White House: No part in detainee release

(Photo: FOX News videos)

On Wednesday, a day after Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced its decision to release several hundred illegal immigrants from detention centers facing budget cuts, the White House stressed it had no hand in the decision.

Jay Carney, White House press secretary, told reporters at Wednesday's White House press briefing that "this was a decision made by career officials at ICE, without any input from the White House, as a result of fiscal uncertainty over the continuing resolution, as well as possible sequester." Sequester refers to the across-the-board spending cuts set to take effect March 1 in the absence of a federal budget.

Also on Wednesday, ICE, in what it said was news unrelated to the release of the detainees, announced that Gary Mead, the ICE official in charge of the agency's detention facilities, is retiring.

A day earlier the agency said it had released several hundred detainees housed at some of the nation's 250 detention centers in response to sequestration, which would cut billions out of the budget beginning this Friday. The decision immediately drew criticism from Republicans, including House Speaker John Boehner and Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who called the move a publicity stunt.

Carney stressed that the several hundred detainees released were "low-risk, noncriminal detainees" and will still be monitored until their deportations?just under a less-expensive system.

ICE estimates that it takes about $165 per day to house illegal immigrants awaiting deportation. Some immigrants are held because they cannot afford to make bail, others because they have been deemed high-risk. Department of Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said the looming budget cuts threatened her agency's ability to maintain the 34,000 detention beds they are required to have by Congress.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Associated Press reported that Mead had emailed his colleagues announcing his resignation.

ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said Mead was not resigning, but simply informing his colleagues of his long-planned desire to retire. "Gary Mead announced several weeks ago to ICE senior leadership that he planned to retire after 40 years in federal service and 6 years at ICE," Christensen wrote in an email to Yahoo News. "As planned, and as shared with ICE staff weeks ago, Mr. Mead will retire at the end of April.?

Under Mead's nearly four-year tenure, ICE has attempted to make its detention facilities less prisonlike. In some newer facilities, detainees have freedom of movement and do not have to wear traditional prison uniforms.

"We're not in the business of holding people for long-term punitive reasons, you know, serving a sentence," Mead told a reporter last year. "It was never our authority or responsibility to punish people or to correct their behavior. ? We have to treat them very differently than a state prison system or a county jail system would treat people in their custody."

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/white-house-distances-itself-decision-release-detainees-ahead-211745750--politics.html

mad cow disease rampart jimmy fallon jimmy fallon

Sound Smart: Watch This Excellent Primer on Digital Audio

A digital waveform is not really a stair-step. Even though that's how the output appears, looks can be deceiving. Let audio guru "Monty" Montgomery break it down.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/r3358Ke6_7U/

the raven the raven zerg rush david wilson playstation all stars battle royale kim zolciak kim zolciak

Nintendo Wii Mini arriving in the UK on March 22nd

When Nintendo's Wii Mini landed in Canada, as far as we were concerned, the land of Due South was welcome to it. After all, the company had robbed the budget model of its internet connectivity, backwards compatibility and its, you know, charm. Unfortunately, Nintendo now feels that the UK deserves its own opportunity to be underwhelmed by the hardware, and so will launch the system in Blighty on March 22nd. Naturally, there's no word yet on pricing, but we'd get even tetchier if Nintendo tried to price it over, say, £70.

Filed under: Gaming, Nintendo

Comments

Via: GamesIndustry

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/26/wii-mini-uk/

white house correspondents dinner phoenix coyotes bruce irvin charlie st cloud celtics nba playoffs rosario dawson

YC-Backed Microryza Is A ?Kickstarter? For Scientific Research

Do you want to know whether cannibalism existed amongst Tyrannosaurus Rexes or whether specific viruses contribute to lung cancer risk? Better yet, do you want to be part of making this research happen faster? A Y Combinator-backed startup called Microryza is positioning itself as a “Kickstarter” for science research. The idea for Microryza sprouted when Cindy Wu, then an undergraduate at University of Washington, found that she had little hope of getting funding for studying a potential anthrax therapeutic. She had discovered it after helping to create a video game that let regular people fold and create virtual enzymes. They came up with 87 different mutants that summer through the video game, and found that one could potentially treat anthrax infections after winning an MIT-based synthetic biology competition. But her professor at the time was skeptical that she could get funding to study it further. “He told me it was a small, early-stage idea and that because I was an undergraduate, I couldn’t get an NIH (National Institutes of Health) or NSF (National Science Foundation) grant,” she said. But he then let her pitch at a lab meeting and funneled money from another existing lab grant into her work. “I was so lucky. But I realized there are so many other undergraduates, graduate students and faculty members that would never be able to get funding,” she said. “I talked to 100 different scientists and found that all of them had high-risk ideas, but they never wrote proposals because they didn’t think it would go through.” So last year, she and co-founder Denny Luan launched Microryza. They work with five or six universities including the University of Washington, USC and UC Santa Cruz. They vet every single researcher on the platform. Luan said Microryza looks for three things: 1) Is the researcher who they say they are? 2) Is the proposal fundamentally new research? 3) Is the researcher capable of carrying out the project? They also work with the researchers to make sure there’s a lasting connection with their backers long after they receive funding. This is the hard part with science-focused Kickstarter concepts (and Microryza isn’t the only one), because research can take years before backers see conclusive results. There have been a few attempts with sites like Petridish, which launched last year and appears to have more than 30 completed projects. Luan and Wu worked on building an information

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/VvrGLhz6STU/

whitney houston dies dolly parton i will always love you beverly hilton hotel whitney houston found dead

JCPenney COO: 'I Hated The JCPenney Culture ... - Business Insider

JCPenney experienced a seismic shift on corporate culture when CEO Ron Johnson took the helm of the company more than a year ago.

The new guard didn't like JCPenney's old way of doing things at headquarters.

Not one bit.

Dana Mattioli at The Wall Street Journal spoke with JCPenney COO Michael Kramer about the company's culture and the mass layoffs at the company's headquarters. He's one of the execs brought in by Johnson, who he'd previously worked with at Apple.

"I hated the JCPenney culture," Kramer told the WSJ. "It was pathetic."

Senior management thought that the headquarters in Plano had become "overstaffed and underproductive" and something had to be done about it.

Kramer shared an example: There were 4,800 employees at the HQ in January 2012, and in one month they had watched five million YouTube videos during work hours.?He said that 35 percent of bandwidth at HQ was used for "loafing off."

One big consequence was the culling of staff. Now, a little more than a year later, 1,600 of those workers have been sent packing.

Another was the total destruction of the company's old corporate culture, which led to dissent among the ranks of executives at the home office who didn't agree with the changes.

Work at JCPenney HQ? What do you think about this? Shoot me an email at kbhasin@businessinsider.com.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/jcpenney-coo-michael-kramer-culture-2013-2

whitney houston funeral live pat buchanan slither slither naacp glen campbell jerusalem artichoke

How Million-Dollar Frauds Turned Photo Conservation Into a Mature Science

It's a bit reductionist to say that it's just because they're 'snobs'....the way it was explained to me by my art teacher is thus:

There are artists, and there are artisans...artists create art, artisans create craft...the yardstick used [in the art world] to differentiate the two is the ability to reproduce the work given the same skills, equipment and environment.

Take for example, two metal workers...both with the same training, equipment, environment and requirements...likely it will be difficult to spot

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/qiz1Wu1QMSQ/story01.htm

sarah palin cbi the shins atomic clock daylight savings time john mccain game changer

Paul Russell: Euthanasia's euphemisms

Here's a great summary of the changes in language employed by those who support changes to the law. This is a time-honoured campaigning tool for anyone who has ever tried to win an argument - but when dealing with life and death - it's just not appropriate.

When a social movement must rely on euphemisms to obfuscate its goals, it is a good bet that there is something wrong with its agenda. From the very beginning of the modern movement, euthanasia advocates have euphemistically bent language as a means of convincing society to endorse killing?an accurate and descriptive term that simply means to end life?as an acceptable method of ending human suffering.

Euthanasia, from the Greek, literally means ?good death.? As the historian Ian Dowbiggin has noted, the term once described ?a calm and easy? natural death at home, ?so family members and friends could say their farewells.?

That changed after an 1870 essay by a teacher named Samuel D. Williams was published arguing that the value of human life depends on whether it is ?worthwhile??an idea known today as the ?quality of life ethic??and moreover, that mercy killing and assisted suicide should be allowed for those who are ?hopelessly suffering.? The essay went viral?to use today?s terminology?and within a few years, the word euthanasia had taken on its modern meaning. The euthanasia movement has been coining new definitions and idioms ever since.

The movement?s latest euphemistic phrase is ?aid in dying,? promoted most prominently by the (euphemistically) named assisted suicide advocacy organization Compassion and Choices (which came into being after a merger with the more descriptively named Hemlock Society). According to C&C, when a terminally ill patient swallows an intentionally prescribed lethal overdose of barbiturates, it isn?t really suicide. Why? Because the word ?suicide? has negative connotations, and C&C wants people to feel positive about some self-killings.

Here?s the idea: A terminally ill patient doesn?t really want to die, but has no choice. Hence, taking an intentionally prescribed lethal overdose of ?medication??another euphemism, since the purpose is not to treat but to poison oneself?doesn?t constitute suicide. Thus, in a C&C press release from a few years ago boosting use of ?aid in dying,? the (late) Peter Goodwin, a prominent assisted suicide-participating doctor, said, ?As a physician, I resent the term ?physician-assisted suicide.? I never felt I was assisting a suicidal patient, but rather aiding a patient with his or her end of life choice.? Since then, ?aid in dying? has become ubiquitous in media stories and assisted suicide advocacy.

Note that Goodwin?s complaint had nothing to do with accuracy and everything to do with emotions. He ?feels? rather than ?thinks.? And that?s how C&C wants listeners and readers to react?emotionally rather than rationally?toward the end that people are more likely to approve of legalizing assisted suicide if it isn?t called what it actually is.

But surely, accurate language must still mean something in public policy debates. Suicide is defined as ?the act or an instance of taking one?s own life voluntarily and intentionally especially by a person of years of discretion and of sound mind.? Thus, under C&C?s reckoning, if the distraught owner of, say, a failed business intentionally takes an overdose of prescribed sleeping pills, it?s suicide. But if the same man takes the pills because he has cancer, and the doctor prescribed the pills for that purpose, it isn?t suicide. That?s nonsensical.

Assisted suicide proponents claim that changing the lexicon is necessary to avoid furthering a supposed stigma associated with suicide. I am not sure whether that stigma exists anymore. But if some suicidal people don?t kill themselves because they worry what others might think, why is that so bad? I mean, the outcome is a saved or extended life. Indeed, many once-suicidal terminally ill people later come to be glad that they didn?t do the deed. Aren?t their lives worth protecting?

I want to make it very clear that I don?t think we should judge or condemn anyone who is suicidal or commits suicide. None of us knows what our own emotional limits might be. Given sufficient despair, fear, or pain, any of us might be attracted to the siren song of self-destruction. The good news is that such causes of despair can often be treated and overcome?including in the dying.

The real issue, then, is how we react to our brothers and sisters who have fallen into a darkness sufficient to make them want to end it all. Should we engage in suicide prevention for all, or only for some? I believe that the dying deserve to have their suicidal desires treated just as seriously as the despairing widow or the troubled teen.

That?s certainly the hospice philosophy, the truly compassionate approach to terminal illness. In contrast to assisted suicide?which is about dying?hospice is about living. Hospice does not seek to simply ?extend life? but maintain its quality to the natural end, and that explicitly includes suicide prevention.

Assisted suicide is suicide.The term is descriptive and accurate. When legalized, it amounts to state-approved suicide, an issue too culturally consequential for us to allow gooey euphemisms to serve as the sugar that helps the bitter hemlock go down.

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute?s Center on Human Exceptionalism. He also consults for the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His previous ?On the Square? articles can be found here.?

Source: http://blog.noeuthanasia.org.au/2013/02/euthanasias-euphemisms.html

guacamole recipe

The Simple Secret to Time Management: Jedi Time Tricks

Imagine you were a Jedi master called Bob (your parents, whilst skilled in the ways of the force weren't the best at choosing names). The love of your life?Princess Lucia?is trapped in a burning building as you hurry to save her.

You might think of Lucia as the embodiment of your dreams, your aspirations?she is your most important thing.

Unfortunately, before you can reach her an army of stormtroopers open fire. The incoming stream of lasers demand your attention?if you fail to dodge them, you're dead. You might think of them as an urgent distraction from saving your princess.

We all know how a hero resolves this dilemma. If he takes his eye off the ultimate goal?his princess?then all his other efforts are for nought. He can engage an army of stormtroopers, cutting them down with graceful ease, but their numbers are limitless, and whilst momentarily satisfying they only distract him. Delayed too long, his princess will die.

And so it is with your life. You have things that are most important and things that are most urgent in permanent competition:

The secret to mastering your time is to systematically focus on importance and suppress urgency. Humans are pre-wired to focus on things which demand an immediate response, like alerts on their phones?and to postpone things which are most important, like going to the gym. You need to reverse that, which goes against your brain and most of human society.

Look at what you spend your day doing. Most of it, I'll warrant, is not anything you chose?it's what is being asked of you. Here's how we fix that, young padawan:

Say no. Most of us follow an implicit social contract: when someone asks you to do something you almost always say yes. It may feel very noble, but don't forget there's a dying princess you need to save, and you just agreed to slow yourself down because you were asked nicely. You may need to sacrifice some social comfort to save a life (as a bonus, people tend to instinctively respect those who can say no).

Unplug the TV. I haven't had a TV signal for 7 years, which has given me about 12,376 hours more than the average American who indulges in 34 hours a week. I do watch some shows?usually one hour a day whilst eating dinner?but only ones I've chosen and bought. You can do a lot with 12,000 hours, and still keep up with Mad Men.

Kill notifications. Modern technology has evolved to exploit our urgency addiction: email, Facebook, Twitter, Quora and more will fight to distract you constantly. Fortunately, this is easily fixed: turn off all your notifications. Choose to check these things when you have time to be distracted?say, during a lunch break?and work through them together, saving time.

Schedule your priorities. Humans are such funny critters. If you have a friend to meet, you'll arrange to see them at a set time. But if you have something that matters to you more than anything?say writing a book, or going to the gym?you won't schedule it. You'll just ?get round to it'. Treat your highest priorities like flights you have to catch: give them a set time in advance and say no to anything that would stop you making your flight.

First things first. What is the single most important (not urgent) thing you could possibly be doing? Do some of that today. Remember there's a limitless number of distracting stormtroopers?don't fool yourself by thinking "if I just do this thing first then I can." Jedi don't live by excuses.

Less volume, more time. There's always millions of things you could be doing. The trick is to pick no more than 1-3 a day, and relentlessly pursue those. Your brain won't like this limit. Other people won't like this limit. Do it anyway. Focusing your all on one task at a time is infinitely more efficient than multi-tasking and gives you time to excel at your work.

Ignore. It's rude, unprofessional, and often utterly necessary. There are people you won't find time to reply to. There are requests you will allow yourself to forget. You can be slow to do things like tidy up, pay bills, or open mail. The world won't fall apart. The payoff is you get done what matters.

One final lesson from the Jedi: they're heroes.

Heroes inspire us for many reasons: they make tough decisions, they keep going and they get done what matters. But there's another reason we love our heroes. Inside us all, we know we have the power to become one ourselves.

How to master your time | Oliver Emberton

---

Oliver Emberton is an entrepreneur, author-in-training, challenge addict, dancer, pianist, programmer, artist, and general busy bee.

Image remixed from Shutterstock.

Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Tessa.

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/6Y2HW3IaxwU/the-simple-secret-to-time-management-jedi-time-tricks

john wall gordon hayward gas prices rising stars challenge star trek 2 kathy ireland brooke mueller

Monday Brief: Mobile World Congress, Nokia Music+, and more!

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/4GeiupWNpGo/story01.htm

miramonte elementary school mark jenkins super bowl commercials 2012 mia amar e stoudemire m.i.a. adrianne curry

Video: Sequestration & Jobs Growth

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/cnbc/50672991/

mario balotelli espn3 kevin youkilis Tropical Storm Debby legend of korra lebron james magic mike trailer

Fireworks cause deadly highway collapse in China

BEIJING (AP) ? A truckload of fireworks intended for Lunar New Year celebrations went off Friday in a massive, deadly explosion that destroyed part of an elevated highway in central China, sending vehicles plummeting 30 meters (about 100 feet) to the ground.

State TV broadcaster CCTV said eight people were confirmed dead and 11 injured after seven vehicles were recovered from the wreckage. The death toll appeared likely to rise: The official Xinhua News Agency said the collapse smashed and buried at least 25 vehicles.

Earlier reports by China National Radio and some other outlets of 26 people killed were later removed from websites, without explanation.

An 80-meter (260-foot) stretch of a major east-west highway collapsed in Mianchi county in Henan province. It scattered blackened chunks of debris and shattered the windows of a nearby truck stop.

A truck driver interviewed on CCTV said he was only 20 meters (yards) away from the explosion.

"I heard a huge bang and immediately braked. I saw small fireballs falling down one by one," said the unidentified truck driver, whose truck windshield was smashed from the impact of the blast.

"I then heard the sounds of clanking and exploding for five to six minutes," the driver said. "My face was covered in dust."

Photos posted online by Xinhua showed a stretch of elevated highway gone, with one truck's back wheels perched at the edge of a shorn-off section of the highway. Other photos showed firefighters below spraying water on scorched hunks of concrete, wrecked trucks and flattened shipping containers.

There was no immediate word on the cause of the explosion. It occurred about 90 kilometers (55 miles) west of Luoyang, an ancient capital of China known for grottoes of Buddhist statues carved from limestone cliffs.

Fireworks are an enormously popular part of Chinese Lunar New Year festivities. To meet the demand, fireworks are made, shipped and stored in large quantities, sometimes in unsafe conditions.

A result is periodic catastrophe: In 2006, on the first day of the Lunar New Year, a storeroom of fireworks exploded at a temple fair in Henan, killing 36 people and injuring dozens more. In 2000, an unlicensed fireworks factory in southern China exploded, killing 33 people, including 13 primary and secondary school students working there.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fireworks-cause-deadly-highway-collapse-china-065131273.html

usa today foxnews cnn yahoo news nbc news cnn news Connecticut shooting

Blockbuster On Demand gives streaming a second chance, with odd limitations

Blockbuster hasn't had much success shifting from physical rentals to digital, even under Dish's wing. Nonetheless, it's betting that the umpteenth time's the charm with a relaunch of its Blockbuster On Demand streaming movie service. The revamp ticks many of the checkboxes for a modern by-the-title rental store with 1080p and 5.1-channel surround sound as well as apps for 2012 Samsung Smart TVs, Android and Roku 2 boxes. However, there's a number of curious choices, and we don't just mean the omission of a subscription model. It's missing an iOS app, emphasizes apps for desktop viewing and leaves no way to watch HD video on anything but a TV -- our mobile and PC screens have advanced in the past several years, Blockbuster. Idiosyncrasies notwithstanding, the rebirth presents more of a unified front than the one-time giant has offered in the past.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD

Comments

Via: Android Police

Source: Blockbuster On Demand

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/M8HVXP9bmQ4/

etta james at last john king obama sings al green heidi klum and seal ohare airport etta james songs east west shrine game

World's largest solar sail to launch in 2014

The largest solar sail ever constructed is headed for the launch pad in 2014 on a mission to demonstrate the value of "propellantless propulsion"? the act of using photons from the sun to push a craft through space.

Dubbed Sunjammer, the giant solar sail measures about 124 feet (38 meters) on a side and boasts a total surface area of nearly 13,000 square feet (1,208 square m, or one-third of an acre). The project is under the wing of NASA's Space Technology Program, within the agency's Office of the Chief Technologist.

NASA has contracted with a team of high-tech "solar sailors" at L'Garde Inc. of Tustin, Calif., to build Sunjammer.

L'Garde is no newcomer to novel space structures. The company has worked with the space agency on several projects, including the creation of inflatable structures for radio frequency antennas and solar arrays. In 1996, the company flew the Inflatable Antenna Experiment (IAE) aboard the space shuttle Endeavour's STS-77 mission. [Photos: Solar Sail Evolution for Space Travel]

Programmatic milestone
"We took the name Sunjammer from an Arthur C. Clarke short story, a fictional yacht race in the heavens using solar sails," said Nathan Barnes, L'Garde's chief operating officer and executive vice president, as well as Sunjammer's project manager. Permission to use the name came from the Clarke estate, he told Space.com.

Work on Sunjammer this year includes a programmatic milestone ? a critical design review ? along with a variety of ground demonstration tests and qualification of components, Barnes said. The flight of the solar sail, he said, is set for the end of 2014, to be sent spaceward atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

"With this sail, we?re targeting our end goal somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,864,114 miles (3 million kilometers) distance from the Earth," Barnes said.

A number of test objectives are to be checked off within the first couple months of flight, he added. These include deployment of the sail, demonstration of vector control using sail-tipped vanes, navigation with accuracy and, finally, maintenance of the spacecraft's position at a gravitationally stable location called Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1.

Sunjammer won't be the world's first solar sail mission. NASA launched NanoSail-D, whose sail covered just 100 square feet (9.3 square m), in November 2010. And Japan's Ikaros probe deployed its solar sail in June 2010, becoming the first craft ever to cruise through space propelled only by sunlight.

Neat, clever, exotic orbits
Sunjammer is potentially applicable to an advanced space weather warning system, which could provide more timely and accurate notice of solar flare activity.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is collaborating with NASA and L?Garde on the upcoming demonstration flight, which will cruise to a spot that provides an interesting view of the sun.

"It will be us flying to a place that a customer actually wants to fly a solar sail to," Barnes said. "There are neat, clever, exotic orbits you can do with the solar sail that would permit viewing different portions of the sun that we can?t normally." [The Sun's Wrath: Worst Solar Storms in History]

One-quarter the size of a football field, Sunjammer will produce a whopping maximum thrust of about 0.01 newton, Barnes said ? roughly equivalent to the weight of a sugar packet.

Thinner sail
Kapton is the solar sail material of choice. The mission team worked with chemical company DuPont to produce a special layer of Kapton for Sunjammer just 5 microns thick.

"Thinner is always better," Barnes said.

When collapsed, the Sunjammer solar sail is the size of a dishwasher and weighs just 70 pounds (32 kilograms).

There are a number of control techniques involved in successfully unfurling the sail, said Billy Derbes, L?Garde?s chief engineer for Sunjammer.

"The highest risk is in the deployment," Derbes said. A camera attached to the sail will capture the unfurling process.

Game-changing capabilities
NASA is keen to infuse solar sail technology into other potential game-changing mission capabilities.

Barnes said that possibilities include the collection and removal of orbital debris, deorbiting spent satellites, providing a direct communications link to Earth?s south pole, as well as for deep space propulsion.

Barnes said nongovernment, entertainment-oriented uses of solar sails are also being explored by L?Garde.

"All space travel right now is limited by expendables," Derbes said. "If you show a technology not limited by expendables ? and Kapton is a long-lasting film material ? what new applications will people think up? We?re opening up a whole new kind of thinking about how you do things in space."

'Star Trek' passengers
Also to fly onboard Sunjammer are the cremated remains of individuals, a service provided by Celestis Inc., an affiliate company of Space Services Inc., a Houston-based aerospace firm.

Celestis flight capsules and modules will be carried by Sunjammer on its voyage through deep space. Already part of that payload are the ashes of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry and his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, often called the "first lady" of the sci-fi series.

"Celestis is pleased to offer our first-ever Voyager deep space memorial spaceflight aboard the Sunjammer mission," said Celestis Chief Executive Officer Charles Chafer.

"Since 1997, Celestis has conducted a dozen memorial spaceflights, and this solar sail mission will mark our most ambitious flight ever. We are excited to be a part of the Sunjammer team," Chafer told Space.com.

1. Space news from NBCNews.com

   1. Asteroids vs. comets: Scientist sizes up perils

      Science editor Alan Boyle's blog: NASA's top expert on near-Earth objects says that new telescope systems are gradually getting a handle on potentially threatening asteroids. But comets? That's a completely different story.

   2. Curiosity rover snaps 1st photos of Mars at night
   3. How a TV show could create a Mars colony
   4. 'Star Wars' Lego toy sparks Turkish tiff

'Green' space propulsion
Sunjammer?s success is the key to enabling several science and exploration missions that can only be accomplished with a solar sail, said Les Johnson, deputy manager of the Advanced Concepts Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

Along with better sun-watching and warning tasks, NASA recently studied the use of a solar-sail-propelled spacecraft for visiting multiple near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), Johnson said.

"We found that a Sunjammer-derived sail could visit up to six NEAs within six years of being launched. This would be impossible with chemical rockets and might not be achievable by electric propulsion. And it?s all because the sail uses no propellant ? deriving its thrust from sunlight, making it a very ?green? space propulsion system," he said.

Johnson is co-editor with Jack McDevitt of "Going Interstellar" (Baen Books, 2012), a unique blend of science fact and science-fiction writings on interstellar voyaging.

"For me, I?m most excited about using a solar sail unfurled close to the sun, inside the orbit of Mercury, and using the increased solar pressure there to accelerate a large solar sail to speeds that will allow it to reach well beyond the edge of the solar system and into interstellar space within my lifetime," Johnson said.

Doing so, Johnson said, "would be the first ?baby step? in a series of increasingly large sails that might one day enable us to reach the stars. This is one of the few ways nature has provided for us to travel between the stars."

Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is former director of research for the National Commission on Space and a past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society's Ad Astra and Space World magazines. He has written for Space.com since 1999. Follow Space.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook? and? Google+.

? 2013 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/50657752/ns/technology_and_science-space/

Michael Strahan Griselda Blanco Michelle Obama Speech eva longoria Rihanna wiz khalifa Michael Clarke Duncan

Jared Will Return For Subway In The Super Bowl - Business Insider

They're in. They're out. They're in.

That's how some marketers ??" sometimes called Super Bowl rebounders -- treat the Super Bowl. One year they're in -- and the next, out. Then, back again. Usually with good reason.

Which is why Subway, today will announce that it's back in the Super Bowl after years away. Its brand image spots will highlight an anniversary of some significance for the sub giant: Jared's 15th year as Subway spokesman. In the spot, 14 Subway athletes -- including superstar Washington Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III -- will congratulate Jared for keeping off the weight he lost eating low-cal offerings at Subway.

Also back in 2013 after some years away: Taco Bell and Tide laundry detergent, both with new tales to tell.

"You can't get 110 million people" anywhere else, says Tony Pace, Subway chief marketing officer, of the Super Bowl's TV viewers. "That's an audience we can't ignore."

The key isn't how often a brand is in the Super Bowl, but what it says when it is, says brand guru Peter Madden. "If you're going to the mat creatively, it shouldn't matter if this is your first Super Bowl ever -- or first Super Bowl in five years."

For Subway, it could be a way to deflect consumer attention from recent reports about some of its foot-long subs only measuring 11 inches in some stores. (Some others, however, were 13 inches). "We're redoubling our efforts to ensure we have the proper length," says Pace.

But Pace insists that the driver for returning to the big game for the first time since 2005 is to remind folks of Jared's feat: keeping off 200 pounds he lost for 15 years. "Everyone does before-and-after weight-loss shots," says Pace. "But it's hard to keep it off for an extended period."

The campaign will continue through 2013, with other Subway celebrities, including Michael Phelps, offering high-fives to Jared.

Also returning to the big game:

- Taco Bell. Like Subway, the chain isn't pitching a new product on the Super Bowl, but a brand image evolution. "We're in the midst of transforming the brand from food as fuel to food as experience," says marketing chief Brian Niccol. Its ad features a Cocoon-like group of old folks who celebrate a night of youthful inspiration that ends up at Taco Bell.

- Tide. During the downturn, the P&G detergent lost some market share to lower-price store brands. For the first time since 2008, the brand is back. "Since the Super Bowl is the pinnacle of the National Football League, it makes sense for us to show up," says Chris Lillich, associate marketing director for North American laundry at Procter& Gamble.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/jared-will-return-for-subway-in-the-super-bowl-2013-1

sag awards 2012 kyra sedgwick honor killings mary tyler moore x games pro bowl 2012 rick santorum daughter