same moment everywhere along a 6,000-mile path. It's amazing to see the different geographic conditions along the route, from icy rivers to lush forests to desert.
NASA Earth Observatory put the data together in a number of different ways, so you can explore it however you want. There's an accessible tour (complete with culturally sensitive music), a 15-minute version, an interactive option on Gigapan, and a way to load it in Google Earth. Go nuts! [NASA Earth Observatory via PetaPixel]
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Public release date: 10-Jun-2013
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While it was missing the skydiving antics of last year’s event, Google’s I/O keynote last week wasn’t short on product launches. In between the splashy updates to Google Maps, Search, Android and everything else Google announced, the company also briefly talked about Web Components for a few minutes. While Google’s Sundar Pichai noted that it’s still early days for this technology, he also said he believes that “the vision for it is clear” and that it will allow developers to build “elegant user interfaces that work across all form factors.” Web Components are clearly a topic that’s close to the heart of a number of Chrome developers. Many of them, for example, cited it as one of the Chrome features they are most excited about at a fireside chat later in the week. A number of Google engineers are also working on Project Polymer, which aims to write a web application framework that’s built upon the idea of Web Components and will allow developers to use the ideas behind Web Components on browsers that don’t even feature all of the necessary technologies yet. The fact that it made an appearance during the keynote, right next to WebGL and other more established web development techniques, makes it pretty obvious that this is a technology that Google believes has the potential to change how developers write web apps going forward. So what is this all about? Essentially, Web Components give developers an easier way to create web sites and recyclable widgets on these sites with the help of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript they already know. The ideas behind Web Components have been around for a while (and a few years back, Microsoft backed a similar initiative that never got any traction), but even today, this is still a topic that’s pretty foreign to most. Building large, single-page web apps with a smart component models isn’t easy today. Web Components help developer encapsulate they HTML, CSS and JavaScript so it doesn’t interfere with the rest of the page and the page doesn’t interfere with it. It’s worth noting that, for the time being, developers can’t rely on this to work in all browsers. Chrome Canary includes support for Web Components, but it’s hidden behind a number of flags. Mozilla will likely start adding support for it in Firefox soon, too. Most importantly, though, the Polymer project aims to bring the concept to
