towns and rural communities to offer their citizens fast and cheap broadband Internet. The move would ask the Federal Communications Commission to address state laws that prevent cities from building their own municipal Internet services.
But it's likely to anger major cable and Internet companies. Obama announced his plans in Cedar Falls, Iowa,
which is home to a 1 GB broadband network 100 times faster than the national average."
"He said greater access to faster Internet will make the U s. more competitive globally.""There are real-world consequences to this,
because his state has rural communities with no access to the Internet.""It's become a pattern that he goes to a state where there's a Republican governor that's doing something that he'd like to replicate on a national level,
Nineteen states have laws that prevent their cities'from building their own broadband networks. Supporters of those laws say they protect taxpayers.
Obama's plans would include technical know-how and financial assistance to those towns, cities and rural communities that want to improve Internet service for their residents."
"I believe that a community has the right to make its own choice and to provide its own broadband
The plan is likely to be opposed by companies such as Comcast and Verizon, which provide Internet services around the nation.
Obama's support for net neutrality and an open Internet have angered already these firms because the president wants the Internet reclassified as a public utility.
Broadband for America a group whose members include major Internet service providers, said while it strongly agrees Obama's plan to expand broadband access,
the president"is risking the success we have witnessed by advocating for the reclassification of broadband as a Title II public utility unprecedented government interference that would stifle private investment,
hinder innovation and undermine the growth of the Internet.""Chattanooga, Tenn. Chattanooga's publicly owned electric company has built already a municipal broadband network in the city. and Wilson,
N c.,have asked the FCC to intervene against state laws that limit publicly funded Internet.""I believe that it is in the best interests of consumers
and competition that the FCC exercises its power to preempt state laws that ban or restrict competition from community broadband,
"FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler wrote in a blog post last year.""Given the opportunity, we will do so."
NPR's Joel Rose has reported previously on how some cities are taking high-speed Internet into their own hands o
#Centcom's Twitter Feed Youtube Channel Hacked The Twitter feed and the Youtube channel of U s. Central Command were compromised on Monday a Pentagon spokesman said.
We are taking appropriate measures to address the matter. I have no further information to provide at this time the spokesman said.
and switched the avatar from the Centcom logo to a photo of a masked fighter.
'A Case Of Cybervandalism'Saying that its operational military networks were compromised not Centcom has released a statement saying it is viewing this purely as a case of cybervandalism.
and that none of the information posted came from CENTCOM's server or social media sites.
On Twitter the hackers released what they purported was a phone list of retired U s. generals as well as
what appear to be presentation slides from the government-funded Lincoln Laboratory at MIT. Pentagon Networks Hacked one tweet read.
At this time however there is no evidence Pentagon servers were compromised. The only thing we know for sure is that credentials for the social media channels
which are hosted on Twitter and Youtube servers were compromised. Quoting defense officials Reuters reports that the images published on Twitter do not appear to pose a security threat
or include classified information. Twitter and Youtube have suspended the accounts s
#Researchers Create Artificial organs That Fit in Your Hand Great balls of cells! Scientists are developing mock human organs that can fit in the palm of your hand.
These organs-on-a-chip are designed to test drugs and help understand the basics of how organs function
when they are healthy and when they are diseased. For instance, you have your gut-on-a-chip being developed at the Johns Hopkins School of medicine.
It's a high-tech approach to dealing with a scourge of the low-tech world.""I'm interested in solving a worldwide problem of diarrheal diseases,
"says Dr. Mark Donowitz, who runs this lab. He says 800,000 children a year die from these diseases notably cholera, rotavirus and certain strains of E coli."
"We've failed so far to find drugs to treat diarrhea using cell culture models
and mouse intestine, "Donowitz says. Mice simply don't react the way we do to these germs,
so they aren't very helpful for studying diseases of the gut. So Donowitz's team is building
what it hopes will be a much better way to study these diseases: the gut-on-a-chip.
Truth be told, there's not a lot to see. Postdoctoral researcher Jennifer Foulke-Abel holds one in the palm of her hand.
It's a thin sheet of glass, topped with a plastic microscope slide and a tiny cavity inside.
Half a dozen spaghetti-size tubes bristle from the device.""The reason there are so many tubes is we have a vacuum chamber that will cause the membrane to stretch,
whether cells in the ersatz organ react the same way to diseases as do cells in the human gut."
"And in all three of the diseases I mentioned, we've been able to take that first step,
"So we know that these appear to be really good models of the human disease."
The guts-on-a-chip produce digestive enzymes, hormones and mucus, but they don't yet incorporate other parts of the human intestine, such as blood vessels or nerve cells."
if you are going to reproduce intestinal biology, "Donowitz says. This lab is moving in that direction.
one use will be to test potential drugs for the diseases being studied.""We think this could be a real step forward in terms of reducing waste-of-time drug development,
#Wi-fi Everywhere May Let You Roam Free From Your Mobile Carrier To get the most out of your smartphone do need you really a cellphone plan?
when he spent a month relying only on Wi-fi networks for his mobile data and voice needs.
and adjustments to your routine you can get almost as much out of your smartphone with a monthly bill of $0.
The frustrations of the switch were relatively minimal Knutson told NPR's Robert Siegel in an interview conducted over Skype.
but with Wi-fi they're hotspots Knutson said. So you can't walk down the street
or drive in a car while doing the Wi-fi only plan because the signals just don't carry far enough to cover you over long distances.
There are companies lining up to help you make the switch-an app to help you find nearby hotspots even
if you're offline companies stitching individual hotspots into networks and carriers with cheap plans that rely on Wi-fi first
and roam on the network of a cellular provider such as Sprint as a backup. Google on Monday announced its own plans to enter the cellphone carrier market The New york times reported:
The ease of his transition and the burgeoning competition could pose serious issues for the industry Knutson writes:
Knutson told Siegel that cellphone providers aren't worried about the competition saying there always will be a market for people who will pay money to have connectivity wherever they go
but that the pattern fits into one described by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma-a low-cost low-quality alternative that slowly improves until it has claimed the bulk of an industry's customers s
#Meet Mafiaboy The'Bratty Kid'Who Took Down The Internet This week, the country's second-largest health insurance company,
Anthem, said hackers broke into a database with personal information about 80 million of its customers.
It's just the latest in a string of large-scale cyberattacks Sony, Staples, Home depot, and JPMORGAN CHASE have all been attacked in the last nine months alone.
In January, President Obama said the cybercrime laws that are supposed to protect consumers from such attacks
and give the government tools to prosecute cybercriminals need to be updated. Many of those laws are more than a decade old
the direct result of one hacking incident that was a wake-up call for the U s. government.
In 2000, a high school student named Michael Calce, who went by the online handle Mafiaboy,
brought down the websites of Amazon, CNN, Dell, E*Trade, ebay, and Yahoo!.At the time, Yahoo!
was the biggest search engine in the world.""The New york stock exchange, they were freaking out, because they were all investing in these e-commerce companies,
"he remembers.""And then it's like, 'OK a 15-year-old kid can shut us down at any point?
Is our money really safe?'"'"For years after the attack, Calce declined to speak to the media,
He says his goal had nothing to do with money and that ultimately, he thinks, his attack has a positive impact.
when Calce got his first computer, at the age of 6 ."I was a pretty bratty kid.
me so he took a computer from his work and brought it home and was like'Here,
It was his first time on the internet, and within a few days the 9-year-old hacked the system
In 2000, he launched the hack that made him famous first taking over a handful of university networks,
and then harnessing their combined computing power to attack outside websites.""Basically when I hit enter on the keyboard,
the university networks all respond at the same exact time and basically overwhelm websites with too much information,
"he explains. It's called a denial-of-service attack. Within hours, he had taken down six major websites."
"The overall purpose was to intimidate other hacker groups, "says Calce. Back then, he says,
"the whole of the hacking community was all about notoriety and exploration, whereas you look at hackers today
and it's all about monetization.""For the national security apparatus, the attack was a wake-up call.
"I started to notice this utility van that was parked at the end of my street at, like, Sunday at 4 a m,
The Clinton administration sent cybersecurity experts to testify.""It was a pretty big ordeal, "says Calce."
He says the internet is a far scarier place today than it was back in 2000.
and the problems and inherent flaws that come with computers and internet. s
#Hackers Strike Health insurer Anthem The country's second-biggest health insurer says cyberattackers infiltrated one of its IT systems
and obtained personal information about current and former customers as well as employees covered by the insurer."
"The information accessed includes names, birthdays, social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and employment information, including income data,
"wrote Anthem CEO Joe Swedish in a letter to the company's policyholders.""No credit card information was compromised,
nor is there evidence at this time that medical information such as claims, test results, or diagnostic codes were targeted
or obtained,"Swedish said. About 80 million of Anthem's customers and employees are affected by the incursion
which was discovered last week, according to The Wall street journal. The FBI is investigating the attack, and Anthem says it has hired a cybersecurity firm to examine its systems
The company says it has established a dedicated website where members can access information, and a dedicated toll free number that both current and former members can call
Anthem offers Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in California, New york and other states and is headquartered in Indianapolis.
One in nine Americans receives coverage for his medical care through Anthem's affiliated plans, according to a statement on its website e
A small air traffic control tower sticks out above the white horizon. But this airport actually has two air traffic control centers.
The second one is just a short walk from the airport runway. Inside a ground-floor windowless room there's a display that looks exactly like what you'd see out of an air traffic control tower.
You can see the snowy runway you can see the trees you can even see a car pulling into the airport parking lot.
But instead of windows these are actually screens. And the airport you're looking at isn't the one in Sundsvall.
It's the one in Ornskoldsvik Sweden#about 105 miles away. Ornskoldsvik is the first airport in the world to land passenger planes remotely.
and it's expensive to keep air traffic controllers there who spend hours with no planes to land.
The day you have one air traffic controller who can control two airports then you have some good benefits according to costs Backman says.
In Ornskoldsvik a set of cameras and microphones delivers a real-time image to Sundsvall. Of course new technology is notoriously glitchy.
And a problem landing an airplane is far more consequential than a laptop freezing up. Backman says when he saw the first mockup of this technology in 2004 he was dubious.
Mikael Henriksson the project manager has been an air traffic controller for 40 years. He says in all his time looking out tower windows there were only three big innovations:
blinds to block out the sun thicker glass to block out the noise and bug zappers to get rid of the flies.
For the air traffic controller this is like airline pilots going from propeller to jet Henriksson says. It's a paradigm shift.
Many Uses Including Potentially For The Militarybecause once the windows are replaced with screens you can overlay all kinds of information on the display:
Anders Carp is head of traffic management at Saab the Swedish defense and security company that created this technology.
The air traffic controllers could be a few #or a few thousand#miles away in a safe environment because it doesn't matter
whether the remote tower is across town or on the other side of the earth.
Back in the Sundsvall control center a plane descends toward the Ornskoldsvik runway. We watch it move across the screen.
The sound shifts in stereo as the plane rolls along. The passengers#and even the pilot#have no idea
whether they've been brought in for a landing from the tower they can see out their window or from this hidden remote center more than a 100 miles away
to cut out inherited DNA that can cause serious health problems in children. The House of commons voted to approve the Human Fertilization
and stoked concerns about setting a new precedent for genetic manipulation. In Britain the legislation known as the Human Fertilization and Embryology (Mitochondrial Donation) Regulations 2015 is seen as having a good chance at being approved.
The United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation estimates that from 1000 to 4000 American children are born each year with a mitochondrial disease e
#Leaky Blood vessels In The Brain May Lead To Alzheimer's Researchers appear to have found a new risk factor for Alzheimer's disease:
"This is exactly the area of the brain that is involved with learning and memory,"says Berislav Zlokovic, the study's senior author and director of the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute at the University of Southern California.
The study, published in Neuron, also found that blood vessels in the hippocampus tend to become leakier in all people as they age.
But the process is accelerated in those likely to develop Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia.
or prevent Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.""This study gives patients and families hope for the future,
hope that detecting leaky blood vessels early will provide the opportunity to stop dementia before it starts,
The new research grew out of earlier studies of people who died with Alzheimer's disease.""We were looking at brains from autopsies
the permeability of the blood-brain barrier was more than 50 percent higher in people with mild cognitive impairment.
"There's every reason to think that a lot of Alzheimer's disease does involve vascular damage, "he says. The study also adds to the evidence that amyloid plaques
There are probably several different paths to dementia, Corriveau says, including one that involves leaky blood vessels.
#Scientists Give Genetically modified organisms A Safety Switch Researchers at Harvard and Yale have used some extreme gene-manipulation tools to engineer safety features into designer organisms.
This work goes far beyond traditional genetic engineering, which involves moving a gene from one organism to another.
In this case, they're actually rewriting the language of genetics. The goal is to make modified organisms safer to use,
you may need to remember a bit of basic biology. The enzymes and other proteins in our bodies are built all from building blocks called amino acids.
There are usually just 20 amino acids in nature. But George Church a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical school, has created a bacterium that requires an additional amino acid,
one made in the lab and not found in nature. His lab did that by rewriting the bacteria's genetic language to add a"word"that calls for this unnatural amino acid."
With their altered genetic code, they are resistant to viruses that frequently attack bacteria. Viruses need the conventional DNA language
"If you get your factory contaminated, it can be hard to clean out for a year,
Viruses there contaminated a plant where bacteria were used to make drugs for two rare genetic disorders, Gaucher disease and Fabry disease, cutting off supplies.
"said Farren Isaacs, an assistant professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology at Yale university. Isaacs left Church's lab at Harvard to start his own at Yale.
He has kept pace with his former boss. He, too, has built some safety features into E coli.
It's harder to think about how this technology could be used in agriculture. Countless acres of genetically engineered crops would need to be fed this manmade ingredient, from a crop duster or by some other means.
Scientists would also need to show that the synthetic protein component is safe to eat."
"I think it's commendable they're starting to design safety into genetically modified organisms, "says Jennifer Kuzma, co-director of the Genetic engineering and Society Center at North carolina State university."
"However, I don't really think it's going to affect the public perception that much or the way we have to deal with the uncertainty anyway.
#Ebola Vaccine Hailed As'Game Changer'In Fight Against The Virus Doctors Without Borders is calling it a"champagne moment."
"In a small trial, an experimental vaccine protected 100 percent of participants who were at high risk for the virus
and preventing the next epidemic.""It is a game changer because there was nothing that could protect people against Ebola no drug,
vaccine or medicine,"says Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, assistant director-general for health systems and innovation at the World health organization,
"The vaccine, called rvsv-ZEBOV, was developed by the Public health Agency of Canada. Previous studies showed it was safe.
In April, WHO and Doctors Without Borders started testing its effectiveness in Guinea. The trial is ongoing,
The vaccine stops Ebola in its tracks, Kieny says.""When we talked with our colleagues who are responding to Ebola cases,
And we vaccinate, and the cases seem to disappear.'"'"In fact, there are so few cases in Guinea right
now that Kieny and her team couldn't use the standard method for testing a vaccine.
The strategy uses what's called ring vaccination. When a case crops up, the team rushes to scene andgives the vaccine to people who are close to the sick person those who are at high risk of getting the virus."So this can be the neighbors, the family, the coworkers,
"Kieny says.""This forms what is called a ring. These are the people that form the community around the case."
000 people in these so-called rings who were eligible for vaccination. They divided them up into two groups.
About half got vaccinated immediately, and the others had to wait three weeks for the shot.
In the group that got the vaccine immediately, no one got Ebola.""No cases at all. Zero,"Kieny says."
The problem is there were only 16 cases of Ebola in the group that didn't get the vaccine immediately.
That's way too small of a number to say how well the vaccine works,
But statistical analyses suggest the vaccine's efficacy is at least 70 percent, Kieny says which is still good enough to stop the spread of the disease."
"I think it is very encouraging to see these very positive, preliminary results of this vaccine trial from Guinea,"says Dr. Jesse Goodman, an infectious disease specialist at Georgetown University, who once led vaccine development at the U s. Food and Drug Administration.
Goodman says we need to be cautious about the study. More data are needed to nail down the vaccine's efficacy.
And there were a few issues with the design of the experiment that could have skewed the results."
"the strength of the difference between the groups that were vaccinated early and late suggests strongly to me that this vaccine is working. i
#The Future Of Cardiology Will be shown In 3-D How can you tell the difference between a good surgeon and an exceptional one?
You could start by looking for the one who has the rare ability to visualize a human organ in three dimensions from little more than a scan."
"The handful of the top surgeons in the world are said like sculptors Dr. Deepak Srivastava, a director at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease in San francisco."
"When cardiovascular surgeons go in to repair a defect in the heart, their success is so often dependent on an ability to see the anatomy in 3-D in their minds,
"said Srivastava.""That's more difficult for younger, less experienced surgeons.""But recent advancements in the field of computer-based modeling may make it easier someday for good surgeons to be great.
One such technology comes from Dassault systèmes, a French company that specializes in 3-D software to help engineers who design cars
and planes avoid potentially fatal outcomes. Earlier this week, Dassault released its highly realistic digital model of the human heart,
which it calls the"Living Heart Project.""Doctors wear 3-D glasses and use a joystick to zoom in to a ventricle or valve,
while listening to every heartbeat.""We take a patient's scan, reconstruct it into a 3-D model,
and test all the possibilities before a heart surgery,"said Dr. Steve Levine, chief strategy officer and director for the Living Heart Project.
The technology hasn't received regulatory approval for doctors to use it in making medical decisions.
But hospitals can buy it for research and educational purposes, such as exploring triggers that cause heart attacks.
Dassault hopes that medical device makers will also use the Living Heart Project's technology for research and development.
The software is free to organizations that agree to conduct research and share their findings with the project.
Otherwise licenses start at $15, 000 a year for commercial use, with educational licenses starting at $500 per year.
Recruiting Partners in Health care For the Living Heart Project, Levine has recruited so far 45 partners,
including the Mayo Clinic, Stanford university and the University of Oxford. Levine said the Food and Drug Administration initially wanted to take a"watch
and wait"approach when told about the project.""I told them, you can't sit on the sidelines as nonparticipants.
You have to get involved.""In 2014, the agency agreed to work with Dassault on a five-year research project that will focus on the reliability of pacemaker leads (the thin wires that carry an electrical impulse from the device to the heart.
But the agency said that it won't necessarily endorse any of the computational models that are developed as part of the research."
"Challenges to greater adoption of computer-modeling include a lack of data for some medical conditions,
At the University of California, San francisco, a team of researchers in the cardiology division are hoping to use the Living Heart Project to figure out the best time to replace patients'heart valves.
Surgeons have to strike the right balance between swapping out too early, when a valve is still working reasonably well,
But he isn't convinced it will transform how are surgeries are performed.""Is this a hammer looking for a nail?"
"Or will this change how we practice medicine?""He said he hopes advanced technology can fill some gaps,
where surgeons are still making educated guesses, such as the timing of valve replacements. But he also said he hasn't seen a convincing study yet that proves the simulation can improve patient outcomes.
Unlike simulations involving manmade objects such as cars and planes, it's very difficult to predict how the human heart will respond to stress in the real world.
Olgin said he fears that doctors could come to rely too heavily on this technology and medical device makers could pull the plug on promising research
if the simulation shows a negative result.""The technology doesn't offer the same level of evidence as medical research on animals or small pilot human trials,
Internet connections were getting faster, hard drives stored more data in tinier spaces, songs were easier than ever to find and available for little or no money.
Every year, the new version of Apple's ipod, first introduced in 2001 with a now-adorable 5gb of storage space, held thousands upon thousands more songs.
It was easy to imagine this trend approaching a music lover's fantasy: a day in the future when we'd be able to carry songs in our pockets, at full fidelity, by the millions.
which was discontinued after just 13 years, looks as quaint as Sony's Walkman cassette player, which survived more than 30.
ad-supported and paid-subscription services that offer instant access to libraries that would make the wildest dreams of the ipod user seem tame.
and if you need writing on the wall, turn to the relentless coverage of Apple's acquisition of Beats Music,
a subscription service that is scheduled to be rolled into the itunes platform sometime this year, possibly as soon as next week.
Apple stands to gain plenty by luring its hundreds of millions of users to a subscription-based streaming service,
The transition will speed surely the decline of the single-song download, and itunes, the world's largest music store, will feel that pain acutely.
Apple's entry into the market isn't the signal that the world is ready for streaming music;
when itunes will launch its attack on established services like Spotify, we're going to examine the world of streaming music that is upon us in a series called Streaming At The Tipping Point.
The question of money of royalties is a crucial one to the survival of the recording industry.
the sources of the fundamental rift between listeners and labels the digital infection. Once you could strip a song from its physical home
The recording industry's fight against that principle took on the form of invasive digital rights management software, advertising campaigns, threats and lawsuits.
turned this germ into a pandemic. The industry could argue all it wanted that listeners didn't have the right to make copies
Every time you click play on a streaming service, from Pandora to Youtube to Spotify, you're licensing the right to listen to the song in that particular moment,
the digital download, but also the concept that fans might possess music itself. No format lives forever.
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