Vonage to Pay AT&T in Patent Dispute

Internet phone service Vonage said on Friday it agreed to settle a patent dispute with U.S. telephone giant AT%26T that calls on Vonage to pay AT%26T up to $7.8 million a year. Vonage said in a statement the five-year settlement deal means it must make an upfront payment of $1.95 million to AT%26T in January 2008 and then pay $650,000 per month over the life of the multi-year contract. The $1.95 million is prepayment on the last three months of the deal. In addition, Vonage said AT%26T had granted it non-exclusive rights to AT%26T patents related to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and dual-mode wireless services. The agreement does not grant Vonage any rights or license to operate a wireless network to provide any wireless service, it said. Shares of Vonage closed off 7 cents or 3.4 percent at $2.00 on the New York Stock Exchange ahead of the announcement. In extended trading, the stock declined another 3 cents to $1.97.

Microsoft Expands Security Reporting

The public has a seemingly insatiable demand for as much information as possible about Microsoft security. To help feed it, Microsoft has added yet another information resource: its new Security Vulnerability Research and Defense blog, which officially launched this week. The Security Vulnerability Research and Defense blog (SWI) is designed to provide additional, in-depth technical details on Microsoft security updates -- ostensibly to better satisfy security researchers, enterprise IT staff, hard-core end-users and close Microsoft observers. The details and workarounds posted in the blog are not covered in official security bulletins -- making them useful, if not potentially critical. "The blog displays the knowledge of our investigators and offers additional details about vulnerabilities Microsoft has fixed beyond bulletins or advisories," a Microsoft spokesperson explained to InternetNews.com. The new outlet should complement the existing Microsoft Security Response Center Blog (MSRC) since both serve different purposes. The MSRC Blog is designed for high-level intelligence about a particular situation. In some cases, however, the Microsoft spokesperson said the company wants to go deep and get into the guts of a vulnerability. "We still encourage customers to follow the guidance in the advisories and bulletins, but the blog shares additional information about mitigations and workarounds where customers wouldn't be able to get anywhere else," the spokesperson said. "We will only release information that is supplemental to customers, and will only be offering information about vulnerabilities that have already been fixed." Already, the effort could be paying dividends for security researchers and admins. The SWI blog at launch provides additional details on two vulnerabilities that Microsoft fixed as part of December's Patch Tuesday. The first example is one that the SWI blog refers to as "The case of the insecure signature." The official Microsoft label is MS07-063, "Vulnerability in SMBv2 Could Allow Remote Code Execution." The original MS07-063 advisory provides an overview of the flaw, which involved the SMB (Server Message Block) technology critical in Windows server communications. The SWI blog expanded that explanation with a broader discussion about message signing in SMB traffic -- where the actual vulnerability exists. The second flaw detailed involves "Vulnerability in Message Queuing," officially labeled as MS07-065, which the SWI blog described as "The case of the significant suffix." In that post, Microsoft provided an additional mitigation approach for affected users. "We periodically identify workarounds or mitigations like this that we can't use for official guidance because they're either too nuanced or have some exception cases," the blog states. "When we discover something potentially useful but are uncomfortable listing it in the bulletin, we'll do our best to describe it here in this blog." According to the Microsoft spokesperson, the company selected both issues because it had interesting additional details to share about each. "Every time we research vulnerability, we come away with a lot of knowledge about it and feel that we should share it," the spokesperson noted.

Glitch in Windows Home Server Corrupts Files

Microsoft has issued an alert to users of its recently released Windows Home Server not to save or edit data files directly to the server because it may cause corruption of the file. Windows Home Server is a scaled-down and modified version of Windows Server 2003, meant for home users and consumers. It's designed to provide simple, fast backup of data files from main computers that can be easily restored in the event of data loss. Bill Gates first introduced it at the 2007 CES show in January and it shipped in November at a starting price of $599. Ironically, the product may do some users more harm than good. In product support posting KB946676, Microsoft confirmed the problem, which it said was due to a glitch in Windows Home Server's shared folders. "When you use certain programs to edit files on a home computer that uses Windows Home Server, the files may become corrupted when you save them to the home server," Microsoft said in the document. The company also said it is working on a fix. Until it releases one, Microsoft advised users not to edit data files stored on their backup systems if they use any of a slew of its applications: Windows Vista Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Office OneNote 2007, Office OneNote 2003, Office Outlook 2007, Microsoft Money 2007 and SyncToy 2.0 beta. Other applications affected by the bug as well. The support document said Intuit Quicken and QuickBooks program files, along with BitTorrent files, also could experience the glitch. While potentially alarming, the problem ranks far below some other notable file-corruption bugs, such the infamous MS-DOS 6 DriveSpace fiasco in the pre-Windows 95 days. Partially, that's because a workaround for the current bug is quite simple: users shouldn't alter files directly on their WHS server, and work instead with the file locally. Microsoft is closed for the holidays and did not respond to inquiries for further detail.

2008: Year of Innovation, Both Good And Evil

The year ahead will be no less challenging than the one we're now exiting: We're going into an election year, which is always tumultuous; there are signs of economic rough waters; and Silicon Valley is headed into a new boom that some are already comparing to the 1999 dot-com mania. And we all know how that ended. Fortunately, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like also seem to remember the dot-com bust, and are learning lessons from the fate of Boo.com and The Industry Standard. Just as the newest Silicon Valley pups are facing their own challenges, so do some of its biggest players: chipmakers AMD and Intel, which are looking to major updates in their designs to beef up their businesses and erase some of the missteps of the recent past. But those two aren't alone in their efforts to devise new technology. On the dark side, malware authors are growing ever-more savvy and show no signs of slowing in their own efforts at "innovation," such as it is. Still, technology innovation's positive benefits may yet outweigh the bad: This year, server virtualization came into its own, offering myriad advantages for the enterprise. Not the least of which, luckily, is improved security.
AMD and Intel: All in with the chips The biggest hardware challenge in 2008 undoubtedly will be the continuing fight between the two vendors whose CPUs power virtually all of our computers: Intel and AMD. Until 2003, Intel was in a solid and somewhat complacent leading position, while AMD was a distant second with chips that were rarely competitive to Intel's top of the line. That all changed in 2003 with the introduction of 64-bit chips, and later dual-core chips on the desktop and the Opteron server processor. In four years, AMD went from having no major OEMs to all of them. That's quite a reversal. When the Opteron came out, not one server vendor was a licensee -- and there aren't a lot of server vendors out there. Today, you can buy an IBM System x, an HP ProLiant, a SunFire or Dell PowerEdge servers with AMD Opteron chips. Veteran semiconductor market analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight64 puts AMD's market share at just about 50 percent of retail, with slightly more than half in desktops and less than half in notebooks. "That's a huge move from where they were, and it's not all the low-priced stuff," he said. It was this success that proved AMD's undoing. In short, it grew faster than it could handle, sort of like a teenager still trying to fit into its pre-teen clothes. It couldn't produce enough product to satisfy demand when it added Dell as a customer in 2006 and the company got creamed in late '06 and into '07, and spent the year recovering. Getting its production capacity in line has been AMD's goal this year. Its problem wasn't creating chips -- it was making them. The massive Dresden, Germany plant had to be converted from 65-nanometer designs to 45nm, and at the same time upgrade from 200mm to 300mm wafers. Oh, and it also had to get the Quad-Core Opteron, a.k.a. "Barcelona," out the door. A daunting plan for a company a fraction of Intel's size with nowhere near its resources. AMD has an ace up its sleeve with ATI. The $5.4 billion acquisition to date has been more of a drag on the company, but benefits are finally starting to show, beginning with the "Spider" platform. AMD has the advantage over Intel and Nvidia, its chief rival to ATI, in that it can put together a complete PC platform with all of the chips needed. Going into 2008, AMD's challenge then is chiefly about getting to 45nm chip designs and shipping "Shanghai," the successor to Barcelona. Shanghai will supplant the quad-core Opteron CPU with a new 45nm process and 6MB of L3 cache, which is shared among its cores. Barcelona has only 2MB of L3 cache. "They darn well better get their 45nm products up and running and out on a more timely basis than they did with Barcelona," Brookwood said. "It's important because AMD needs Shanghai to compete with %26#91;Intel's upcoming%26#93; 'Nehalem.' If AMD does not have Shanghai to compete with Nehalem, then it will have a serious competitive problem." Like AMD, its daunting rival has not performed flawlessly company in the past, either -- although most of Intel's pain had been limited to 2006. For the world's largest chipmaker, 2007 was a year of increasing momentum. CEO Paul Otellini has cleaned house of all the bad old ideas, consolidated, cut and streamlined anywhere and everywhere to make Intel more efficient and very profitable. The challenge in 2008 for Intel is rather simple: don't screw up. With its scale and massive resources, the task may seem easy for Intel. But the company is taking a sizable risk with Nehalem. The design, when it ships later in the year, will finally mark Intel's dumping of the front-side bus -- the external memory controller that all data must pass through when entering or exiting the CPU. Abandoning the front-side bus should mean increased bandwidth. However, doing so requires a whole new architecture, new chipsets, new motherboards and a new way to handle memory. "This means changes across the board, it's not just a chip update," Brookwood said. "Platform and processor change should not be underestimated." Next page: Innovations in viruses and cybercrime? You'd better believe it.

Political Web: A Promise Not Yet Fulfilled

In 2007, YouTube hosted two Presidential debates. The most popular video from the Republican debates has been viewed 295,559 times. Another 19.5 million views and it'll get close to the popularity of Miss Teen South Carolina's infamous blunder. Yes, politics are on the Web and, yes, you can find Hilary Clinton and Tom Tancredo on Facebook and MySpace. But so far, Politics 2.0 is more hype than substance. Next year, candidates will spend little money on online advertising, instead using the Internet only for three things: grassroots organizing, fund-raising, and games of "gotcha." Candidates aren't concerned about popularity on the Internet, because so far, there seems to be little evidence that it matters. Take Ron Paul for an example. Web analytics company Compete puts November unique visitors to the Paul campaign's homepage at ronpaul2008.com at 496,906 people. The next closest, Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's mikehuckabee.com, saw only 270,349 unique visitors during the month. One-time Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney totaled 115,819; former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, 108,120. Also according to Compete, Ron Paul groups represented 87 percent of total time spent organizing any political activities on Meetup.com.
Source: Compete, Inc. Yet according to the latest poll from NBC and the Wall Street Journal (available in PDF format), only 4 percent of Republicans would nominate Paul to run for the party. By comparison, Giuliani comes in at 20 percent and Huckabee at 17 percent. Evidently, Internet popularity does not yet translate into real-world popularity. The candidates know it, too. That's why they're keeping their ad money off the Internet and spending it on TV, according to Campaign Media Analysis Group, a division of TNS Media Intelligence. Though spending on campaign advertising should reach $3 billion in 2008, the online portion "will amount to little more than a rounding error when put next to the money spent on television," advertising analyst Evan Tracey told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month. "If any business had to run on a cycle where you could only get your customers once every other year, and you had one day when they had to pick between your brand and somebody else's and whichever brand had 51 percent of the market won, you would want to have a medium that is best situated to essentially drive up the volume and get ... customers to notice you," Tracey said. "That has always been television." Next page: So will candidates be using the Internet at all in 2008?

Malware Now Hiding As Google Toolbar Buttons

A security researcher has discovered a rather sneaky new exploit involving the Google Toolbar, where hackers can pretend to be installing a legitimate Toolbar button item but they're really installing malicious code. Aviv Raff noted that the spoof presents legitimate-looking dialog boxes and windows to convince users that the button comes from a trusted domain. In his example, he showed what appeared to be a button for The New York Times being installed on the toolbar. In reality, when the user clicks on the Times button on their toolbar, malicious code is then retrieved and installed on their computer without them knowing it. Raff found it affected Google Toolbar 5 beta for Internet Explorer, Google Toolbar 4 for IE and it partially affected Google Toolbar 4 for Firefox. When contacted by InternetNews.com, a Google spokesperson would only say "Google takes the security of our users very seriously. We have been notified of this issue and are currently working on a fix." Paul Henry, vice president of technology evangelism for the security provider Secure Computing, said Google needs to do two things: stop anyone from spoofing the functionality of the application so it looks like a legitimate application, and make sure the button doesn't download code. "There's no reason a button should cause an executable to be downloaded across the public Internet without operator intervention," he said. "Perhaps we need signing for toolbar buttons." Henry said until Google issues a fix, "common sense is your best defense. Do not install any Google toolbar buttons from any site that you do not explicitly trust."

2007: Open Source, Patents, SCO, And More

2007 is a year that will long be remembered in the open source and Linux communities. It was a year in which the twin underpinnings of what makes open source successful and what could serve to destroy it made the headlines. On the pro side, Linux made major technology advances this year and a key new license emerged for open source. On the flipside patents and intellectual property issues continued to threaten the survival and success of the open source ecosystem. GPL v. 3 The release of the GPL Version 3 was one of the most highly anticipated events of 2007. The GPL after all is the cornerstone license of the Open Source and Free Software world with countless thousands of projects under its license. Work began on GPL version 3 in January of 2006 but it was in 2007 that the hard work of the final drafts were drawn out ultimately resulting in the final version. The GPL 2 was released in 1991 and the efforts and the issues involved in changing it were not insubstantial. Though there were some 16 years of events that transpired between the release of GPL 2 and GPL 3 the authors of the GPL 3 blamed the Novell Microsoft deal of November 2006 for a delay in putting out the GPL 3 on time. The third draft which came out in March of 2007 specifically set out to prevent the "mockery of Free Software" which the authors of the GPL deemed the Novell/Microsoft deal to be. In May the last call draft of the GPL was issued cleaning up language and making the license compatible with the widely deployed Apache 2.0 license. Finally in June, after 18 months of debate and discussion, the final GPL 3 license was released. With the final release which includes updated provisions for DRM as well as patents, Richard Stallman the founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the original GPL urged adoption as a way to fight Microsoft. "When Novell upgrades to versions of software covered by the GPLv3, GPLv3 will extend this patent protection from the customers of Novell to everybody who uses those programs," Stallman said at the time. "Effectively, we found a way to turn the deal against Microsoft and make it backfire." Microsoft took notice soon thereafter and pledged not distribute GPL version 3 licensed code. Novell's CEO however argued that his company will distribute GPL Version licensed software, even to its customers that got their Linux distributions from Microsoft's Linux coupons. Legal questions aside the new license was reasonably well adopted in its first 5 months of existence. Early predictions from licensing software vendor Palamida were that 5,500 projects would adopt the GPL version 3. As of December 6th, 2007 Palamida was reporting that some 1263 projects had actually converted to the GPL version 3. Among the high profile conversions are the Samba Windows to Linux file sharing utility as well as the popular SugarCRM application. Though Linux kernel developers discussed the potential for a conversion to GPL version 3, nothing came of it and the general sentiment is that it's not likely to happen either. Patents, Patents and Microsoft The GPL version 3 process was strongly influenced by Microsoft and its patents. While Microsoft has argued for years that Linux may infringe on Microsoft's intellectual property, it was in 2007 that Microsoft gave the infringements a number. Microsoft alleged that Open Source software infringed on some 235 of its patents. Steve Ballmer himself beat the patent drum telling people that Red Hat and others have an obligation to pay up. Some did pay up. Xandros, Linspire and TurboLinux all signed up for Microsoft's patent protection plan. The risk associated with patent infringement were all cited by IDC as a barrier to adoption for Linux. At no time during 2007 did Microsoft actually name any of the patents. Some Microsoft executives did talk about interoperability and the need to build an IP licensing bridge with open source. Microsoft itself crossed the bridge in 2007, the bridge to Open Source licensing. In October, Microsoft's Public License (Ms-PL) and the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL) were blessed by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as bona fide Open Source licenses. Microsoft though wasn't the only company in 2007 to allege patent infringement in Open Source code. Patent holding firm IP Innovation alleged that Novell and Microsoft infringed on its intellectual property. IP Innovations has since stated that its legal challenge is not a challenge against Open Source itself. SCO in a Coma The poster child for Linux lawsuits and patent infringement, also known as SCO somehow managed to survive 2007. In 2006, we had predicted that end of SCO in 2007 due to a trial that was supposed to have happened this year. No trial ever happened. Instead SCO pleaded poverty, declared bankruptcy and tried to sell of its Unix business before creditors like Novell could get a piece of it. Is SCO dead? Nope, looks like the company such that it is, will stick around till 2008 Linux Gets Both Real and Virtual With all the talk of licensing and patents in the open source world of 2007, it's important to remember that the only reason why those issues are important is because Linux technology itself is thriving. This year marked the debut of a number of very significant Linux releases and technologies that impacted millions of users. There were four mainline kernel.org Linux kernel releases in 2007 adding functionality across the whole set of computing requirements. The SuperBowl 2.6.20 kernel was the first of the year, kicking off with some virtualization enhancements. The 2.6.21 kernel was also highlighted by virtualization which was a strong theme overall for Linux in 2007. New memory management and a new wireless stack debuted in the 2.6.22 kernel. The 2.6.23 kernel marked the introduction of the completely fair scheduler which provides some real time capabilities for Linux. Virtualization was a key theme for one of the biggest Linux distro releases of the year, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL). RHEL 5 was the culmination of nearly two years of development for Red Hat and marked the first time that the Linux vendor included virtualization in its main enterprise release. Though it didn't release a real time version in 2007, Red Hat did talk about a real timeand did announce a product (Red Hat MRG)which is set for a 2008 release. Both Novell and MontaVista actually released new real time Linux distributions in 2007. 2007 was not however the year of the Linux desktop, though Linux did make some inroads in the consumer space. Dell began selling Ubuntu Linux and Wal-Mart offered Linux PCs on its shelves. A lot can happen in a year, and a lot did in the open source space in 2007. From the legal challenges of patents and licensing to the technical challenges of virtualization and real-time, open source in 2007 laid the foundation for the challenges and triumphs to come in 2008 and beyond.

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A New Generation of Web Savvy 'Super-Communicators'

In Victorian times, a favorite admonishment for the corseted schoolmarm to hiss at her class full of ill-mannered, chattering imps was, "Children are to be seen, not heard." Well, in the decidedly un-Victorian Internet, teenagers are becoming prolific content creators, posting their opinions, artwork and photos across the rapidly expanding array of social content sites, according to a report released today from the Pew Internet Project. The "Teens and Social Media" study found that 64 percent of Internet users aged 12 to 17 create some form of online content, up from 57 percent in 2004. The rise of what Pew calls "super-communicators," who have moved beyond antiquated e-mail to new forms of interaction, has been driven in large part by the rise of social networking sites and other Web 2.0 tools that have enabled traditional sites to add a social dimension to their content. Representing 28 percent of teenagers, super-communicators are those kids who use every technology to communicate that is available to them, including landlines and cell phones, social-networking sites, text messaging, instant messaging and, as a last resort, e-mail. "Access to social networks and cell phones has opened up new channels for today's teens," Pew Senior Research Specialist and study co-author Mary Madden said in the report. "New technology increases the overall intensity and frequency of their communication with friends, with e-mail being the one glaringly uncool exception in their eyes." To many teenagers, social networks have become much more than a self-publishing platform; 41 percent of teens who are on social networks said that they routinely use those sites to send messages to their friends. When teenagers are posting blogs, videos and other content, they are looking to start a conversation as much as they are trying to promote their own creative output, the Pew study found. When they post photos, people comment on them; when they post a video, a discussion starts. "For teens, the beauty of the Internet, particularly social-networking Web sites, is that content can be created and easily shared among a network of friends," Pew Senior Research Specialist and study co-author Amands Lenhart said in the report. "Even more compelling is that people in those social networks can easily comment and give feedback on shared content." Yet as eager as teens may be to publish parts their lives on the Web, they are also cautious about who's allowed to engage with their personal content. Of the teens with profiles on social networks, 66 percent limit access to their pages in some way; 77 percent of teens who upload photos said that they restrict access to them at least some of the time. A recent Pew report found that adults are less concerned with protecting their online identities than teenagers. Pew reported that 28 percent of teenagers online had created their own blog and that almost all of the new teen blogs are created by girls. In 2004, 19 percent of teenagers had created their own blog. More than one-quarter %26#150; 27 percent %26#150; of teenaged Internet users manage their own Web site. Thirty-nine percent of teen Internet users post photos, videos, artwork and other artistic content. Like blogs, online photo sharing skews female, with 54 percent of teen girls reporting that they have posted photos, compared with 40 percent of all teen boys. Video is a different story. Nineteen percent of the teen boys surveyed said they had posted a video online where it could be seen by someone else, compared with just 10 percent of the girls.

Budget Cuts Imperil Fermilab

By Adrian Cho
ScienceNOW Daily News
19 December 2007

The last U.S. lab dedicated to particle physics will be forced to lay off about 200 of its 1900 scientists next month after learning yesterday that its 2008 budget will be nearly 17%26#37; smaller than expected (ScienceNOW, 18 December). The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, will also be forced to stop work on all accelerator-based projects, a move that threatens the viability of the 40-year-old Department of Energy (DOE) lab.

The budget decisions, part of a $550 billion omnibus spending package that Congress approved this week, call into question the U.S.'s commitment to particle physics as a whole, says Fermilab Director Pier Oddone. "There's a policy question for the government and for Congress," he says. "Do we want to stay in particle physics or not?"

The omnibus bill, passed nearly 3 months into the 2008 fiscal year, funds every federal agency outside the Defense Department. Bowing to a demand by President George W. Bush to trim domestic spending, the Democratic Congress sliced $22 billion from an earlier spending blueprint. That step meant steep cuts across the government, including a proposed double-digit boost for DOE's $3.8 billion Office of Science that funds Fermilab. As a result, the 8%26#37; increase that the lab was expecting for 2008 suddenly turned into a 10%26#37; cut from current levels. That $62 million turnaround (from $372 million to $310 million) specifically targets projects that are key to Fermilab's future.

One is a neutrino experiment known as NO?A, which would have been the lab's flagship experiment after its Tevatron collider shuts down. Researchers had expected $36 million in funding to start assembling the experiment this year; instead, Congress flat-lined the budget for the program, for which Fermilab spent $16 million last year.

Congress also cut funding for the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC)--a 30-kilometer-long multibillion-dollar behemoth that U.S. researchers hope someday to build at Fermilab (Science, 9 February, p. 746). Congress reduced funding for ILC research and development from a requested $60 million to $15 million. It also cut funding for research on superconducting accelerator technology from a projected $24 million to $5 million. Fermilab's share of those two pots shrunk accordingly, from an expected $47 million to $15 million. As the fiscal year is a quarter over, physicists have already spent nearly that much, so work will stop immediately, Oddone says. "These cuts rain down devastation on all these future programs," he says.

The cuts may also affect Fermilab's flagship Tevatron collider, which researchers hope will cough up the long-sought Higgs boson before it is nabbed by the more powerful Large Hadron Collider. The LHC will swing into action next summer at the European particle physics lab, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. To meet the new budget, employees will have to take unpaid leave, although Oddone says he hopes a "rolling furlough" program will allow him to keep the machine running.

The cuts undermine Fermilab's plan to move into neutrino research in the next several years and then, before the end of the next decade, play a leading role in the ILC. Some observers say that the cuts threaten the lab's very existence. "This sets Fermilab on a trajectory for closure after 2011," says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C. Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and leader of the ILC Global Design Effort, says that project is in better shape, despite a 75%26#37; cut in the U.S. contribution to its budget, than is Fermilab. "Their problems dwarf ours," Barish says. "Fermilab is in deep, deep, deep trouble."

Related site

Fermilab

Tropics on the Move

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
3 December 2007

Scientists have detected signs that the planet's tropics may have expanded much farther north in the past 3 decades than climate models had predicted for the next century. If the findings are confirmed and the trend continues, it could place major strains on subtropical ecosystems, hasten the spread of tropical diseases, and generally make life less pleasant for populations living with the zones of change.

The tilt of Earth's axis creates the tropical zones, which form a 47%26deg;-latitude belt around the planet's midsection. Also helping form these warm-weather regions are the distribution of water, land, winds, and currents. These processes take warm, moist air from the equator and send it toward the poles, where it raises temperatures in regions such as most of Central and South America, central and southern Africa, Southeast Asia, and a good bit of Australia. Climate models predict that global warming could be causing the tropics to expand. So far, they have suggested a creep of 2%26deg; of latitude north and south, but only over the next century.

To find out what has happened so far, a team led by climate scientist Dian Seidel of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland, examined the stratosphere for signs of change in the tropics. She and colleagues surveyed five sets of data collected by satellites and weather balloons from 1979 to 2000. The data showed that tropical climate patterns, such as increased ozone concentrations and temperatures, in the stratosphere had expanded by up to 4.5%26deg; of latitude--depending on the observations--in the Northern Hemisphere during that short period.

Seidel says the reason for the difference between the model predictions and the observed data could be that the models tend to concentrate on the lower atmosphere and Earth's surface, not on the interactions with the stratosphere. Although the changes there are indeed occurring, "we don't know yet what that means for the surface," says Seidel, whose team reported the findings online 2 December in Nature Geoscience.

Atmospheric scientist John Wallace of the University of Washington, Seattle, says the survey "makes a compelling case that the tropical belt has widened substantially over the past 30 years," and if it continues at the same rate, "it will have major societal implications."

Fibre Channel Over Ethernet Goes Open Source

Ethernet is on a march to become the dominant interconnect for all types of network traffic. Although Ethernet is the dominant interconnect for LANs (define), when it comes to storage and SANs (define), it lags other technologies, notably Fibre Channel (define). That's about to change. Thanks to a new open source effort led by Intel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) technology is coming to Linux. FCoE may end up eliminating the gap between Fibre Channel and Ethernet providing users with more choice and flexibility in their networks. "We think storage over Ethernet is a great idea," Jordan Plawner, Intel's storage planner and technologist, told InternetNews.com. "We've open-sourced the FCoE initiator, which is the first step to getting native OS support over time. We believe this will help accelerate adoption of FCoE." In storage terms an initiator is a key technology. Plawner explained that an initiator is code that establishes or initiates a session with a source target and helps to send data to the target. With iSCSI (define), which allows SCSCI traffic to go over Ethernet all the major OS vendors already have a native initiator stack so any server that ships is iSCSI ready. "In the Fibre Channel world today there are various proprietary stacks from the hardware vendors and their can be issues around interoperability," Plawner said. "In the Ethernet world we are used to having as much support natively in the operating system for whatever feature we're talking about. Our goal in the FCoE world is to make source code available to OS vendors and we're stating with Linux so there can be a native FCoE stack." FCoE itself is also not a departure from core Fibre Channel in terms of its core data structure. "The most important point about FCoE is that it doesn't change the Fibre Channel frame," Plawner explained. "You're simply moving the Fibre Channel traffic onto a different fabric. You're not taking apart the Fibre Channel frames." Since FCoE looks like regular Fibre Channel traffic, an enterprise's security and traffic management infrastructure will work across FCoE fabric as well as the FC fabric. "It becomes seamless to adopt and is very evolutionary and not revolutionary," Plawner noted. The FCoE standard was proposed in April 2007. Full ratification is expected sometime in 2008. The decision to go Open Source with the FCoE initiator was a calculated strategic decision by Intel. "We're developing the code for our own products and we didn't have to open source this. We could have just said by our solution," Plawner said. "We took the more strategic view that it would benefit everybody especially the adoption of FCoE if we open source the code. So we're picking up the social cost of improving and accelerating FCoE adoption." Plawner also admitted that by going Open Source, which can be used by anyone, the FCoE initiator benefits Intel's competitors, too. That's not necessarily a bad thing. "I hope our competitors start helping us with the enablement effort," Robert Love, Intel's leader of the Open FCoE project, told InternetNews.com. The FCoE effort is not intended to necessarily displace native Fibre Channel, iSCSI or other storage fabrics. "It's a matter of choice," Plawner explained. "It provides another way for people to connect existing servers to Fibre Channel SANs. In iSCSI you have choice and we are planning to bring that same choice to the Fibre Channel world."

Who's Doing All The Ego Surfing?

More than twice as many Internet users today are plugging their own names into a search engine to find out what kind of personal information is available on the Web than just five years ago, according to new research from the Pew Internet Project. The study, titled "Digital Footprints: Online Identity Management and Search in the Age of Transparency," found that while people are increasingly aware of the trail of information they leave on the Web, the majority of Internet users are not worried about that information and most do not take steps to limit it. The "age of transparency" refers to the rise of self-authored content on the participatory Web, where the level of personally identifying information goes much deeper than just a name, address, phone number and e-mail address. The Pew researchers have pointed out that the proliferation of social networks, blogging and photo and video sharing has created an online landscape where people can not only be found through simple search, but enough of their identities are readily available online that they become "knowable." In the Pew study, 47 percent of participants said that they have looked for information about themselves on the Web by typing their name into a search engine, compared with the 22 percent who reported self-searching in 2002. Only 3 percent reported that they routinely search for themselves, and 22 percent said that they self-search "every once in a while." Even if more people are curious about their increasingly detailed online profiles, most are still unfazed by the results. The Pew study found that 60 percent of Internet users are unconcerned about how much information is available; a corresponding 61 percent do not feel the need to limit information. On the social networks, teenagers are more privacy-conscious with their profiles than adults, the Pew researchers found. Among the adults with visible profiles, 60 percent said that they can be viewed by anyone, while 38 percent said that their profile is only visible to friends. Among teenagers with visible profiles, the numbers are reversed: 40 percent said that anyone can view their profiles; 59 percent limit access to friends only. The study also identified some discrepancy between the information people expected to find about themselves and what actually turned up on a basic Web search. When self-searching by name, 38 percent of Internet users did not find any information about themselves. Thirteen percent were surprised by how little information there is about them on the Web, while 21 percent were surprised by how much is out there. The majority %26#150; 62 percent %26#150; said that the information about them on the Web met their expectations. The Pew researchers also found that the accuracy of the information retrieved by self-searching has improved considerably in the last five years. In the 2002 study, 74 percent of the participants said that the bulk of the information available about them was generally accurate; in this year's study, 87 percent said the information was accurate. Roughly 10 percent of Internet users have a job that requires them to maintain an active Web presence, either for marketing or general informational purposes. Unsurprisingly, members of that segment are far more likely to conduct self searches. For some time, job seekers, particularly recent college graduates taking their first steps into the professional world, have been warned to pay close attention to the personal information they load their profiles with on MySpace or Facebook. Hiring managers have been known to mine the social networks in search of primary source material about job seekers, which frequently surfaces as an embarrassing counterpoint to the self-adulatory froth of r%26#233;sum%26#233;s and CV's. Pew's study offers some numbers to pin down the confluence of work-life and the social Web. Twenty percent of the respondents said that their employers have a policy governing how they can present themselves online. Employees with higher levels of education are more likely to maintain an Internet presence for professional purposes, the study found. Whereas 18 percent of employed college graduates are expected to use the Web for job-related self-promotion, just 5 percent of working adults with only a high school diploma are expected to do the same. Beyond self-search, the study also examined how Internet users are searching for other people. More than half (53 percent) of adult Internet users said that they had used a search engine to look for information about other people in their lives, be they family and friends, co-workers, competitors or romantic interests. The rich, new dimensions of online identity notwithstanding, most Internet users who conduct people searches are only looking for contact information, like an address or phone number, according to the researchers.

IBM Reels In Cajasol

IBM on Monday announced a $60 million contract with Cajasol, a mid-sized bank based in Madrid, to provide hardware, software and IT services for the next four years. Cajasol, the product of a merger this year between Caja San Fernando and Caja El Monte, is Spain's eighth-largest bank with more than 800 branches. As a result of the merger, the newly combined company is in the process of consolidating its IT platform and updating its legacy hardware and software systems. In a release announcing the pact, IBM said the systems consolidation program will allow Cajasol to expand its business in Andalusia, Madrid and the Spanish Mediterranean coast and enable it to offer a variety of real-time services to all of its branches and banking customers. "We will continue contributing our IT capacities and business know-how to Cajasol's innovation goals, which will have a positive impact on the services that this savings bank provides its customers," Ampara Moraleda, an IBM general manager, said in a statement. Cajasol officials said it plans to upgrade the software in its mainframe and distributed computing environments to improve the security, reliability and availability of its core banking applications. In addition to providing new software and servers, IBM will provide maintenance and consulting services throughout the consolidation project and spiff up the company's disaster recovery software portfolio and processes. In recent years, large banks have increasingly turned to IBM's Core Systems Transformation (CST) solution to upgrade and replace their legacy back-end systems that are struggling to keep pace with increasing volumes of mortgage, loans and deposits. CST, based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) (define), is designed to offer key banking utilities as Web services, allowing customers and branches to update and exchange information in real-time from any location. The services are delivered with core transaction processing gear from IBM's WebSphere and Rational software, servers and storage equipment.

UK Admits Losing Data Of 3 Million People

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government suffered new embarrassment over missing data on Monday when it revealed one of its contractors had lost the details of 3 million learner drivers. The revelation came weeks after the government admitted it had lost computer discs containing the names and bank account details of 25 million people, exposing nearly half the population to possible fraud and identity theft. The opposition Conservatives accused the government of incompetence over the data loss, the latest in a series of mishaps that have caused the popularity of Brown's six-month-old government to plunge. Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly told parliament a private contractor reported in May that a hard disc drive had gone missing from a facility in Iowa in the United States. It contained the names, addresses and other details of more than three million candidates for a theory test taken by learner drivers in Britain. The disc drive did not contain any bank account or credit card details, Kelly said. "I apologize for any uncertainty or concern that these individuals may experience," she said. She also revealed that two discs containing the details of 7,500 vehicles and the names and addresses of their owners had been lost in transit. She announced steps to tighten up the security of personal data held by government agencies. Conservative transport spokeswoman Theresa Villiers said the loss was "further evidence of systemic failure in the government's handling of private data, evidence of a basic lack of competence by this government." "Quite simply the government is failing in its duty to obey its own laws on data protection," she said. An opinion poll on Sunday showed Brown's Labor Party trailing the Conservatives by the largest margin in more than 15 years. A YouGov poll for the Sunday Times put Labor on 32 percent, 13 points behind the Conservatives. Brown's personal rating has also slumped since he took over from Tony Blair in June. Finance minister Alistair Darling told parliament earlier there was no sign that the discs containing the details of 25 million people had fallen into criminal hands.

Apple Launch Of Leopard OS Its Best Ever: Report

The launch of Apple Inc's latest operating system, Leopard, was its best ever, a research group said on Monday. When comparing the first full month of sales of Apple Mac OS 10.5 "Leopard" (November 2007) to the first full month of sales for Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger" (May 2005), dollar volume for Leopard was up 32.8 percent and unit volume up 20.5 percent, NPD Group Inc said in a statement. Apple, maker of the Macintosh computer, the iPod digital music player and the iPhone smartphone, started selling Leopard on October 25, after a four-month delay due to the company's work on the iPhone. The new version of Apple's OS X software costs $129 for a single user and $199 for a "family pack" that can be installed on as many as five computers in a single household. New features include a file back-up feature called "Time Machine," improvements to e-mail and instant messaging, and the ability to preview documents or files without starting up a separate program, as well as quick access to other computers on a home or an office network. While the increases in dollar and unit volume can partially be attributed to going on sale during November -- a key month for consumer shopping -- and the growth in the number of Apple retail stores, NPD said the figures show that Apple has found the right formula for rolling out new versions of Mac operating systems. Leopard is the sixth version in as many years, a fact the Cupertino, California-based concern is quick to contrast with Microsoft Corp, which went more than five years between new versions of its Windows operating system. Microsoft's Windows Vista became broadly available early this year and comes in several versions that cost between $100 and $260, according to the company's Web site.

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Stem Cells Overpower Muscle Disease

By Steve Mitchell
ScienceNOW Daily News
12 December 2007

The recent breakthrough of skin cells reprogrammed to behave like embryonic stem cells has stolen the spotlight (ScienceNOW, 6 December), but adult stem cells are proving that they have advantages of their own. In the 13 December issue of Cell Stem Cell, researchers report using stem cells from patients afflicted with a form of muscular dystrophy to correct the disorder in mice. The results suggest that this strategy could one day treat muscular dystrophy in humans as well as other genetic disorders.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which predominantly strikes boys, is caused by a mutation in the gene for a protein called dystrophin that is essential for proper muscle function. The condition leads to muscle degeneration, and patients usually die in their 30s. A particular type of stem cell found in muscle can give rise to new muscle tissue, so a team led by geneticist Luis Garcia of G%26eacute;n%26eacute;thon, a nonprofit biotechnology firm in %26Eacute;vry, France, investigated whether these cells could be used to reverse the dystrophin problems.

The researchers first obtained the stem cells from patients via a muscle biopsy. Next, they used a virus to insert a gene into the cells that corrects the mutation in the dystrophin gene. The researchers then injected the modified stem cells into arteries of the legs of mice with muscular dystrophy. In just 3 weeks, muscles in the foot, shin, and thigh began expressing human dystrophin protein, indicating that the stem cells had given rise to muscle cells that had taken up residence in the muscles of the mice.

The real proof came in treadmill tests. The treated mice were able to run longer, maxing out at 15 minutes, than untreated ill animals, which managed only 10 minutes before becoming exhausted, the researchers report.

Garcia says his team now plans to test the strategy in people with muscular dystrophy. He adds that the technique could be used to treat a variety of genetic diseases, including other muscle and skin disorders.

Stem cell scientist Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, calls the strategy promising. He adds that the stem cells used in the study have advantages over reprogrammed skin cells, including eliminating the tricky business of inducing the cells to become muscle cells, but he notes that both types of cells could pose risks because the virus used to modify them could cause cancer.

Geneticist Kay Davies of the University of Oxford, U.K., says that in order for the approach to be successful in humans, the stem cells will have to be delivered to every muscle. That could prove an enormous challenge, she notes, because of the repeated injections and high costs involved.

NetSuite IPO Auction Under Way

NetSuite on Monday said it has finally launched the auction portion of its initial public offering, giving individual investors rather than underwriters the opportunity to set its opening stock price. Company executives have said NetSuite plans to use its IPO proceeds to pay off debt, build a second datacenter and possibly make some acquisitions. The firm, which is using a modified Dutch auction format just as Google did for its IPO in 2004, said it expects its shares to be priced after the stock market closes on Dec. 19. The auction-style, 6.2-million-share offering is designed to give smaller individual investors a fair shot at owning shares in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (define) pioneer. Credit Suisse is serving as the book-running manager, with W.R. Hambrecht %26 Co. acting as co-manager. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, NetSuite set an initial price range of between $13 and $16 a share. However, based on the demand or lack thereof for NetSuite shares during the auction, that price could be adjusted up or down. If the shares were to go out at the high end of the range, NetSuite would likely raise just under $100 million for the 6.2 million shares. In addition to structuring its IPO to appeal to smaller investors, NetSuite will also be taking a unique approach to the involvement of its majority owner, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. When it first announced its IPO plans in July, the company said Ellison would put his directly owned stake -- roughly 60 percent of all outstanding shares -- into a "lockbox." That move would mean that Ellison is effectively stripped of voting rights in NetSuite endeavors, eliminating most of the conflict-of-interest concerns he might face as CEO of a significant competitor. Founded in 1998, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company has yet to turn a profit, posting a net loss of $35.7 million in 2006 on sales of $67.2 million. In first three quarters of this year, it has lost more than $20.6 million.

Obesity Is Bacteria's Little Helper

By Steve Mitchell
ScienceNOW Daily News
10 December 2007

Fat mice should consider flossing. Although not the exact conclusion of a new report, the study does indicate that--at least in rodents--obesity weakens the immune system's ability to fight off bacteria that cause gum disease. The finding helps explain why obese people are more likely to develop the oral ailment and suggests that they may be more vulnerable to other bacterial infections as well.

Obesity raises the risk for developing several serious conditions, including heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers, and a growing body of evidence indicates that it also impairs the immune system. Earlier this year, a study in mice found that obese animals had more trouble fighting viruses, and previous research in people suggests that obesity suppresses key components of the immune system that help wipe out germs. Now a team led by oral biologist Salomon Amar of Boston University has shown for the first time that obesity also appears to reduce the immune system's ability to thwart bacteria.

The first thing the researchers needed to do was to plump up some mice. Five mice fed a calorie-laden, high-fat diet for 16 weeks bloated to 42 grams, or 1.5 times the weight of animals dining on standard mouse chow. Then, the researchers wrapped a silk thread soaked in a solution containing the bacteria Porphyromonas gingivalis, which cause gingivitis, around a tooth of each mouse to cause gum-disease infection. Compared to lean animals, the obese mice experienced 40%26#37; more bone loss around the roots of their teeth within 10 days after infection and had higher levels of bacteria in their plaque.

Further experiments showed that the obese mice had lethargic immune systems. When the researchers injected the gingivalis bacterium into the animals' tails, lean mice bumped up immune system components that respond to infections, including tumor necrosis factor-%26alpha; and interleukin-6. This response was blunted in obese mice. The researchers report their findings online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

How obesity impairs the immune system is not yet clear, but infectious disease researcher Herbert Tanowitz of Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in New York City suggests that the chronic low-level inflammation that occurs as a result of obesity may somehow be at fault.

Periodontist microbiologist Robert Genco of the University at Buffalo in New York state says the findings raise the possibility that another immune system component, neutrophils, is also suppressed in obesity. Neutrophils, which were not monitored in this study, kill bacteria, so if these cells are compromised, more severe disease could develop, he says.

Tanowitz adds that obese people probably have the same impaired immune response, a serious concern because gum disease can lead to tooth loss and raise the risk of heart disease and stroke. "There is good evidence that people who are obese have more problems, at least in the hospital setting, with bacterial infections," he says.

Human Evolution Is Speeding Up

By Ann Gibbons
ScienceNOW Daily News
10 December 2007

Plentiful food has made it easier than ever before to survive and reproduce in many parts of the world, so it's tempting to think that our species has stopped evolving. But a controversial new study says that isn't so. Far from slowing down, human evolution has sped up in the past 40,000 years and has become 100 times faster in the past 5000 years alone, according to the analysis. This means that even though some people have been globe-trotters who interbreed, most humans on different continents are becoming more different, rather than blending together into one genetically homogenous race.

In the current study, a team of researchers led by paleoanthropologist Henry Harpending of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City analyzed DNA from 270 individuals in the International HapMap Project, an effort to identify variations in human genes that cause disease. The team searched for single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)--mutations in an allele that spread throughout a population--and scanned sequence data from Europeans, Africans, and Asians. The researchers searched for SNPs that were flanked by tens of thousands of bases of identical DNA in many individuals in a population, because this suggests that the mutation is advantageous and under recent selection pressure to be preserved in a lineage.

Evolution has accelerated in 1800 human genes, which encompass about 7%26#37; of the human genome, Harpending's team reports online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Most of the mutations resulted from dramatic population booms, they suggest. As populations expand, the number of mutations increases, boosting the chances for a beneficial genetic variant that can improve survival and sweep through a population (in the same way that a large population of insects develops a gene for resistance to a pesticide faster than a small population).

Although the researchers don't know the identity of most of the genes, they say quite a few appear to be responses to changes in diet and a new wave of virulent diseases that swept through human populations as they began farming. Some examples include mutations that allow adults to digest starch, fatty acids, and lactose in milk, including mutations that arose in Europeans. Others improve the resistance to diseases, such as malaria, AIDS, and yellow fever in Africans. Several genes related to the production of human sperm also have been under selection in the past 10,000 years. Overall, "the pace of change has accelerated a lot in the last 40,000 years, especially since the end of the Ice Age," says Harpending.

The findings are persuasive to anthropologist Clark Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus. But not everyone is on board. "I don't deny recent rapid selection," says geneticist Kenneth Kidd of Yale University. "But I am not yet convinced that so much rapid selection at so many places in the genome has occurred. ... I think we need much more data."

Palm's Woes Continue as Rivals Enjoy Successes

Palm Inc. warned on Thursday that it will post a loss for the quarter ended Nov. 30 as revenue fell short due to a product delay, driving the company's shares down 16.5 percent. The news sparked concerns that the maker of the Treo phone could miss out on the critical end-year holiday shopping season for a second year in a row due to poor execution. The disappointing preliminary results, which came after a warning in October, contrast with successes by rival devices such as Apple iPhone and Research in Motion's Blackberry push into the market. Palm said it now expects to report fiscal second-quarter revenue in the range of $345 million to $350 million, down from its previous forecast of $370 million to $380 million. Analysts on average were expecting $376 million, according to Reuters Estimates. The shortfall was primarily due to a delay in shipping a product that Palm had expected to have been certified in the quarter, the company said, without giving any more details. "It is a disappointment," said Oppenheimer analyst Lawrence Harris. "It's been a pattern of uneven performance ... On a seasonal basis Palm should be doing well now. November should be a strong month going into the holiday season." Palm, which makes advanced cell phones and digital organizers, forecast a fiscal second-quarter net loss of 22 cents to 24 cents per share, or a loss of 8 cents to 10 cents per share excluding special items that it did not detail. The forecast for the November quarter was far worse than the 3 cents per share profit, excluding items, that Wall Street was looking for, according to Reuters Estimates, which had initially put the forecast at 2 cents per share. The actual results will be released on Dec. 18, Palm said. The company also cut its estimate for gross profit margins for the quarter to a range of 29.3 percent to 29.8 percent, from its earlier target of 33.3 percent to 33.8 percent. It said the lowered margin outlook was due to an increase in warranty repair expenses, higher-than-expected shipments of its lower-end Centro phones, as well as the product delay. "We are disappointed that we did not get a key product certified for delivery in the quarter, but we are focused on realizing the long-term benefits and opportunities that inspired our transaction with Elevation Partners," Palm President and CEO Ed Colligan said in a statement, In October, Palm closed a $325 million recapitalization deal with the private equity firm Elevation Partners that gave it a 27 percent stake in the company. Before the deal closed, Palm had warned that its quarterly results would lag Wall Street targets, as it faced growing competition and set aggressive prices for its Treo and Centro devices. The Centro is a smaller and lighter version of Palm's flagship Treo. Analysts said it was good that sales of the Centro, which costs $99 at Sprint Nextel, appeared strong even if the cheaper phone weighed on Palm margins. Palm's shares fell to $5.50 in after-hours trade from their close on NASDAQ of $6.59, which was up 4.27 percent from the day before.

Methylating the Mind

By Elizabeth Quill
ScienceNOW Daily News
7 December 2007

All brain cells are the same, genetically speaking. Yet somehow they play vastly different roles, some directing movement, others participating in language or thought. Now, a study finds that a chemical known to turn genes on and off may be partially responsible for this division of labor. The results, researchers suggest, could help scientists better understand psychiatric and neurological diseases.

It takes more than genes to make people who they are. Identical twins, for example, can look and act differently even though they share the same DNA (ScienceNOW, 5 July 2005). Environmental factors likely contribute to this variation, but it also seems to depend on so-called epigenetic phenomena, activity that regulates genes without changing the DNA code (ScienceNOW, 12 April 2006). In the 1960s, researchers found that the addition of a molecule called a methyl group to cytosine, one of the four building blocks of DNA, could turn off genes. Since then, scientists have found that this process, called methylation, can also turn genes on and that it is linked to cancer (ScienceNOW, 31 January 2000) and short-term memory formation (ScienceNOW, 14 March).

Because no studies have surveyed methylation's role in assigning marching orders to brain cells, geneticist Andrew Feinberg and psychiatric neuroscientist James Potash, both of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, decided to investigate. Along with their colleagues, they compared possible methylation sites on 807 genes in 76 samples from human brains. Among the regions studied were the cerebellum, which controls movement, and the cerebral cortex, which controls language and memory. The team found that methylation patterns differed by brain region, indicating that epigenetics helps divide up the brain's functions. These patterns proved more robust than differences in methylation linked to race, age, or sex, the team reports in the December issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics.

The study makes clear, Feinberg says, that "working on the brain without thinking about epigenetics is like working with a blindfold on." By understanding normal methylation, he adds, researchers can begin to look at methylation gone wrong, possibly in autism, depression, bipolar disease, and schizophrenia.

Given that epigenetics has been shown to modify gene expression in other parts of the body, the brain results are not surprising, says psychiatrist Schahram Akbarian of the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. "One could say neuroscience is catching up with the rest of the field."

Stocks Little Changed on Jobs Report

Stocks were little changed Friday after the government's monthly jobs report came in stronger than expected, but not so strong that the Federal Reserve won't have room to cut interest rates when it meets next week. The Labor Department reported that the economy added 94,000 jobs last month, in line with estimates of a 70,000-100,000 jobs gain, with financial services, manufacturing and construction losing jobs. The one negative in the report was a larger than expected 0.5% increase in wages, but the report was enough to give the Fed a little room to cut interest rates to help ease a growing credit market crisis. Also next week, Texas Instruments will hold its mid-quarter update on Monday, and Lehman Brothers will kick off the all-important earnings season for brokerages on Thursday. Palm shares plunged 13% after the company said a shipping delay will result in a quarterly loss. National Semi climbed 4%, as strong cellphone chip sales outweighed a weak outlook. Synopsis was up 9% on results that beat Wall Street estimates, and American Software gained 18% on its earnings. Macrovision plunged 21% on plans to acquire Gemstar-TV Guide. The Nasdaq lost 3 to 2706, the S%26P was off 2 to 1504, and the Dow tacked on 5 to 13,625. Volume declined to 3.15 billion shares on the NYSE, and 1.9 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led by a 17-16 margin on the NYSE, while decliners held a 15-14 edge on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 52% on the NYSE, and 46% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 117-84 on the NYSE, and 97-128 on the Nasdaq.

BigFix Updates Core Systems Management Software

BigFix on Tuesday announced the availability of BigFix Discovery 7, the latest version of its systems management and discovery software that forms the basis for all of its support products. Discovery is an end-point technology used to discover assets and also push out and install updates to the end-point system regardless of hardware platform or operating system. BigFix supports fixed or mobile systems, both clients and servers, running Windows, Unix, Linux or Macs. One of the main claims behind Discovery is its scalability. From a single server, with some repeaters for bandwidth purposes, it's possible to send out software upgrades to 500 machines in a company or 200,000 computers worldwide, said Greg Toto, vice president of products for BigFix. "Our hallmark is back-end scalability," he told InternetNews.com. Discovery is also a single agent for a number of processes. Rather than requiring separate agents for patches, software distribution, inventory, and other functions, the Discover agent waits for instructions to be sent from the control server and executes them. "Every managed asset is continuously assessing itself for compliance, problems or issues you care about, and if your admins empower those agents to fix it, they will," Toto explained. Changes are pushed down to computers regardless of location, "even if they are in a Starbucks," said Toto. Stacy Lee, a systems administrator in Stanford University's Information Technology and Services department, said the campus started out using a single server in 2004 to manage 5,000 machines. Now it's managing 25,000 machines and it's still running Discovery on the same server Stanford first deployed in 2004, just with more repeaters for bandwidth redundancy. "BigFix fit in really well here," he told InternetNews.com. "What BigFix can do is it works in a very flexible, heterogeneous environment like ours. Everyone likes to do things their own way %26#91;at the department level%26#93;. When we were looking for something to patch Windows systems, we knew it had to be scalable and flexible, and BigFix back then fit those needs." Discovery can even look for software that may not be part of the official company software list. Employees have a habit of installing their own software, but with Discovery, it's possible for an administrator to probe their entire network and find out who may be running iTunes, for example, and push down an update to their computer even though iTunes wasn't part of the company's system image. It will also inform an employee if they did something to get their computer out of compliance, such as turning off their firewall or security software. The agent can then undo what was done to break compliance. Version 7 adds several new features and functionality. While Discovery can run on a single control server, BigFix expanded it to operate among several servers to increase redundancy and scalability. The agent now supports virtual environments on VMware's ESX Server hypervisor (define) and zLinux, IBM's Linux implementation on its z Series mainframes. BigFix also expanded its policy libraries of ready-to-implement security configuration best practices based on standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Defense Information Systems Agency Security Technical Implementation Guides (DISA STIG). Version 7 also has libraries for help desk support and for provisioning a bare metal endpoint. Pricing for BigFix Discovery 7.0 is dependent on solution packs and policy modules.

Did Carbon Save Earth From a Deep Freeze?

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
5 December 2007

As half of the United States struggles through the first major snow and ice storm of the season, it might be useful to consider what the whole planet would be like if not for the effects of carbon. Researchers are postulating that carbon in the ocean, dissolved from mineral deposits on the sea floor, has prevented Earth from becoming a giant snowball at critical junctures in its history. The findings also lend credence to a hypothesis that climate change and the global carbon cycle are tightly linked, with each influencing the other.

Life on Earth depends on the greenhouse effect. Without carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere to capture a significant portion of the sun's heat, the planet would have plunged into subfreezing temperatures long ago--and perhaps never warmed enough to allow complex, heat-dependent creatures such as humans to flourish. Geological data show that Earth has come perilously close to this scenario in the distant past. One viewpoint, called the snowball Earth hypothesis, suggests that the planet required millions of years to recover from these deep freezes--the last one occurring about 550 million years ago--and could do so only via the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions.

Now a team from the University of Toronto in Canada has used a model of the carbon cycle to show that the presence of the element--in the form of a class of minerals called carbonates--in the sea bottom arrested the deep freeze before it completely overcame the planet. Instead of snowball Earth, the team reports in the 6 December issue of Nature, the effect was more of a "slushball Earth." The researchers, led by geophysicist W. Richard Peltier, found that cooling global temperatures allow the oceans to absorb more oxygen from the atmosphere. The oxygen reacts with carbonates deposited from the skeletons of tiny marine organisms as well as the action of photosynthesis by plankton, releasing carbon dioxide that helps temperatures bounce back quickly, at least on a geological timetable. The greenhouse effect has played an important role, "even in the deep past, in determining the surface climate of the planet," Peltier says. And from 1 billion years ago to about 550 million years ago, the period that was the subject of the study, "this influence apparently acted to protect the biosphere."

It is clear from the research that Earth's feedback systems kept the planet from plunging permanently into a snowball state, says geologist Alan Jay Kaufman of the University of Maryland, College Park. In principle, the feedback system might spare the planet from a runaway greenhouse effect if the oceans take up enough carbon from the atmosphere. But the effect takes place over many thousands of years, Kaufman says, so there's little hope that the carbon cycle could temper the effect of increased atmospheric CO₂ on human time scales.

CA Fires Another Shot Across Beacon's Bow

Facebook's Beacon has been nothing if not a lighting rod for controversy. The revolution that CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised when he unveiled Facebook's ad platform on November 6 has drawn the ire of privacy analysts, legal experts and, now, security researchers. Two senior research engineers with Computer Associates (CA) who have taken a deeper look into the kind of information that Facebook collects about users' activities on third-party Web sites through its Beacon program claim that their findings contradict both what Facebook has said in public and what its privacy department has written in response to past inquiries. The results, CA's Stefan Berteau writes, are "extremely disconcerting." Berteau and his colleague, Ben Googins, conclude that Facebook is still receiving information about actions that users take on Beacon partner sites even if they decline to include the action in their News Feeds and are not logged in to Facebook. Berteau and Googins concluded their research last week. Facebook has since responded with a statement essentially acknowledging that it collects data in the manner demonstrated by the researchers, but adding that it immediately deletes all information from users who click "No, thanks" to the Beacon prompt and from those who are logged out of Facebook. "Obviously, we're encouraged that they made a statement," Googins told InternetNews.com, though he noted that tests on Monday showed that Facebook was still collecting the same data in the same manner as their research showed last week, before Facebook announced changes to the Beacon permission settings. Now, no action users take on third-party sites will show up on their News Feeds. That concession had prompted civic action group MoveOn.org to declare "victory" in its petition campaign calling on Facebook to take its users' privacy more seriously. (MoveOn, for its part, is now claiming "victory" only in the fight over Facebook's data-sharing practices, telling InternetNews.com that "the data collection debate pre-existed and continues to exist.") To put Facebook's data collection practices to the test, Berteau created an account with epicurious.com, a Beacon partner site, and saved three recipes to his favorites. While saving the first recipe, he was logged in to Facebook in a different tab in his browser. At the prompt asking if he would like the story added to his News Feed, he clicked "No, thanks." When he saved the second recipe, he had logged out of Facebook, but continued using the same browser session. Again, at the News Feed alert, he clicked "No, thanks." To save the third recipe, Berteau was logged out of Facebook and had closed his browser, reopening it to start a new session. No Beacon alert appeared. Checking the network traffic logs, Berteau found that each of the three actions resulted in data being sent to Facebook. His conclusion: "The first two cases involve the transmission of user data despite 'No, thanks' having been selected on the opt-out dialog, and are causes for deep concern. They pale, however, in comparison to the third case, where Facebook was receiving data about my online habits while I was not logged in, and was doing so silently, without even alerting me to the cross-site communication." Berteau notified Facebook about his concerns. On the CA blog, he posted the response from Facebook's privacy department, which includes this excerpt: "Please note that as long as you are logged out of Facebook, no actions you have taken on other websites can be sent to Facebook." Then, after Berteau and Googins posted their research methods and the responses to Berteau's inquiries from Facebook's privacy department on the CA blog, Facebook responded with this statement: "When a Facebook user takes a Beacon-enabled action on a participating site, information is sent to Facebook in order for Facebook to operate Beacon technologically. If a Facebook user clicks "No, thanks" on the partner site notification, Facebook does not use the data and deletes it from its servers. Separately, before Facebook can determine whether the user is logged in, some data may be transferred from the participating site to Facebook. In those cases, Facebook does not associate the information with any individual user account, and deletes the data as well." Googins reiterates that Facebook's statement contradicts the earlier communications of its privacy department. While he allows that from a technical standpoint, some data exchange is to determine whether or not the user is logged in to Facebook, the site could retain the same utility while collecting only a fraction of the information that is currently being sent. A universal opt-out policy could help resolve the issue, Googins believes. That way, users who didn't want to participate in Beacon at all could rest assured that Facebook was not collecting any information about their activities on external sites. "In a general sense, there needs to be a material change," Googins said. "Technically, we have no way of knowing what they're doing with the data once it's been received." For the advocacy groups that have been pressing Facebook and other social networking sites to implement greater transparency in their data-collection and usage practices, CA's findings are simply another weapon in the arsenal it is planning to use as it appeals to regulatory bodies to update privacy laws governing the social Web. "We intend to press both Federal Trade Commission and European Commission to scrutinize exactly what it %26#91;Facebook%26#93; is doing," the Center for Digital Democracy's (CDD) Executive Director Jeff Chester told InternetNews.com. "At the same time, Facebook must make its whole operation transparent to the public." Chester also said that the CDD would be calling on advertisers to modify the partnerships they make with sites like Facebook in the hopes of developing an industry-accepted set of best practices for the intersection of commerce and social media. "I'm not sure if we can take Facebook at face value," he quipped. As of press time, Facebook had nothing to add to its statement posted on CA's blog and reprinted above in its entirety.

Ads Coming to PDFs Courtesy of Adobe, Yahoo

What will they monetize next? Adobe and Yahoo today announced a new service that will allow marketers to place ads in Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). Currently available in beta version, the opt-in service is designed to create a new revenue stream for publishers by opening up their PDFs to Yahoo's advertising network. The clickable, text-based ads are paired with contextually relevant PDF content, "creating opportunities for publishers to build new businesses around unique content that previously was just given away or not available to a mass online audience," Adobe Senior Vice President Ron Tarkoff said in a statement. There is no cost for publishers to submit PDF documents to the network, the companies said. Content providers receive a portion of the revenue from each ad click; the remainder is split between Yahoo and Adobe. To enter the program, publishers upload their PDF content to Yahoo's network so the ads can be placed before the documents are distributed. The ads appear in the margins of a PDF document so they do not block the content. The ads only appear when the document is viewed in Adobe's Reader or Acrobat programs. Publishers will be able to track the performance and reach of their ads through Yahoo's network using the same metrics as with traditional Web ads. Participating publishers currently include Pearson's Education, Reed Elsevier and IDG InfoWorld.

New Form of Cell Death Discovered

By Steve Mitchell
ScienceNOW Daily News
29 November 2007

Scientists have discovered a novel form of cell death in which cells crawl inside other cells to die. The process, dubbed entosis, may be a method of suppressing tumors, the researchers say, but others aren't so sure.

For more than 25 years, scientists examining cultures of human cancer cells have occasionally spotted cells tucked within other cells. But the phenomenon remained largely unexplored until a team led by cell biologist Michael Overholtzer of Harvard Medical School in Boston recently saw the same thing while working with a line of normal breast cells. As in breast tissue, these cultured cells usually grow on a membrane or matrix. When they became detached, however, some cells appeared to be enveloped by other cells. Intrigued, the researchers looked closer.

Overholtzer's team found that up to 70%26#37; of the detached cells died once engulfed by another detached cell. However, up to 9%26#37; divided while enveloped and up to 18%26#37; were eventually released unharmed. Blocking the mechanisms involved in other methods of cell death including apoptosis and phagocytosis did not disrupt the process, confirming that entosis operates in a different way.

Further experiments revealed that cadherins, proteins that keep cells joined to each other, are required for entosis. The researchers are still working out the details, but they speculate in the 30 November issue of Cell that entosis occurs due to an imbalance in adhesion forces between two cells when they dislodge from the matrix. This could lead to one cell pushing into the other until it is engulfed, akin to pressing your fist into a balloon.

However entosis occurs, it appears to be widespread. The team found evidence of the process in several other cell types, including breast, ovarian, umbilical cord, and kidney cancer cells. Overholtzer says tumor suppression may be one function of entosis. When a chemical that inhibits entosis was applied to a line of breast cancer cells, colony formation--an indicator of tumor growth in vitro--increased 10-fold.

Conversely, cancer cells could be using entosis as a survival tool. It may be "a way for a tumor cell to escape recognition by chemotherapeutic drugs or the immune system" by hiding out inside another cell, says Maureen Murphy, a molecular biologist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That may explain why not all cells die during entosis.

Craig Thompson, a cancer biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is more skeptical. The fact that some cells survive entosis, he says, suggests that it is not a very effective process for suppressing tumors and raises concern that it may be a phenomenon that primarily occurs in the lab rather than in the body.

Facebook Backpedals on Beacon

Facebook last night made the announcement many have been expecting for the three weeks since CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company's controversial new ad platform. Now, the company is withdrawing somewhat on its plans for Beacon in the wake of immediate and hostile reaction from legal experts, privacy advocates and concerned users of the social networking site, who said the platform had gone too far. Under the original Beacon design, users who made a purchase on a participating Web site had to click a "no thanks" icon to prevent that action from being published as a news story in their feed. As a result of the change, however, Facebook said users will have to proactively give their consent for an action they take on an external site to show up in their news feeds. Users still will see their actions appear on their profile pages, but they will have to click "OK" for the item to turn up in their news feed where their friends can see it. If the user ignores the item, Facebook said it would not be published. These changes will not give users the ability to permanently opt out of the program, however. Acknowledging that this might not be the final solution to privacy concerns, Facebook said these changes may not be its last. "We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice," the company said in a statement. Facebook also said it would add a Beacon tutorial to its site to help users better understand how the program works. To some degree, the announcement may mollify groups like MoveOn.org, the civic action group that started a petition calling on Facebook to take its users' privacy more seriously following the Beacon launch. Last Tuesday, MoveOn created a Facebook group in support of the petition, which as of this writing has more than 54,000 members. "If Facebook changes their policy so that no private purchases made on other websites are displayed publicly on Facebook without a user's explicit permission, that would be a huge step in the right direction -- and would say a lot about the ability of everyday Internet users to band together to make a difference," MoveOn's Adam Green wrote on the petition group page. In anticipation of the announcement, Green sent an e-mail to InternetNews.com indicating that the petition group would accept Facebook's policy changes only if the company ceased displaying transactions without explicit opt-in and adds a permanent opt-out for the system. "If the answers to these questions haven't changed, %26#91;then%26#93; Facebook has only made cosmetic tweaks to a flawed policy that puts the wish lists of corporate advertisers ahead of the basic privacy rights of Internet users," he also wrote on the petition page. MoveOn spokespeople were not immediately available for comment following Facebook's announcement to say how far the changes had satisfied its requirements. At least, the changes could go a long way toward reconciliation with Facebook users who had complained about Beacon adding their holiday gift purchases to their feeds -- where the purchases were seen by the intended recipients, spoiling the surprise. Many users posting to the MoveOn petition group claimed that purchases appeared on their feeds without their knowing because they had either not seen the "no thanks" icon on the third-party site or not clicked it in time. Whether the change also is enough to reach a peace with privacy groups -- some of which have been preparing complaints to file with the Federal Trade Commission against Facebook's ad platform -- seems less likely. Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), is one of the harsher critics not only of Facebook's Beacon, but of what he describes as the "unholy" intersection of social media and advertising. "It's a shame that the controversy is just about Beacon," he told InternetNews.com "It's the entire set of new marketing practices that they created earlier this month." Chester said that creating an opt-in policy would be extremely important for Facebook, but that it is not enough. "By repeatedly offering to publish all of the user's actions each time a purchase is made, Facebook is hoping that users will ultimately give in... too busy to make the decision each time," he said. "Facebook still doesn't want to face the privacy threats from its new, expanded, targeted profiling system." If Facebook doesn't do more to make its privacy policy transparent and provide users with a permanent way to shield their profile information from advertisers, it could break under the weight of its own hubris, Chester warned. "Mark Zuckerberg just doesn't get it. Facebook should be all about user control and privacy," he said, adding that if it doesn't do more for users' privacy, "Facebook is likely to be a casebook for unfair and deceptive business practices in the 21st century." Facebook spokespeople did not return requests for comment by press time. The CDD has been working with the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in examining the privacy implications of monetizing social media through advertising. Both have expressed their intention of taking their complaint to the FTC. EPIC Executive Director Mark Rotenberg told InternetNews.com that an opt-in policy would go a considerable way toward answering his group's concerns, but added that he was by no means ready to drop the investigation should Facebook announce such a policy. If the two groups proceed, they will likely file their complaints early next year, they said.

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Taking a Page From the Book of Flight

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
27 November 2007

Researchers have used a computer program that simulates avian evolution to design a better flying machine. With further refinements, the contraption's offspring someday might flit like bats or birds.

For centuries, scientists and inventors have been attempting--nearly always unsuccessfully--to adapt the graceful beatings of a bird's wings for mechanical flight. A flapping craft would have two main advantages over planes and helicopters: It could stay airborne over a wide range of speeds and would be more maneuverable, achieving both without sacrificing aerodynamic efficiency. Such abilities could be particularly useful for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the lightweight aircraft the military increasingly employs for low-altitude reconnaissance.

Researchers from Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris embarked on a unique strategy to apply the secrets of bird flight. They created a program called an evolutionary algorithm that essentially "evolves" a birdlike creature from scratch, refining designs that work and tossing those that don't. The team then appropriated the most successful designs from the algorithm to create a simulated UAV. The simulation achieved a birdlike energy efficiency flying at speeds between 10 meters and 12 meters per second, the researchers report in the December issue of Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. Based on the tests, the team has built a mechanical prototype with the goal, says biologist and lead author Emmanuel de Margerie, of improving wing designs based on further refinements from the algorithm.

Evolutionary roboticist Inman Harvey of the University of Sussex, U.K., praises the team's artificial evolution approach. It allows the exploration of designs "that a human designer might not have considered venturing into," he says. Still, the team's findings are limited, says research engineer Robert Michelson of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He notes, for example, that the simulated UAV the researchers developed is only efficient at relatively high speeds; at lower speeds, flight efficiency drops dramatically. And despite its advantages, flapping flight has its share of kinks. The bouncing reduces the value of the craft as a camera platform, says Michelson, and flapping can place large strains on wings. So far, these "have been the long poles in the creation of flapping-wing micro air vehicles," he says.

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Cyber Monday Shopping Traffic Breaks Records, Sites

Judging from the early returns, this year's "Cyber Monday" looks to be another record-breaker. Internet content delivery player Akamai reported that peak traffic to U.S. retail sites during Cyber Monday -- the first Monday after Thanksgiving -- increased 30 percent from last year, reaching 4.6 million global visitors per minute. Akamai's early findings may bear out predictions from retail industry association Shop.org that 72 million Americans would shop online on Cyber Monday this year, up 18.6 percent from last year. Likewise, online metrics firm comScore has projected online spending to surge past $700 million, which would set a new record. The firm reported $608 million in online consumer spending last Cyber Monday, a 26 percent increase from the year before. By 10 a.m. EST yesterday morning, per-minute Internet traffic had already exceeded last year's peak, which didn't come until 2 p.m. EST, according to Akamai. As heavy as the traffic was, Monday might still be a prelude to things to come. comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said in a statement that his firm's projected figure for Cyber Monday "would make it the heaviest online shopping day on record." "We can expect to see even stronger days ahead as the 2007 shopping season progresses into December," Fulgoni said. Accordingly, eBay subsidiary Shopping.com, which is already reporting a 28 percent increase in traffic this Cyber Monday compared with last year, is looking forward to what it calls "Green Monday," the second Monday in December. Piggybacking on procrastinating shoppers, "Green Monday" in recent years brought Shopping.com increased revenue and traffic, CEO Josh Silverman said in a statement. Retailers across the board have been heavily promoting their online stores this holiday season. More than 72 percent planned some promotion specifically for Cyber Monday, up from 42.7 percent last year, according to Shop.org. Offers include product-specific discounts, one-day sales and free shipping.
Sales up, but sites down? Record site traffic might be a victory for the marketing departments, but IT gets a mixed report card, according to Keynote Systems, a research firm that measures Web site performance. Just as on Black Friday, many e-commerce sites buckled under the weight of the traffic, which created significant slowdowns in product search and checkout. Brick-and-mortar retailers suffered the biggest problems, according to Keynote, with Toys "R" Us' site experiencing slowdowns of up to 300 percent, JCrew.com's transaction processing slowing by up to 400 percent, and Costco's site performance flagging by as much as 500 percent in periods of peak traffic. Yahoo's hosted shopping service, which Keynote does not track, also hit major snags due to heavy traffic. Yahoo hosts the e-commerce services for many smaller retailers, who found that their shopping cart services were unable to process transactions yesterday afternoon. Shortly after noon yesterday, Yahoo posted an acknowledgement on its Small Business site that shoppers had been receiving a "system unavailable" message when trying to checkout on some merchants' sites. At 9:51 p.m., Yahoo reported that after some reconfiguration, all merchants could process transactions, but some could expect slower-than-usual site performance. This morning, at 2:06 a.m., Yahoo reported that the issue had been resolved and that it was "actively monitoring all systems involved." Yahoo's problem may have been an anomaly, but Keynote's research suggests that the strain of heavy traffic on site performance is not, with site slowdowns also having taken place on Black Friday. However, even with Black Friday's difficulties, enough of the day's shoppers held on through the checkout process to post impressive numbers. Online shoppers spent $531 million on Black Friday, up 22 percent from last year, comScore has reported. On Thanksgiving, online retail spending rose 29 percent from last year to $272 million. The company also said that for the first 23 days of November (ending on Black Friday), online retail spending reached $9.36 billion, up 17 percent from the same period last year. And the hottest product segment so far this shopping season? Sales of video games, consoles and accessories are up 134 percent from last year, propelled in large part by hot items like the Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 3 and Halo 3, according to comScore.

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Gene Therapy Did Not Kill Patient, Study Finds

By Jocelyn Kaiser
ScienceNOW Daily News
26 November 2007

Federal regulators have given a green light to a gene-therapy arthritis trial that was halted last summer after a patient died. New tests indicate that the therapy played no role in the death. The decision comes as a relief to gene-therapy researchers who had worried about a potential new setback for their field.

The trial conducted by Targeted Genetics Corp. was shut down after the 24 July death of 36-year-old Jolee Mohr of Taylorville, Illinois, who received a gene-therapy injection to treat her rheumatoid arthritis in one knee 3 weeks earlier (Science, 3 August). At a September meeting of the federal Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC), experts noted that Mohr apparently died mainly from a fungal infection called histoplasmosis that her immune system was unable to fight off (ScienceNOW, 17 September). Mohr's immune system may have been compromised by an arthritis drug she was taking, Humira, which blocks an inflammatory molecule called tumor necrosis factor %26alpha; (TNF-%26alpha;). The protein produced by the gene therapy is also a TNF-%26alpha; blocker, and if it spread beyond Mohr's knee, the combination with Humira may have left her vulnerable to the fungus.

That did not happen, according to Targeted Genetics. The company points to new test results from an investigation by the company and outside researchers, which were presented at the American College of Rheumatology annual meeting earlier this month. The level of TNF-%26alpha; blocker detected in Mohr's blood with a binding assay was "well within the normal range expected" from the dose of Humira she was taking, says President and CEO H. Stewart Parker. The new tests also ruled out the idea that the gene-therapy vector, adeno-associated virus, replicated in Mohr's body. Although DNA from the vector turned up in other tissues, the amounts were extremely low. Today, the company announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has lifted the hold on the trial.

Others agree that the case is closed. "It does not look like the gene therapy played a role to the best of our knowledge," says physician Kyle Hogarth of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who treated Mohr and took part in the investigation. However, Hogarth questions whether it makes sense to enroll patients who are already taking TNF-%26alpha; blockers in the study, because it's difficult to distinguish between the effects of the gene-therapy product and the drugs. Parker disagrees, noting that rheumatologists say "there is a significant unmet need" for treatments for patients with joints that do not respond to the systemic drugs.

The company now plans to resume the trial of 127 patients but will not give a second dose to as many as 35 awaiting patients if they have a fever, as Mohr did. "We are being conservative," says Parker. She says the only change to the informed-consent document will be to note the earlier death. RAC will issue its final conclusions about the case at a meeting next week. RAC Chair Howard Federoff of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., declined to comment in advance of the meeting.