Google is adding handwriting input to Gmail and Docs. Starting today, you can use your trackpad or mouse to hand-draw characters in a variety of languages. [Gmail Blog via 9to5Google]
     |
Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/D1fQSMBbAZ0/google-is-adding-handwriting-input-to-gmail-and-docs-s-1450070277WASHINGTON (AP) — A White House national security official has been fired for running a Twitter account that was harshly critical of the Obama administration.
Jofi Joseph served as non-proliferation director at the National Security Council and was involved in nuclear negotiations with Iran. In a statement to Politico, Joseph says he takes "complete responsibility" for the @natsecwonk Twitter account, which often criticized administration policies and top officials.
Joseph says the Twitter feed started as a "parody account." He apologized to those he insulted.
A White House official confirmed that Joseph is no longer working for the administration, but would not comment on personnel matters.
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-10-23-White%20House-Twitter%20Firing/id-1ee5e2a51dfc4168a68528de47d6d275T-Mobile has announced a new way to try their network with your LTE-enabled tablet. As part of the Un-carrier 3.0 initiative, users — even those who are not a current T-Mobile customer — will receive 200MB of free LTE data on any eligible device every 30 days. This offer is good for tablets purchased through T-Mobile, or any compatible device you may already have or have purchased elsewhere. Users who already have a tablet data plan with T-Mobile will get an extra 200MB monthly. this offer will last for the life of the device.
This won't work like the current Simple Choice plans. Once you use the "free" bandwidth, you're shut off instead of being throttled. You'll be given an opportunity to sign up for a day pass, or any other plan, but you can always choose to just disconnect until your 30-day cycle refreshes. Current customers won't have to do anything for the extra data bucket, their plan will be automatically adjusted to take advantage of the new offer.
This all goes into effect November 1. CEO John Legere was also quick to mention that they're not done yet with their Un-carrier program. Will bring you more if and when it happens, but for now be sure to click the link below to get all the information, and you can always hit up @TMobile with questions on Twitter.
Source: T-Mobile
| |
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/XCpbPFWksn8/story01.htmBy David Ingram and Kevin Drawbaugh
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Foes of President Barack Obama's healthcare law lost a bid on Tuesday to put an immediate stop to a key part of the law - the insurance subsidies in the 34 U.S. states that declined to establish their own online marketplaces.
At a court hearing, U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman in Washington, D.C., declined to grant a preliminary injunction sought by a group of individuals and small businesses that in a lawsuit call the subsidies unlawful.
Friedman ruled their lawsuit could move forward and said he would rule on its overall merits by mid-February, rejecting an argument from the Obama administration that the suit was too speculative to be considered.
The latest round of legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare," focuses on whether the 2010 law allows for subsidies in all states or only in states that have set up exchanges.
Only 16 states and the District of Columbia chose to set up the online marketplaces where people without private health insurance can shop for it, forcing the federal government to create them in the remaining states.
Subsidies, in the form of tax credits, are available to people with annual incomes of up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level, or $94,200 for a family of four. The Obama administration views the subsidies as essential if the law is going to work, because otherwise many people could not afford private insurance.
The suit was brought by a mix of individuals and businesses from Texas, Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia. The plaintiffs argue the subsidies are unlawful and impose a burden by forcing them to purchase the insurance or else pay a penalty.
SEEKING AN EXEMPTION
David Klemencic, who does flooring work in West Virginia, is one of the plaintiffs. In court papers, he said he cannot afford insurance and wishes to forgo coverage entirely in 2014, using an exemption in the healthcare law for people with low income.
But the availability of the tax credits means he is not eligible for the exemption, his lawyers said, so he must either buy subsidized insurance at about $18 a month or pay a penalty equal to about $12 a month.
In rejecting a preliminary injunction, Friedman said there was no need for such an emergency measure because Klemencic has until the end of March to apply for an exemption from Obamacare, by which time the lawsuit may be over.
"As long as we get a decision in a timely manner, that's what we've been looking for," Michael Carvin, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told reporters after the hearing. Carvin was among the lawyers who appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012 to argue that the healthcare law should be struck down entirely.
Two similar lawsuits are pending in federal courts in Oklahoma and Indiana. Neither has reached a final ruling.
Complicating the situation for the Obama administration is the wording of the law, parts of which were drafted in haste in 2010 as the legislation wound through Congress.
The law says subsidies may be given "through an exchange established by the state," not through one set up by the federal government, a point that the suit emphasizes.
The administration says the subsidies should be available to people in every state because Congress intended the online exchanges to be uniform.
At the core of this claim is what Congress intended when it wrote the law, not expecting that some states would fail to set up an exchange or would, as in the case of Texas and other Republican-controlled states, refuse to do so out of political opposition to Obamacare.
The case is Halbig v. Sebelius, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 1:13-cv-623.
(Additional reporting by Patrick Temple-West and Terry Baynes; Editing by Howard Goller and Mohammad Zargham)
When the movie The Godfather came out in 1972, a young New York lawyer and future governor named Mario Cuomo didn't see it. He objected to stereotyping Italian-Americans as mobsters. But as first reported by The New York Times, Cuomo has finally ended his 41-year boycott and had a look.
Turns out it's not just Macs getting an OS update today. Apple has now also released version 7.0.3 of iOS -- a decidedly less major upgrade, but one that will no doubt be welcome to anyone having technical issues since updating to iOS 7. It's not all bug fixes, though. The update also brings with it ...
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/HbN3NF4NyXc/![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_suK4u3pldcMXheGB5W_AlKZE2RCSOtEqMjx9QWtUz5sTmG7jvBmDhfFbFskfaggFEHKZ8DpTccSTiCVUZHWwKw1NttEUq58D2DrLD-ShU=s0-d){kind=small}
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 22-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Sue McGreevey
smcgreevey@partners.org
617-724-2764
Massachusetts General Hospital
As researchers develop novel therapies based on inducing specific cells to do specific things, getting the right message to the right group of cells at the right time remains a major challenge. The use of light to communicate with cells has been restricted by its limited ability to pass through tissues. Now researchers at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a way to deliver a light signal to specific tissues deep within the body. They describe their accomplishment in the current issue of Nature Photonics.
"Scientists only began investigating light-activated therapy a few years ago, but it is generating huge interest," says Wellman investigator Seok Hyun (Andy) Yun, PhD, senior author of the study. "One of the best known example is use of optogenetics activation or deactivation of brain cells by illumination with different colors of light to treat brain disorders. But how to deliver light deep within the brain or other tissues has been a common problem. The implant we have developed may help solve this problem."
Called a light-guiding hydrogel, the implant is constructed from a polymer-based scaffolding capable of supporting living cells and contains cells genetically engineered either to carry out a specific activity in response to light or to emit light in response to a particular metabolic signal. An optical fiber connects the implant to either an external light source or a light detector.
The investigators first determined the properties of the hydrogel scaffolding including transparency, flexibility and stability that would be most appropriate for delivering or detecting a light signal. After determining how many cells could be implanted into the hydrogel without significantly reducing its ability to transmit a light signal, they developed and tested in mice two different systems, both involving implantation of a 4-centimeter hydrogel beneath the animal's skin.
The first system's implants contained cells genetically engineered to express light-emitting green fluorescent protein (GFP) upon contact with a toxin. After confirming in vitro the hydrogels' response to nanoparticles containing the toxic metal cadmium, the researchers implanted the hydrogels beneath the skin of three groups of mice. One group was then injected with the cadmium nanoparticles, the second received nanoparticles encased in a polymer shell that shielded cells from the toxin, and the third received a control saline injection. The implants only produced a GFP-signal in response to the unshielded nanoparticles, indicating their ability to sense a change in this instance the presence of a toxin in the cellular environment.
To investigate a possible therapeutic application for the system, the investigators used a hydrogel implant containing cells that respond to blue light by producing glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), a protein playing an essential role in glucose metabolism. After the implants were placed under the skin of mice with diabetes, the blue light signal was delivered for 12 hours. A day and a half later 48 hours after the implant the animals that received the light signal had double the level of GLP-1 in their blood, along with significantly better results in a glucose tolerance test, than did implanted mice not treated with light.
"This work combines several existing technologies well known in their respective fields such as drug delivery, genetic engineering, biomaterial science, and photonics to build a new implant system that enables the delivery of photomedicine deep in the body," says Yun, an associate professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Bio-Optics Lab. "This is the first time anyone has shown the ability to talk optically by means of light with cells deep within the body, both to sense the presence of a toxin and to deliver a cell-based therapy."
The researchers add that future studies should investigate how changing the shape and structure of the hydrogel can improve the implant's light-guiding properties, ways to improve the production and delivery of a therapeutic protein, how the immune system would react to long-term implantation and ways to deliver or detect the light signal that would not require passing a fiber through the skin.
###
Myunghwan Choi, PhD, of the Wellman Center at MGH is lead author of the Nature Photonics article. Additional co-authors are Jin Woo Choi, Sedat Nizamoglu, and Sei Kwang Hahn, PhD, Wellman Center; and Seonghoon Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Support for the study includes National Institutes of Health grant R21 EB013761, National Science Foundation grant ECS-1101947 and Department of Defense grant FA9550-10-1-0537.
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of more than $775 million and major research centers in AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, reproductive biology, systems biology, transplantation biology and photomedicine.
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 22-Oct-2013
ShareContact: Sue McGreevey
smcgreevey@partners.org
617-724-2764
Massachusetts General Hospital
As researchers develop novel therapies based on inducing specific cells to do specific things, getting the right message to the right group of cells at the right time remains a major challenge. The use of light to communicate with cells has been restricted by its limited ability to pass through tissues. Now researchers at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a way to deliver a light signal to specific tissues deep within the body. They describe their accomplishment in the current issue of Nature Photonics.
"Scientists only began investigating light-activated therapy a few years ago, but it is generating huge interest," says Wellman investigator Seok Hyun (Andy) Yun, PhD, senior author of the study. "One of the best known example is use of optogenetics activation or deactivation of brain cells by illumination with different colors of light to treat brain disorders. But how to deliver light deep within the brain or other tissues has been a common problem. The implant we have developed may help solve this problem."
Called a light-guiding hydrogel, the implant is constructed from a polymer-based scaffolding capable of supporting living cells and contains cells genetically engineered either to carry out a specific activity in response to light or to emit light in response to a particular metabolic signal. An optical fiber connects the implant to either an external light source or a light detector.
The investigators first determined the properties of the hydrogel scaffolding including transparency, flexibility and stability that would be most appropriate for delivering or detecting a light signal. After determining how many cells could be implanted into the hydrogel without significantly reducing its ability to transmit a light signal, they developed and tested in mice two different systems, both involving implantation of a 4-centimeter hydrogel beneath the animal's skin.
The first system's implants contained cells genetically engineered to express light-emitting green fluorescent protein (GFP) upon contact with a toxin. After confirming in vitro the hydrogels' response to nanoparticles containing the toxic metal cadmium, the researchers implanted the hydrogels beneath the skin of three groups of mice. One group was then injected with the cadmium nanoparticles, the second received nanoparticles encased in a polymer shell that shielded cells from the toxin, and the third received a control saline injection. The implants only produced a GFP-signal in response to the unshielded nanoparticles, indicating their ability to sense a change in this instance the presence of a toxin in the cellular environment.
To investigate a possible therapeutic application for the system, the investigators used a hydrogel implant containing cells that respond to blue light by producing glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), a protein playing an essential role in glucose metabolism. After the implants were placed under the skin of mice with diabetes, the blue light signal was delivered for 12 hours. A day and a half later 48 hours after the implant the animals that received the light signal had double the level of GLP-1 in their blood, along with significantly better results in a glucose tolerance test, than did implanted mice not treated with light.
"This work combines several existing technologies well known in their respective fields such as drug delivery, genetic engineering, biomaterial science, and photonics to build a new implant system that enables the delivery of photomedicine deep in the body," says Yun, an associate professor of Dermatology at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Bio-Optics Lab. "This is the first time anyone has shown the ability to talk optically by means of light with cells deep within the body, both to sense the presence of a toxin and to deliver a cell-based therapy."
The researchers add that future studies should investigate how changing the shape and structure of the hydrogel can improve the implant's light-guiding properties, ways to improve the production and delivery of a therapeutic protein, how the immune system would react to long-term implantation and ways to deliver or detect the light signal that would not require passing a fiber through the skin.
###
Myunghwan Choi, PhD, of the Wellman Center at MGH is lead author of the Nature Photonics article. Additional co-authors are Jin Woo Choi, Sedat Nizamoglu, and Sei Kwang Hahn, PhD, Wellman Center; and Seonghoon Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Support for the study includes National Institutes of Health grant R21 EB013761, National Science Foundation grant ECS-1101947 and Department of Defense grant FA9550-10-1-0537.
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the United States, with an annual research budget of more than $775 million and major research centers in AIDS, cardiovascular research, cancer, computational and integrative biology, cutaneous biology, human genetics, medical imaging, neurodegenerative disorders, regenerative medicine, reproductive biology, systems biology, transplantation biology and photomedicine.
Share
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
