World's loneliest bug turns up in Death Valley

An improbable microbe, first found living 3.3 kilometres below South Africa, has been glimpsed half a world away in California.

Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator was found in water-filled fractures in South Africa's deep gold mines, where it lives isolated from every other life form on Earth.

Uniquely, the bacterium has evolved to do without the sun's energy, relying only on hydrogen and sulphate, which can form naturally in its subterranean home.

Until recently, biologists thought that the species was confined to South Africa's depths – although related DNA has shown up in Europe and in igneous crust below the sea floor.

Now, a project to map Earth's deep biosphere – the Census of Deep Life – has found DNA 99 per cent identical to that of D. audaxviator tens of thousands of kilometres away, in boreholes 900 metres deep near Death Valley in eastern California.

Duane Moser at the Desert Research Institute in Las Vegas, Nevada, discussed the find at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco on 6 December. "We're reasonably sure we're looking at the same bug," he says.

Life can find a way

If so, D. audaxviator – literally, "bold traveller" – merits its name. If the bacterium came from South Africa, it probably started out at shallow depths and evolved to live in ever-greater isolation as it descended, says Moser. But then some bacteria may have made the return journey and reached the surface, perhaps through water springs. From there they may have surfed the winds before raining down on the US and begun to descend once more.

The scenario is certainly possible, says Tullis Onstott at Princeton University, who has worked extensively on the South African D. audaxviator populations.

Alternatively, the horizontal flow of water underground may allow deep microbes to colonise new regions without returning to the surface, says Jan Amend at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The move between South Africa and the New World must have happened before the Atlantic opened between them, though.

"We're taught in school that all life needs some input from the sun," says Moser. "What we're seeing in D. audaxviator is that even where the sun hasn't shone for hundreds of millions of years – like the interior of Earth or Mars – life can find a way."

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Land parcel in Sembawang receives top bid of S$211.9m

SINGAPORE: The tender for a land parcel located at Sembawang Crescent/Sembawang Drive closed on Thursday with a top bid of $211.92 million.

The site, measuring 21,718.4 square metres, received a total of eight bids.

In a statement, the Housing and Development Board (HDB) said the top bid came from boutique developer JBE Holdings, while the second highest bid of S$210.1 million was handed in by FCL Place Pte. Ltd. and Hytech Builders.

Meanwhile, two joint bidders submitted the third highest tender price of S$208.5 million. They were Master Contract Services Pte Ltd & Keong Hong Construction and Peak Square Pte. Ltd. & Low Keng Huat (Singapore) Limited.

The lowest bid of S$184 million came from Mezzo Development.

The site can be developed into an executive condominium housing with around 650 units. It has a maximum gross floor area of 60,811.52 square metres and gross plot ratio of 2.8. The lease term is 99 years.

HDB said the decision on the tender award will be announced at a later date after the bids have been evaluated.

- CNA/de

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Apple, publishers settle in EU e-book antitrust case

Apple and four major publishers have settled a case with European antitrust regulators after negotiations began in September, ending an ongoing row over e-book price fixing.

The iPhone and
iPad maker, along with HarperCollins, Hachette Livre, Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck-owned Macmillan, and CBS-owned Simon & Schuster (CNET and ZDNet are also owned by CBS), all agreed to legally binding conditions that would ease pricing restrictions on Amazon and other e-book sellers.

A fifth publisher, Penguin -- owned by U.K. group Pearson -- is still under investigation as the publisher "chose not to offer commitments," but the Commission said it was still in discussions with the publisher.

The European Commission said in a statement that the companies "may have contrived to limit retail price competition for e-books in the European Economic Area (EEA), in breach of EU antitrust rules." In order to address these concerns, the e-book publishers have offered to "terminate on-going agency agreements and to exclude certain clauses in their agency agreements during the next five years."

It's taken a year for European antitrust authorities to reach this point after U.K. trading authorities first raided offices and began investigating on behalf of the EU. Once the EU was involved, allegations were made that Apple and its partner publishers had conspired to restrict competition by fixing the prices of e-books.

The Commission had opened the antitrust case to investigate whether the publishers were "helped" by Apple to fix e-book pricing. It is also alleged that the actions could have blocked rivals, such as Amazon, which has a different "wholesale" pricing model, and ultimately hurt consumers.

Amazon's pricing model gives much greater flexibility to e-book makers and sellers, allowing them to price what they like for their work, and even at a loss, while Apple takes an 'agency' fee of 30 percent of each e-book sale.

The publishers also agreed to end a "most-favored-nation" clause, which allows a retailer to apply a lower retail price for an e-book by another retailer, regardless of the model used by other retailers. This meant that retailers could take a slice of the profits, which could have a knock-on effect to smaller booksellers.

The Commission said in the statement that it was concerned that the switch to these agency contracts "may have been coordinated between the publishers and Apple, as part of a common strategy aimed at raising retail prices for e-books or preventing the introduction of lower retail prices for e-books on a global scale."

The agency said it was "satisfied" that these commitments will "remedy the identified competition" that Europe's executive body identified.

EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia said: "While each separate publisher and each retailer of e-books are free to choose the type of business relationship they prefer, any form of collusion to restrict or eliminate competition is simply unacceptable."

He added: "The commitments proposed by Apple and the four publishers will restore normal competitive conditions in this new and fast-moving market, to the benefit of the buyers and readers of e-books."

This story originally appeared at ZDNet's Between the Lines under the headline "EU ends e-book pricing antitrust probe after Apple, publishers settle."

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Hubble Discovers Oldest Known Galaxy

The Hubble space telescope has discovered seven primitive galaxies formed in the earliest days of the cosmos, including one believed to be the oldest ever detected.

The discovery, announced Wednesday, is part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field campaign to determine how and when galaxies first assembled following the Big Bang.

"This 'cosmic dawn' was not a single, dramatic event," said astrophysicist Richard Ellis with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Rather, galaxies appear to have been formed over hundreds of millions of years.

Ellis led a team that used Hubble to look at one small section of the sky for a hundred hours. The grainy images of faint galaxies include one researchers determined to be from a period 380 million years after the onset of the universe—the closest in time to the Big Bang ever observed.

The cosmos is about 13.7 billion years old, so the newly discovered galaxy was present when the universe was 4 percent of its current age. The other six galaxies were sending out light from between 380 million and 600 million years after the Big Bang. (See pictures of "Hubble's Top Ten Discoveries.")

Baby Pictures

The images are "like the first ultrasounds of [an] infant," said Abraham Loeb, a specialist in the early cosmos at Harvard University. "These are the building blocks of the galaxies we now have."

These early galaxies were a thousand times denser than galaxies are now and were much closer together as well, Ellis said. But they were also less luminous than later galaxies.

The team used a set of four filters to analyze the near infrared wavelengths captured by Hubble Wide Field Camera 3, and estimated the galaxies' distances from Earth by studying their colors. At a NASA teleconference, team members said they had pushed Hubble's detection capabilities about as far as they could go and would most likely not be able to identify galaxies from further back in time until the James Webb Space Telescope launches toward the end of the decade. (Learn about the Hubble telescope.)

"Although we may have reached back as far as Hubble will see, Hubble has set the stage for Webb," said team member Anton Koekemoer of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "Our work indicates there is a rich field of even earlier galaxies that Webb will be able to study."

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McAfee Returns to US, Admits Playing 'Crazy Card'

John McAfee's month-long international run from police through two Central American nations ended with a flight to Miami, where the businessman who says he abandoned his fortune admitted to playing the "crazy card."

As a gaggle of media waited near several exit doors at the airport Wednesday night, federal authorities whisked the founder of McAfee anti-virus software off the plane and into a van.

"They said, 'Mr. McAfee, please step forward,'" McAfee, 67, later told ABC News exclusively overnight at a Miami Beach hotel. "I was met by a dozen or maybe fewer officers. I said, 'Am I arrested?' They said, 'No, sir, I am here to help you.' That felt the best of all."

He eventually snuck out of the airport in a cab and headed to South Beach. After walking down famed Ocean Drive to the bewilderment of tourists and eating sushi, his first meal in three days, he sat down with ABC News and admitted to playing the "crazy card" and says he is broke.

"I have nothing now," McAfee said. He claims he left everything behind in Belize, including $20 million in investments and about 15 properties. "I've got a pair of clothes and shoes, my friend dropped off some cash."

Just hours earlier, the self-made millionaire was deported by Guatemalan police who forced him aboard his U.S.-bound flight away from the home and the two women he said he loves. After he arrived on South Beach, he said, a mysterious "Canadian friend" ordered another man he'd never met to drop off a wad of fresh $5 bills that McAfee later displayed to ABC News, pulling them from his coat pocket.

He says he left his fortune, including a beachfront compound, behind after his neighbor Greg Faull was found shot to death in Belize on Nov. 10.

John McAfee Arrested in Guatemala Overnight Watch Video

Software Founder Breaks Silence: McAfee Speaks on Murder Allegations Watch Video

Belize officials said he isn't a suspect, but when they asked to question him, McAfee disguised himself and ran.

After three weeks ducking authorities in Belize, by hiding in attics, in the jungle and in dingy hotels, he turned up in Guatemala Dec. 3.

Barely a day later he was detained for entering the country illegally. As Guatemala officials grappled with how to handle his request for asylum and the Belize government's demand for his deportation, McAfee fell ill. The mysterious illness, described by his attorney alternately as a heart ailment or a nervous breakdown, led to a scene with reporters chasing his ambulance down the narrow streets of Guatemala City and right into the emergency room, where McAfee appeared unresponsive.

He now says it was all a ruse:
"It was a deception but who did it hurt? I look pretty healthy, don't I?"

He says he faked the illness in order to buy some time for a judge to hear his case and stay his deportation to Belize, a government he believes wants him dead. When asked whether he believes Belize officials where inept, he didn't mince words.

"I was on the run with a 20-year-old girl for three and a half weeks inside their borders and everyone was looking for me, and they did not catch me," he said. "I escaped, was captured and they tried to send me back. Now I'm sitting in Miami. There had to be some ineptness."

The man who many believe only wants attention answered critics who called his month-long odyssey and blog posts a publicity stunt by simply saying, "What's a better story, millionaire mad man on the run. You [the media] saved my ass. Because you paid attention to the story. As long as you are reporting, it is hard to whack somebody that the world is watching."

He denies any involvement in his neighbor's death but adds that he is not particularly concerned about clearing his name. He is focused on getting his 20-year-old and 17-year-old girlfriends out of Belize and says he has no idea what he'll do next, where he'll live or how he'll support himself.

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Artificial muscle for soft robots can bend in sunlight

Douglas Heaven, reporter

Robots aren't known for being light on their feet, but a new artificial muscle that can be powered by a sunbeam could change that. Researchers have developed a photoresponsive actuator - a gel-like material that bends when it is exposed to light.

Akira Harada at Osaka University in Japan and colleagues have developed a prototype that works in water. When hit with UV light at a wavelength of 365 nanometres it expands, bending and increasing in mass by taking on water. Visible light at a wavelength of 430 nm restores the muscle to its previous form. "The gel absorbs water like an expanding and contracting sponge," says Harada.

The muscles work via the interaction of two chemical compounds in the gel - azobendrine and cyclodextrin - which react differently under different light. The direction in which the gel bends can then be controlled by shining UV and visible light from various angles.

Light-activated muscles are likely to be most applicable in soft robots, which are built from materials such as gel or rubber and lack a skeletal frame. Existing examples tend to move pneumatically, but the need for an umbilical air hose keeps them tethered. Soft robots are also currently limited by their inability to carry heavy loads such as a battery.

By using light as an external power source, soft robots could be given a much greater range. Even sunlight could be used, says Harada.

Journal reference: Nature Communications, doi.org/jzr

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PM to "carefully consider" whether to call by-election

SINGAPORE: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said he will carefully consider whether to call a by-election in Punggol East and, if so, when.

This follows the resignation of Michael Palmer as MP for the area.

In a statement to the media on Wednesday, Mr Lee also assured Singaporeans that he will make his decision based on what he said, "is best for the constituents of Punggol East and the country."

Mr Lee pointed out that Singapore is currently focused on several national issues.

He cited the 'Our Singapore Conversation', which he said is making good progress.

Mr Lee added the White Paper on Population will be debated in Parliament in January.

Separately, the government is also preparing for Budget 2013.

Mr Lee said his first priority is to ensure that the residents of Punggol East continue to be well taken care of.

"We have appointed Mr Teo Ser Luck to oversee Punggol East constituency, and Mr Zainal Sapari to chair the Pasir Ris-Punggol Town Council. DPM Teo Chee Hean, who himself is in Pasir Ris-Punggol GRC, will also take a personal interest in the welfare of Punggol East residents," said Mr Lee.

The Constitution does not require the prime minister to call a by-election within any fixed time frame.

The Workers' Party (WP) and the Singapore People's Party (SPP) have urged the prime minister to call a by-election as soon as possible.

And speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a Meet-the-People Session on Wednesday, WP chief Low Thia Khiang said he was surprised by Mr Palmer's resignation, which he said was unexpected.

Mr Low also said it was not fair to draw a comparison between Mr Palmer's situation and that of former WP MP Yaw Shin Leong, who was sacked by the party due to personal indiscretions.

Mr Low said his party is ready to contest in the event a by-election in the Punggol East ward is held.

"It's premature at this point to speculate who will be the candidate. Anyway we don't know whether the prime minister is going to call a by-election at all. We'll let you know the moment by-election is announced. We'll decide who to field," he added.

Mr Low also said that in the selection of political candidates, no process was foolproof.

- CNA/ir

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Google's Schmidt: Android is 'winning that war' with Apple

It's hard to argue with Schmidt.

(Credit:
IDC)

Google chairman Eric Schmidt believes
Android's war with iOS is just about over -- and his team won.

Speaking to Bloomberg in an interview published this morning, Schmidt said that Android's ongoing market share battle with Apple's iOS "is of the scale of 20 years ago -- Microsoft versus Apple." He went on to say that in his opinion, "we're winning that war pretty clearly now."

It might be difficult to argue with Schmidt's point. Research firm IDC reported last month that during the third quarter, Android shipments accounted for 75 percent of the entire market. Apple's iOS came in second with 14.9 percent share. During the same period in 2011, Android's market share could only muster 57.5 percent ownership, compared to a 13.8 percent share for iOS.

Schmidt's comparison to Windows versus OS X might also be appropriate. Windows was able to dominate the operating system space because a slew of vendors were bundling the software in their products. Apple, meanwhile, kept OS X for itself, and only used the software on its own products.

A similar scenario plays out in the mobile market. There are countless Android-based devices hitting store shelves each year, but there are far fewer iOS-based products.

Schmidt didn't only focus his discussion on Apple competition. In a brief mention of Facebook, the Google chairman said that he believes Google+ is a "viable competitor to Facebook."

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Best Space Pictures of 2012: Editor's Picks

Photograph courtesy Tunç Tezel, APOY/Royal Observatory

This image of the Milky Way's vast star fields hanging over a valley of human-made light was recognized in the 2012 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition run by the U.K.’s Royal Observatory Greenwich.

To get the shot, photographer Tunç Tezel trekked to Uludag National Park near his hometown of Bursa, Turkey. He intended to watch the moon and evening planets, then take in the Perseids meteor shower.

"We live in a spiral arm of the Milky Way, so when we gaze through the thickness of our galaxy, we see it as a band of dense star fields encircling the sky," said Marek Kukula, the Royal Observatory's public astronomer and a contest judge.

Full story>>

Why We Love It

"I like the way this view of the Milky Way also shows us a compelling foreground landscape. It also hints at the astronomy problems caused by light pollution."—Chris Combs, news photo editor

Published December 11, 2012

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Mall Gunman Wanted to Kill 'Total Strangers'

The masked gunman who opened fire in the crowded Clackamas Town Center mall in suburban Portland, Ore., killing two and seriously injuring a third before killing himself, was trying to "kill as many people as possible."

The shooter, wearing a white hockey mask, black clothing and a bullet proof vest, tore through the mall just before 3:30 p.m. Tuesday, entering through a Macy's store and heading to the food court and public areas spraying bullets, according to witness reports.

Police have identified the gunman, but have not released his name, Sheriff Craig Roberts told "Good Morning America."

"We have been able to identify the shooter over this last night," Roberts said. "I believe, at least from the information that's been provided to me at this point in time, it really was a killing of total strangers. To my knowledge at this point in time he was really trying, I think, to kill as many people as possible."

Police have not released the names of the shooter's victims. Clackamas County Sheriff's Department Lt. James Rhodes said authorities are in the process of notifying victims' families.

The injured victim, identified by hospital officials as Kristina Shevchenko, has been taken to a hospital, according to Roberts.

PHOTOS: Oregon Mall Shooting

Craig Mitchelldyer/Getty Images

Oregon Mall Shooting: 'Killing of Total Strangers' Watch Video

Oregon Mall Shooting: Woman on Macy's Employee's Heroism Watch Video

Oregon Mall Shooting: At Least 3 People Dead Watch Video

Nadia Telguz, who said she was a friend of Shevchenko, told ABC News affiliate KATU-TV in Portland that the woman was expected to recover.

"My friend's sister got shot," Teleguz told KATU. "She's on her way to (Oregon Health and Science University Hospital). They're saying she got shot in her side and so it's not life-threatening, so she'll be OK."

Witnesses from the shooting rampage said that a young man who appeared to be a teenager, ran through the upper level of Macy's to the mall food court, firing multiple shots, one right after the other, with what is believed to be a black, semi-automatic rifle.

By 4:40 p.m., police reported finding a group of people hiding in a storeroom. In a surreal moment, even the mall Santa was seen running for his life.

"I didn't know where the gunman was, so I decided to kind of eased my way out," said the mall Santa, who the AP identified as 68-year-old Brance Wilson.

More than 10,000 shoppers were at the mall during the day, according to police. Roberts said that officers responded to the scene of the shooting within minutes, and four SWAT teams swept the 1.4 million-square-foot building searching for the shooter. He was eventually found dead, an apparent suicide.

"I can confirm the shooter is dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound," Rhodes said. "By all accounts there were no rounds fired by law enforcement today in the mall."

Roberts said more than 100 law enforcement officers responded to the shooting, and the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are working with local agencies to trace the shooter's weapon.

Cell phone video shot at the scene shows the chaos soon after the shooting. When police arrived they were met head on by terrified shoppers, children and employees streaming out. Customers, even a little girl, were being lead out with their hands up.

"I think a variety of things happened that I think this could have been much, much worse," Roberts told "GMA." "And to give you some ideas, we got the call at 3:29, we had someone on scene within a minute, 30 seconds.

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