Twitter accounts of Obama, Spears hacked

The Twitter accounts of U.S. president-elect Barack Obama, singer Britney Spears and other prominent figures were hacked on Monday.
Twitter founder Biz Stone, in a post on the official company blog, said a total of 33 Twitter accounts had been hacked including those of Obama, Spears and Rick Sanchez, a CNN television anchor with tens of thousands of followers. As a result, fake messages sent out in their names on the micro-blogging service.
Twitter is a social-networking blog site that allows users to send status updates, or "tweets," from cell phones, instant messaging services and Facebook in less than 140 characters.
"We immediately locked down the accounts and investigated the issue," Stone said: "These accounts were compromised by an individual who hacked into some of the tools our support team uses to help people do things like edit the email address associated with their Twitter account."
The message from the fake Obama invited recipients to take a survey and win 500 dollars worth of gas while the CNN anchor purportedly told followers that he was "high on crack" and would probably not be coming into work on Monday.
Twitter was also the target of a phishing attack over the weekend in which scamsters attempted to obtain passwords and other personal information from Twitter users. Stone said Monday's hacking incident was unrelated to the phishing scam.
The attacks are the first known security issues with Twitter, which has grown as a popular social networking site during the last year.
Launched in August 2006, it has been embraced by a number of celebrities including Obama, who has more than 150,000 followers, and four-time NBA champion Shaquille O'Neal of the Phoenix Suns.

Steve Jobs to remain Apple CEO despite nutritional problem

In a move to dissipate latest rumors about his health, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs said on Monday that his weight loss is caused by a treatable hormone imbalance and he will continue to run the company.
"As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008.The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors," Jobs wrote in a letter published on Apple's website.
Blood tests confirmed that the weight loss was caused by a hormone imbalance that has been "robbing" him of the proteins his body needs to be healthy, Jobs said.
"The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I've already begun treatment," he said, adding that he will continue as Apple's CEO during his recovery.
Jobs, a co-founder of Apple, resigned from the company in 1985,but returned in 1997 and has since served as its CEO.
In 2004, Jobs underwent a surgery to treat a rare, far less aggressive form of pancreatic cancer.
In the following years, his thin, almost gaunt appearance while delivering keynote speeches at some major conferences constantly inspired speculations about his health.
In December 2008, Apple announced that Jobs would not deliver the keynote address at the Macworld Conference and Expo 2009 which is scheduled for this Tuesday in San Francisco.
This fueled new rumors about Jobs' health. He had given the Macworld keynote address for the past 11 consecutive years.
At the end of 2008, tech blog Gizmodo reported that an unnamed reliable source said Jobs canceled the Macworld keynote address because of "rapidly declining" health. Apple's stock plummeted momentarily following the report.
In his letter, Jobs noted that the decision to skip the Macworld keynote address set off another flurry of rumors about his health, "with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed."
In a separate statement posted Monday on Apple's website, the company's Board of Directors said "Apple is very lucky to have Steve as its leader and CEO, and he deserves our complete and unwavering support during his recuperation."
"It is widely recognized both inside and outside of Apple that Steve Jobs is one of the most talented and effective CEOs in the world," the statement said.

Jobs to remain Apple's head despite "hormone imbalance"

Apple's iconic founder Steve Jobs said he has an easily treated "hormone imbalance" and will remain head of the company.
Jobs, a pancreatic cancer survivor, said in the statement Monday, "I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple's CEO," breaking his silence about his health for the first time in months.
The statement followed widespread investor concern about the executive's health, after Jobs decided not to give the keynote speech at Apple product showcase Macworld this week.
Speculation about his health started in June 2008, when Jobs appeared markedly thinner at an Apple event.
Jobs acknowledged he had been losing weight throughout 2008 and that his doctors determined "a hormone imbalance that has been 'robbing' me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy."
He said the remedy for "this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward" and that he has begun treatment.
Jobs also said he would remain CEO during his recovery and that his doctors expect him to regain his weight by late spring.
Apple's board released a separate statement, saying, "Apple is very lucky to have Steve as its leader and CEO, and he deserves our complete and unwavering support during his recuperation. He most certainly has that from Apple and its board."
Jobs is seen as the driver of Apple's successful products, including Macintosh computers, iPod media players and iPhones.

China's retail sales up 13% during three-day New Year holiday

Retail sales rose 13 percent year-on-year in the three-day New Year holiday, China's Ministry of Commerce (MOC) reported on Sunday.

The 1,000 retail enterprises involved in the calculation reported total revenue of 12.5 billion yuan (1.83 billion U.S. dollars) from Jan. 1 to Jan. 3.

An unidentified official from the MOC Market Operation division said sales promotions and exhibits boosted consumption nationwide.

As the major holiday of the year, the Spring Festival, is approaching, food, discounted clothes, shoes and home appliances sold well, although luxury goods sales declined, he said.

Restaurants were busy with bookings of families and friends. On Jan. 1, key restaurants in the survey saw an 18 percent rise in revenue, compared with the previous day. Also on New Year's Day, 11 outlets of the Quanjude roast duck restaurant had a 15 percent rise in combined income.

Prices of daily necessities remained stable over the three-day period, the ministry said.

Danish PM calls for more vigorous response to global warming

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen Thursday called on all countries to make prompt commitments to jointly tackle the urgent issue of ever-worsening climate change.
In his new year address, Rasmussen stressed time and again the importance of environmental protection.
The increasing import of oil and gas in many countries indicates the soaring global energy consumption, he said.
World leaders should plan to reduce the consumption of non-renewable resources, further develop green energy to protect the fragile global climate while striving to revive their national economy and improve people's livelihood in the new year, he added.
An agreement was reached by the European Union leaders last month on a climate change package aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, making 20 percent energy saving and bringing renewable energy sources up to 20 percent of total energy use.
The EU's package plan was approved following the Poznan climate talks in Poland, the United Nation's annual summit on climate change, which produced scant progress towards a possible deal in Copenhagen in December.
The Copenhagen negotiations are scheduled to ink a new global treaty on fighting global warming to succeed the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol which is to expire in 2012.
"The overall political message that we have sent to the rest ofthe world is that Europe is taking the lead," Rasmussen said afterthe European leaders agreed on the package plan.

Fathering sons, daughters may be in man's genes

BEIJING, Jan. 3 -- A UK researcher has a new explanation for how the human race manages to keep a fairly even balance of males and females, despite massive deaths of young males in war and selective abortion of female fetuses in certain parts of the world.
Corry Gellatly, a research scientist at Newcastle University, proposes that there's a gene that determines whether a man will father more sons, more daughters, or equal numbers of each. When females are in short supply, they have a better chance of snagging a mate, and are thus more likely to pass the gene for fathering daughters on to their offspring. And when men are scarce, they have a better chance of mating and passing along the gene for having sons.
"It's kind of a counter-balancing mechanism," Gellatly explained. "You can't get a population that becomes too skewed toward males or too skewed toward females."
The ratio of male to female births jumped significantly at the end of each of the world wars in countries involved in the fighting. A number of hypotheses have been floated to explain why. One idea is that returning soldiers have extra-frequent sex with their partners, which could lead to fertilization earlier in the menstrual cycle, possibly making male births more likely.
After sorting through 927 family trees from North America and Europe, including 556,387 people in all, Gellatly proposes another explanation.
In an article published online in the journal Evolutionary Biology, the researcher suggests that men carry a gene that controls their ratio of X to Y sperm, and thus the likelihood of their fathering sons or daughters.
Gellatly made a computer model simulating how the gene would act over 500 generations, and examined whether offspring sex ratios in the real-life family trees supported his hypothesis. Both experiments bore out his idea of a gene for gender.
Almost all of our genes come in pairs, with one being inherited from each parent. Gellatly hypothesizes that the gender-controlling gene comes in a "male" and "female" version, with three possible combinations of the two.
A man could have a "male-male" gene, which would promote the formation of Y sperm; a "male-female" gene, which would cause him to produce about the same number of X and Y sperm; and a "female-female" gene, which would cause him to make more X sperm.
"The structure of the proposed gene is essentially very basic, and its function is simply to say 'produce more boys' or 'produce more girls,'" Gellatly explains.

Brain blamed for hearing trouble at holiday parties

Researchers in New York have identified brain to be blamed for hearing trouble with background noise, according to media reports Tuesday.
They said the hearing trouble, sometimes called the cocktail party problem, may lie in the brain's dimmer switch for controlling the input from ears. That bit of brain circuitry appears to falter with age, and scientists are getting some clues about why.
"I think it's a significant player," said Robert Frisina of the University of Rochester in New York, who is studying it.
Scientists have long known that the brain not only receives signals from the ears, but can also talk back to them. And when there's too much noise, this dimmer-switch brain circuitry tells the ears to reduce their flow of signals to the brain.
Frisina and colleagues published evidence in 2002 that the dimmer switch effectiveness declines with age. The drop-off showed up in middle-aged people (ages 38 to 52) and was even worse in people past age 62.
Another crucial element lies within the inner ear, where sound is converted to nerve signals and accomplished by cells that use delicate hairs to detect sound waves. These hair cells can be damaged by aging and by long hours in loud environments like rock concerts. Loss of those cells makes it harder to understand speech in noisy rooms.

Study links molecule to muscle cancer

Researchers at the Ohio State University have discovered that a molecule implicated in leukemia and lung cancer is also important in muscle repair and in a muscle cancer that strikes mainly children.
The study is published in the current issue of the journal Cancer Cell. It shows that immature muscle cells require the molecule, called miR-29, to become mature, and that the molecule is nearly missing in cells from rhabdomyosarcoma, a cancer caused by the proliferation of immature muscle cells.
Cells from human rhabdomyosarcoma tumors showed levels of the molecule that were 10 percent or less of those in normal muscle cells. Artificially raising the level of the molecule in the cancer cells cut their growth by half and caused them to begin maturing, slowing down tumor growth.
MiR-29 is a type of microRNA, a family of molecules that helps regulate the proteins cells produce. Researchers say this study is unusual because it also sheds light on how a microRNA itself is regulated. They discovered that the gene for miR-29 is silenced bythe action of a special protein. Their study shows that this protein is present at high levels in rhabdomyosarcoma cells, and that this keeps miR-29 shut off, preventing muscle progenitor cells from maturing.
"This study shows that there is a connection between this microRNA, muscle development and rhabdomyosarcoma," says lead researcher Denis Guttridge. "The findings should give us a better understanding of muscle repair and development, and of rhabdomyosarcoma, and could lead to new treatments for this and other muscle diseases."