Karelia Software updated iMedia Browser to version 1.1.2 on Wednesday. The application adds the familiar media browser across most applications in Mac OS X.
Among the changes in the new version are live updating of media libraries and improved parsing of iPhoto and Lightroom libraries. The update also restores access to Sounds, iLifeSound Effects, and iMovie Sound Effects.
The company said numerous under-the-hood enhancements were also made resulting in smoother, faster browsing.
Viagra has been found to ease exercise-induced fatigue in dystrophic mice models by overcoming a faulty signalling pathway that causes it, according to research.
Muscular dystrophy (MD) refers to a group of genetic, hereditary muscle diseases that cause progressive muscle weakness. Researchers showed that Viagra could alleviate fatigue in such mice.
“Our research suggests that there probably are many different neuromuscular conditions where fatigue could be treated by targeting this newly discovered pathway,” said Kevin Campbell,
University of Iowa professor and head of molecular physiology and biophysics.
Using animal models, the researchers showed that if an enzyme called neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) is not present at its normal location on the muscle membrane, then blood vessels that supply active muscles do not relax normally and the animals experience post-exercise fatigue.
Early clues about the role of nNOS came from observing that the significant inactivity of dystrophic mice following mild
exercise was very similar to the fatigue experience by
muscular dystrophy patients after a short period of walking.
Working with mouse models of
muscular dystrophy and normal mice engineered to lack nNOS, the university team, including study co-author Yvonne Kobayashi, research associate in molecular physiology and biophysics, showed that mice with misplaced or missing nNOS exhibited prolonged fatigue after mild
exercise.
“The mice without nNOS have normal muscles and can
exercise quite well, but after just mild
exercise, we found that they had the intense fatigue response,” Kobayashi said, according to a university press release.
“The signalling pathway probably maintains blood flow into the muscle during
exercise and keeps the blood flow going after
exercise. But when nNOS is missing or mislocalised, this pathway breaks down,” Campbell explained.
To determine if nNOS was affected in humans with
muscular dystrophy, Steven Moore, professor of pathology and study co-author, examined muscle biopsies from 425 patients with many different forms of
muscular dystrophy. He found that nNOS was missing or reduced in most cases, suggesting a common mechanism of fatigue.
The enzyme nNOS makes a signalling molecule called
nitric oxide, which stimulates production of a chemical called cGMP that causes smooth muscle around
blood vessels to relax thereby increasing blood flow.
This
nitric oxide signalling pathway is turned off by phosphodiesterase (PDE), an enzyme that breaks down cGMP, according to findings published in Nature Advance Online Publication Sunday. Viagra, a drug designed to increase blood flow, inhibits PDE and prolongs the existence of the cGMP molecules that promote blood vessel dilation.
the flagship company of the Godrej Group, has shifted its entire information technology staff to Hewlett Packard (HP), India. The move is a part of the outsourcing deal that GIL has signed with HP, for its in-house IT operations.
“The IT workforce of GIL have been transferred to HP, and operations have been outsourced to the company. We have not laid anyone off,” said Adi Godrej, chairman of GIL. He declined to give the size of the deal.
Industry sources pointed out that the company would make a significant saving with this deal. Earlier this year, the Future Group had inked a similar deal worth about $150 million (Rs 741.1 crore) with Wipro under which more than 250 employees of Pantaloon Retail were moved to the IT company.
GIL and HP have announced a partnership for comprehensive, strategic IT outsourcing and transformation project that would include infrastructure solutions, SAP application services, consulting and outsourced services, Godrej said. Not mentioning the number of people shifted due to the arrangement, he said that the number of employees is small, since they were part of the maintenance team.
The staff would now cease to be on GIL’s payroll and will be working with HP India’s instead.
Russia’s spacecraft producer Energiya will not provide any more Soyuz vessels for trips to the International Space Station unless funds could urgently be found, Energiya’s president and general constructor warned on Friday.
“We have vessels and funding for them for the next two trips, but I do not know what will happen with expeditions after that,” Vitaly Lopota told reporters as quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency.
“We have no funds to produce new Soyuz craft. Unless we are granted loans or advance payment in the next two or three weeks, we cannot be responsible for future Soyuz production,” Lopota explained.
The Soyuz is Russia’s workhorse spacecraft that has carried out more than 1,600 flights, despite glitches that have bedevilled recent landings of the Soyuz capsule.
An April 19 landing, where the capsule entered the atmosphere at an unusually steep angle, subjecting astronauts to uncomfortably strong G forces and landing 420 kilometres (260 miles) from its target, as well as a similar October 2007 incident, raised doubts about the Soyuz’s safety.
However, Friday’s landing of the Soyuz carrying US space tourist Richard Garriott and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko, went smoothly as scheduled.
NASA will be totally reliant on the Soyuz for transporting astronauts and cargo to the ISS after its space shuttle fleet retires in 2010 and until the shuttle’s successor vehicle is ready, expected in 2015 at the earliest.
Among nursing home residents, having a nursing aide help them maintain good oral hygiene lowers the odds of them dying from pneumonia, a study suggests.
Pneumonia is the leading cause of death in elderly nursing home residents, Dr. Carol W. Bassim and colleagues point out in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. “Several studies have shown that poor oral hygiene or inadequate oral care are also associated with pneumonia,” they add.
Bassim, now at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland, and her associates studied the impact of enhanced oral hygiene care for residents in two wards at a Florida nursing home compared with residents in two other wards.
Initially, there was no difference in the mortality rate from pneumonia between the two groups. However, patients in the oral care group were older and more disabled than those who did not receive oral care, and once this was taken into account the risk of dying from pneumonia was more than three times higher in patients who did not receive oral care.
Pneumonia in the elderly is often triggered by aspirating saliva or food. It is likely that the risk of pneumonia “depends on the quality and the quantity of the oropharyngeal contents of a patient at the time of respiratory inoculation or introduction,” Bassim and colleagues explain.
“The quantity of saliva inhaled and a predisposition to gross aspiration events may not be modified through oral care,” they add, “but this study indicates that oral care may be involved in significantly reducing the harmful quality of the intra-oral environment, reducing the risk of a patient dying from pneumonia.”
Even as Maoist Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ is urging the international investors to put their money in mega projects in Nepal, the country’s biggest hydropower project - developed by an international consortium including an Indian company - has come under fresh attack despite repeated appeals for security by the company.
An NGO, suspected to be led by the Maoists, said it was indefinitely padlocking the information centres of the 750 Mega Watts (MW) West Seti Hydro project in remote Bajhang district.
Recently, the project’s other information centres in Doti, Baitadi and Dadeldhura also came under attack. While some were set on fire, one was looted.
Australian company SMEC Developments is the main developer with India’s Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services holding a 15 percent stake.
As per the agreement between the developers and the government of Nepal, the state will get 10 percent free energy while the rest of the power produced is to be sold to Power Trading Corporation of India for distribution in northern India.
The West Seti project is being regarded as a test case by India as well as other foreign countries who are wary of investing in Nepal’s potentially rich, but politically surcharged, hydropower sector due to the long history of dissent.
Though the Memorandum of Understanding was signed in 1997, work is yet to start on the construction due to continuous opposition by the locals of the four districts under the aegis of Nepali NGOs.
The information centres were established this year after the end of the Maoist insurgency, which had been a serious deterrent to development activities.
The centres are to disseminate information to the locals about the volume of displacement to be caused by the project and the company’s compensatory offers.
On Wednesday, Maoist Minister for Labour and Transport Management Lekhnath Bhatt wrote an article in a Nepali daily, saying that the project would have to indicate its plans for the development for the four backward districts.
The main opposition to the project apparently stems from the fact that the power is to be sold to India.
Though the project authorities have repeatedly urged Prachanda, Finance Minister Baburam Bhattarai and Home Minister Bamdev Gautam for security, the government has continued to turn a deaf ear.
The rupee plunged to a record low on Thursday, driven by another sharp drop in the stock market and broad-based dollar strength, but suspected central bank intervention kept it from testing 50 per dollar.
It closed at 49.81/82, off a record low of 49.86 but 1.1% weaker than 49.28/29 at close on Wednesday. The rupee has shed nearly 21% against the dollar in 2008.
“The dollar has significantly strengthened against the euro, and there are continuous outflows of foreign funds, so the rupee is likely to continue weakening,” said Naveen Raghuvanshi, associate VP, Development Credit Bank. “The rupee is at these levels only because RBI intervened heavily at 49.80/81 levels,” he said. “Tomorrow the rupee will surely open above 50,” he said.
Meanwhile, the 10-year bond yield ended at 7.56%, from the previous close of 7.60%, on softer inflation data, which raised hopes of a repo rate cut in the central bank’s policy review on Friday.
Call money rate closed 6/6.10%, unchanged from Wednesday as banks had already made arrangements to fund their requirements for the reporting day, reducing demand.
Iraqi officials Wednesday reported finding mass graves with remains of 34 people, most believed to have been Iraqi army recruits waylaid three years ago by al-Qaida gunmen as they traveled to a training base near the Syrian border.
Farmers tipped off authorities last week about the graves, located in the Euphrates River valley near Syria about 200 miles northwest of Baghdad, according to a local mayor, Farhan Fitaghan.
Fitaghan told The Associated Press that two of the remains were women.
Most of the victims were believed to have been army recruits from the southern Shiite city of Karbala who were traveling by bus in September 2005 to a training camp in an abandoned phosphate plant in Qaim when they were stopped by gunmen and taken away, the mayor said.
“We informed the Karbala authorities and invited their families to come and identify their relatives,” said Fitaghan, the mayor of Qaim. “We held an official funeral procession today and paid all expenses to send the coffins to Karbala.”
A tiny, egg-robbing dinosaur that lived more than 150 million years ago could help explain a key phase in the evolution of birds, scientists reported on Wednesday.
In unusual language for a high-brow journal, Chinese palaeontologists admit the wee dino was, frankly, “bizarre”.
The beast was a distant relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex but was no bigger than a kitten. And it was covered in feathers but couldn’t fly.
The creature lived between 152 and 168 million years ago, according to analysis of its fossil, found in Daohugou in Inner Mongolia, northern China.
Dubbed Epidexipteryx hui, the mini-dino was a two-footed predator, known as a therapod, that lived in the Middle to Late Jurassic era between 152 and 168 million years ago.
It probably weighed no more than 164 grammes, or just over five ounces, and fed opportunistically on eggs it found or stole, according to the paper, which appears in the British weekly journal Nature.
E. hui lived shortly before the famous Archaeopteryx, which arrived on the scene around 150 million years ago and is generally considered to be the first bird.
Despite its many dinosaur features, Archaeopteryx is believed to have been capable of powered flight.
Yet one of the many questions about the “early bird” scenario is exactly why dinosaurs evolved feathers.
Did feathers provide warmth, for instance, or a means of flight, enabling a tree-living dino to jump or glide to safety from a perch or to find food?
The Chinese team, led by the fossil-hunter Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropoloy in Beijing, say a clutch of long, ribbon-like feathers on E. hui’s tale points to a different function.
They believe the unusual plumage was “integumentary ornamentation” — a decorative attachment that helped in mating.
Rather like the peacock spreads out his tail fan to lure a female, the dinosaur would show his feathers in courtship to demonstrate his fitness.
E. hui’s name derives from a Greek composite meaning “feather display” and from Yaoming Hu, a Chinese expert in Mesozoic mammals who died in April this year after a long illness, aged only 42.
A suspected U.S. drone fired a missile into a Pakistani village in North Waziristan tribal region early on Thursday, a Reuters witness said, the latest in a series of such attacks in recent weeks.
The strike targeted a village near Waziristan’s main town of Miranshah where Jalaluddin Haqqani, a veteran Taliban commander and an old friend of Osama bin Laden, had established a madrasa or religious school and where his extended family used to be living. There was no immediate word on casualties.
“A large number of militants are rushing toward the area in vehicles,” the Reuters witness told Reuters by telephone from Miranshah.
Twenty-three people, mostly relatives of Haqqani, were killed in a similar attack in the same area in September.
The U.S. forces, frustrated over growing cross-border militant attacks from the Pakistani side, have carried out around a dozen missile strikes and a commando raid in Pakistani tribal areas since the start of September.
A large number of militants have been killed in these attacks but no senior al Qaeda or Taliban commander is reported to have died so far.
One of the sons of Haqqani had told Reuters that the elderly commander was in Afghanistan when the village was hit in September.
Haqqani is a veteran of the U.S.-backed Afghan war against the Soviet invasion in the 1970s and 1980s and his extended family had been living in North Waziristan since then. Haqqani’s links with bin Laden go back to the late 1980s.
Taliban sources say he is in ill-health and his son, Sirajuddin, has been leading the Haqqani group.
(Reporting by Haji Mujtaba; Writing by Zeeshan Haider; Editing by Sami Aboudi)