Pictures: The Story Behind Sun Dogs, Penitent Ice, and More

Photograph by Art Wolfe, Getty Images

If you want the beauty of winter without having to brave the bone-chilling temperatures blasting much of the United States this week, snuggle into a soft blanket, grab a warm beverage, and curl up with some of these natural frozen wonders.

Nieve penitente, or penitent snow, are collections of spires that resemble robed monks—or penitents. They are flattened columns of snow wider at the base than at the tip and can range in height from 3 to 20 feet (1 to 6 meters). The picture above shows the phenomenon in central Chile. (See pictures of the patterns in snow and ice.)

Nieve penitente tend to form in shallow valleys where the snow is deep and the sun doesn't shine at too steep an angle, said Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who studies ice crystal formation.

As the snow melts, dirt gets mixed in with the runoff and collects in little pools here and there, he said. Since the dirt is darker in color than the surrounding snow, the dirty areas melt faster "and you end up digging these pits," explained Libbrecht.

"They tend to form at high altitude," he said. But other than that, no one really knows the exact conditions that are needed to form penitent snow.

"They're fairly strong," Libbrecht said. "People have found [the spires] difficult to hike through."

—Jane J. Lee

Published January 25, 2013

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Squatter, Bank of America Battle for $2.5M Mansion

Bank of America is taking a Florida man to court after he attempted to use an antiquated state law to legally take possession of a $2.5 million mansion that is currently owned by the bank.

Andre "Loki" Barbosa has lived in a five-bedroom Boca Raton, Fla., waterside property since July, and police have reportedly been unable to remove him.

The Brazilian national, 23, who reportedly refers to himself as "Loki Boy," cites Florida's "adverse possession" law, in which a party may acquire title from another by openly occupying their land and paying real property tax for at least seven years.

The house is listed as being owned by Bank of America as of July 2012, and that an adverse possession was filed in July. After Bank of America foreclosed on the property last year, the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser's Office was notified that Barbosa would be moving in, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

The Sun-Sentinel reported that he posted a notice in the front window of the house naming him as a "living beneficiary to the Divine Estate being superior of commerce and usury."
On Facebook, a man named Andre Barbosa calls the property "Templo de Kamisamar."

After Barbosa gained national attention for his brazen attempt, Bank of America filed an injunction on Jan. 23 to evict Barbosa and eight unidentified occupants.

In the civil complaint, Bank of America said Barbosa and other tenants "unlawfully entered the property" and "refused to permit the Plaintiff agents entry, use, and possession of its property." In addition to eviction, Bank of America is asking for $15,000 in damages to be paid to cover attorney's expenses.

Police were called Dec. 26 to the home but did not remove Barbosa, according to the Sentinel. Barbosa reportedly presented authorities with the adverse possession paperwork at the time.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Povery Law Center, says police officers may be disinclined to take action even if they are presented with paperwork that is invalid.

"A police officer walks up to someone who is claiming a house now belongs to him, without any basis at all, is handed a big sheaf of documents, which are incomprehensible," Potok said. "I think very often the officers ultimately feel that they're forced to go back to headquarters and try to figure out what's going on before they can actually toss someone in the slammer."

A neighbor of the Boca property, who asked not be named, told ABCNews.com that he entered the empty home just before Christmas to find four people inside, one of whom said the group is establishing an embassy for their mission, and that families would be moving in and out of the property. Barbosa was also among them.

The neighbor said he believes that Barbosa is a "patsy."

"This young guy is caught up in this thing," the neighbor said. "I think it's going on on a bigger scale."

Barbosa could not be reached for comment.

The neighbor said that although the lights have been turned on at the house, the water has not, adding that this makes it clear it is not a permanent residence. The neighbor also said the form posted in the window is "total gibberish," which indicated that the house is an embassy, and that those who enter must present two forms of identification, and respect the rights of its indigenous people.

"I think it's a group of people that see an opportunity to get some money from the bank," the neighbor said. "If they're going to hold the house ransom, then the bank is going to have to go through an eviction process.

"They're taking advantage of banks, where the right hand doesn't know where the left hand is," the neighbor said. "They can't clap."

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DNA in stolen kisses could reveal sex offenders

SO ROMANTIC... when you kiss your partner passionately, not only do you exchange bacteria and mucus, you also impart some of your genetic code. No matter how fleeting the encounter, the DNA will hang around in their mouth for at least an hour. This means that women's saliva could contain evidence of unwanted attention in cases of assault, or even telltale signs of infidelity.

Natália Kamodyová and her colleagues at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, recruited 12 couples who agreed to kiss each other passionately for at least 2 minutes. Afterwards, saliva samples were collected from the women at 5, 10, 30 and 60-minute intervals. Because Kamodyová's method relies on detection of the Y chromosome, it can only be used to identify a man's DNA in a woman's saliva.

The results show that the man's DNA was still present and could be detected through amplification after at least an hour, and possibly longer. "We've shown it's possible to get a full profile, which could be useful in crime investigation to pinpoint the possible perpetrator among suspects or exclude those innocent," says Kamodyová. Her team is investigating whether the DNA survives longer than an hour and whether it's obtainable from the mouths of women who have died (Forensic Science International: Genetics, DOI: 10.1016/j.fsigen.2012.07.007).

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Tennis: Azarenka beats Li in dramatic Australian final

MELBOURNE: Victoria Azarenka won an incident-packed final against an injury-hit Li Na to successfully defend her Australian Open title and retain the world number one ranking on Saturday.

After a scrappy match marked by boos for Azarenka, a break for Australia Day fireworks and two painful falls for China's Li, the Belarusian top seed dissolved in tears after sealing the 4-6, 6-4, 6-3 win.

Li required two medical timeouts, when she twice twisted her left ankle and also banged her head on the court, in a match also interrupted for nine minutes at a crucial stage by the fireworks.

Azarenka overcame a pro-Li crowd that was clearly unimpressed by her controversial medical timeout in the semi-finals, which she took after blowing five match points.

It was a gutsy effort from the 23-year-old as she came back from a set down and sealed it on her first match point in 2hr 40min to clinch her second Grand Slam title.

Azarenka became only the fourth active player to hold two or more majors, behind Serena Williams with 15, Venus Williams with seven, Maria Sharapova with four and Svetlana Kuznetsova with two.

- AFP/al

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Review: While "jOBS" fawns over subject, film falls flat

Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs in "jOBS."

(Credit:
Five Star Feature Films)

PARK CITY, UTAH--The eagerly awaited biopic "jOBS" opens in 2001, when Apple's iconic co-founder arrives at Town Hall on Apple's Cupertino campus with good news. A secret team, Steve Jobs tells his employees, has built a product that will revolutionize the way everyone listens to music. Before he can even show them the iPod, the employees have sprung to their feet, wild-eyed and ecstatic, and their thunderous applause is eventually drowned out only by strings swelling in the background. It's a scene that sets the tone for all that is to follow: for most of the film's two hours, "jOBS" rarely stops clapping for its subject.

The team behind "jOBS," which was directed by Joshua Michael Stern, began working on the project shortly before Jobs retired from Apple in 2011. The script by first-time screenwriter Matt Whiteley covers Jobs' life from 1974, when Jobs attended classes at Reed College in Oregon, to 2001, when he announced the
iPod to Apple employees. Along the way "jOBS" covers most of the major milestones of its subject's time at Apple: the Apple I, the Apple II, the Lisa, and the Macintosh all are shown in development, as Jobs (a hard-working Ashton Kutcher) works to bring his vision of personal computing to the masses. Jobs hand-picks John Sculley to become Apple's CEO, hoping his marketing expertise will help the company overtake IBM in the PC market. But Sculley disappoints Jobs, who alienates his allies on Apple's board of directors and is ousted from the company he started. Only Apple's near-death experience in 1997 is enough to bring him back to Apple -- first as an adviser, then as an "interim" CEO -- and with the success of the Bondi blue iMacs, Apple was ascendant once again.

It's a story that will be familiar to readers of Walter Isaacson's recent Jobs biography or any number of other histories of the company. The opportunity "jOBS" had was to render these legendary events of Silicon Valley's history on screen, and to dramatize the contradictions of a man who remained unknowable even to some of those closest to him.

The movie gives it a shot. Kutcher drew skepticism when he was announced as the film's lead, despite an uncanny resemblance to the man he would be playing. But he throws himself into the role, inhabiting Jobs in his mannerisms and gestures while doing a more than creditable impression of the man's voice. Kutcher also captures Jobs' deliberate, slightly hunched-over walk. At moments, as during an enjoyable sequence in which Jobs recruits members for the Macintosh team, Kutcher disappears into the role.

The filmmakers do show Jobs being a jerk: he sleeps around, he yells at people, he parks in handicapped spaces. He persuades Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad) to perform crucial work for him, but lies about how much he is being paid, so he can dramatically underpay his best friend. An hour into the movie, he fires someone during an argument over font availability on the Lisa.

Yet the filmmakers are more interested in showing Jobs going about the work of being a genius. Over and over again, minor characters explain to him why something can't be done; Kutcher-as-Jobs smiles enigmatically and waves away their concerns. (It is left to someone else, far off screen, to turn his visions into reality.) We watch Jobs out-negotiate a computer parts store owner, lecture the team making the Lisa, and ride to the rescue of the Macintosh. Each time, he speaks of how the technology Apple is building will improve the lives of average people. Co-workers argue with him, but they never get anywhere, because their parts are poorly written and the filmmakers have no interest in showing their subject being wrong about his work. The film mentions Lisa's failure but has no interest in what part Jobs played in that failure; all Apple failures in "jOBS" are portrayed as the result of conservative, backward-thinking executives beholden only to their shareholders. The result is that the viewer spends two hours watching cardboard cutouts lose arguments to Ashton Kutcher.

Kutcher speaks fully 40 percent of the lines in "jOBS." Unfortunately, he has almost no one to play off of. Dermot Mulroney, as early Apple investor Mike Markkula, shakes his head at Jobs' excesses without ever really challenging him. J.K. Simmons, as the Apple board chairman who oversees Jobs' ouster, is a cartoon villain. Women in the film barely exist; an actress playing Chris-Ann Brennan has a single under-written scene informing a young Jobs that she is carrying his baby; years later in the film, a small scene shows Jobs at home with his wife. Only Gad, as Wozniak, gets a scene standing up to the great man -- as Woz quits Apple, he criticizes Jobs for losing his humanity amid a single-minded pursuit of making great products. It's something even Jobs' staunchest admirers have to wrestle with, and the film could have used more of that.

Others will write of the things "jOBS" omits, gets wrong, or simply avoids. My primary disappointment was in how shallow the film felt, given the extensive historical record. In the early days Jobs' co-workers had to wrestle with a man who smelled bad, who cried often, who yelled constantly, who missed deadlines, who overspent his budget by millions. He did it in service of products we love and use daily, and yet his obsessions took a toll on those around him. It also inspired others to do the best work of their lives, pushing themselves further than they ever imagined they can go. There is great drama to be found in all that, but it is not to be found in the saccharine "jOBS."

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Pictures: The Story Behind Sun Dogs, Penitent Ice, and More

Photograph by Art Wolfe, Getty Images

If you want the beauty of winter without having to brave the bone-chilling temperatures blasting much of the United States this week, snuggle into a soft blanket, grab a warm beverage, and curl up with some of these natural frozen wonders.

Nieve penitente, or penitent snow, are collections of spires that resemble robed monks—or penitents. They are flattened columns of snow wider at the base than at the tip and can range in height from 3 to 20 feet (1 to 6 meters). The picture above shows the phenomenon in central Chile. (See pictures of the patterns in snow and ice.)

Nieve penitente tend to form in shallow valleys where the snow is deep and the sun doesn't shine at too steep an angle, said Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who studies ice crystal formation.

As the snow melts, dirt gets mixed in with the runoff and collects in little pools here and there, he said. Since the dirt is darker in color than the surrounding snow, the dirty areas melt faster "and you end up digging these pits," explained Libbrecht.

"They tend to form at high altitude," he said. But other than that, no one really knows the exact conditions that are needed to form penitent snow.

"They're fairly strong," Libbrecht said. "People have found [the spires] difficult to hike through."

—Jane J. Lee

Published January 25, 2013

Read More..

WH, Senators to Begin Push on Immigration Reform

The White House and a bipartisan group of senators next week plan to begin their efforts to push for comprehensive immigration reform.

President Barack Obama will make an announcement on immigration during a Tuesday trip to Las Vegas, Nevada, the White House said on Friday. The Senate group is expected make their plans public around the same time, the Associated Press reported.

See Also: Where Do Labor Unions Stand on Immigration?

For Obama, immigration reform is a campaign promise that has remained unfulfilled from his first White House run in 2008. During his 2012 re-election campaign, the president vowed to renew his effort to overhaul the nation's immigration system. It has long been expected that Obama would roll out his plans shortly after his inauguration.

The president's trip to Las Vegas is designed "to redouble the administration's efforts to work with Congress to fix the broken immigration system this year," the White House said.

Ever since November's election, in which Latino voters turned out in record numbers, Republicans and Democrats have expressed a desire to work on immigration reform. Obama has long supported a bill that would make many of the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants without criminal records eligible to apply for an earned pathway to citizenship, which includes paying fines and learning English.

Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

But the debate over a pathway to citizenship is expected to be contentious. Other flashpoints in an immigration reform push could include a guest-worker program, workplace enforcement efforts, border security, and immigration backlogs.

In a statement, the White House said that "any legislation must include a path to earned citizenship."

Ahead of his immigration push next week, Obama met today with a group of lawmakers from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), including chairman Rubén Hinojosa (D-Texas) , Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), Democratic Caucus Chair Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), and CHC Immigration Task Force Chair Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), the latter's office said. CHC members are expected to play a pivotal role in the debate.

"The president is the quarterback and he will direct the team, call the play, and be pivotal if we succeed. I am very optimistic based on conversations with Republicans in the House and Senate that we will do more than just talk about the immigration issue this year," Gutierrez said in a statement following the CHC meeting with Obama. "The president putting his full weight and attention behind getting a bill signed into law is tremendously helpful. We need the president and the American people all putting pressure on the Congress to act because nothing happens in the Capitol without people pushing from the outside."

A bipartisan group of eight senators, which includes Menendez, has also begun talks on drafting an immigration bill and will play an integral part in the process of passing a bill through Congress. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has been participating in talks with others senators, has also unveiled his own outline for an immigration proposal.

The group of senators have reportedly eyed Friday as the date when they'll unveil their separate proposal, according to the Washington Post.

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Zoologger: Supercool squirrels go into the deep freeze

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world

Species: Spermophilus parryii
Habitat: The frozen North American tundra, in labyrinthine burrows

In the Arctic winter, it is not even worth getting up in the morning. It's freezing cold and the sun never rises, making it impossible to tell night from day. So each autumn, when the Arctic ground squirrel (Spermophilus parryii) heads underground to hibernate for eight months, it doesn't even bother setting its circadian clock.

During hibernation, the squirrel goes into a state akin to suspended animation. It cuts itself off from the world and allows its body temperature to drop to -3 °C while it sleeps – the lowest ever body temperature recorded in a mammal. Once it wakes up for the summer, however, the squirrel can switch its daily clock back on.

The squirrels' sub-zero tolerance was first discovered almost 25 years ago. Curious how the animals manage to survive the frigid Arctic winter where temperatures regularly drop to -30 °C, Brian Barnes of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks implanted radio transmitters into the stomachs of captive squirrels, which transmitted information on their body temperature, before letting them build burrows for the winter.

Once the squirrels went into their deep sleep, Barnes found that their core body temperature dropped from about 36 °C to -3 °C.

To prevent their blood from freezing, the squirrels cleanse it of any particles that water molecules could form ice crystals around. This allows the blood to remain liquid below zero, a phenomenon known as supercooling.

It's still unknown how the squirrels do this, says Barnes, because they lack the "antifreeze" proteins that allow fish to survive at low temperatures. But their extremely low metabolism probably allows them to make best use of their fat stores.

How low can you go?

To determine the limit of the squirrels' supercooled sleep, Melanie Richter from Barnes's lab slowly decreased the temperature inside a freezing wind tunnel with a hibernating squirrel in it. As the mercury dropped, the squirrel stayed asleep, keeping its body temperature around -4 °C until the room temperature hit -26 °C.

At this temperature, the squirrel started to shiver and wake up (see video above), and its body temperature rose, suggesting that this is the lowest temperature at which it could survive while asleep.

Richter presented her work at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting in San Francisco earlier this month.

These extreme temperatures aren't the only thing that makes hibernators want to stay in bed. The constant light of the Arctic summer and constant darkness of the winter make it impossible to tune circadian clocks to any environmental cues. As a result, many Arctic species such as ptarmigans and reindeer lack circadian rhythms at all.

Hit the snooze

To test whether squirrels have such clocks, the group gave their tagged animals light-sensitive collars, allowing the researchers to know when the squirrels were in and out of their burrows.

Male squirrels woke up about three weeks before females. During this time, they stayed in their burrows eating food they had previously stored. In this constant darkness, their body temperatures remained constant, indicating that their circadian clocks were still off.

But as soon as a squirrel emerged in the spring, its body temperature began rising during the day and falling at night.

Throughout the constantly light summer, the squirrels seemed to create their own sunrise and sunset by popping out of their burrows every day and retreating at night. This tricked their body clocks into responding.

It's not clear how they tell night from day, Barnes says, unless they're responding to some cue such as the height of the sun in the sky or how red the light is. The team is now trying to figure out what genes in the squirrels' brains are turning their rhythms on and off.

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NUS names water research facility in honour of Dutchman

SINGAPORE: The National University of Singapore has named its water research facility the van Kleef Centre. This is to honour Dutchman Karel Willem Benjamin van Kleef, who lived in Singapore in the 19th and early 20th century.

He bequeathed his fortune to build the Van Kleef Aquarium, which was demolished in 1996.

The research facility was named in conjunction with a visit by the Queen of Netherlands.

Queen Beatrix was accompanied by members of the royal family, Prince of Orange and Princess Maxima of the Netherlands, as well as foreign affairs and foreign trade ministers.

They visited the Aquatic Science Centre, where researchers showcased research work on urban water management and water sensitive urban design.

Ambassador-at-Large Professor Tommy Koh was one of the guests. Prof Koh said it was important for Singaporeans to remember and honour foreign friends who had been good to Singapore.

He said: "I want them to remember that this is a foreign friend of Singapore who loved our country so much that he bequeathed his fortune to us, and also to remember the aquarium which has disappeared.

"Because for two generations of Singaporeans, it was the only aquarium in Singapore, and we all went there. We loved the aquarium and it made an impact on some people."

-CNA/ac

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Web founder: share information, improve the world

Tim Berners-Lee speaking at the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

He stopped well short of saying information wants to be free, but Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, said today the world would be better with some judicious liberation.

Speaking at the 2013 World Economic Forum today in Davos, Switzerland, Berners-Lee called on social-networking sites, academics, musicians, and governments to share more information online.

In earlier days of computing, people had full control over their own information because it was all stored on their own computer in front of them. Now, people store data with online services that deprive them of that control.

"They put their photographs into Flickr. The simplest thing in world, you'd think, would be to share these photos with Facebook friends and LindedIn colleagues. But you can't do that, because these social networks are a silo," Berners-Lee said. "There's a frustration that I've told it all my data, but I as a user don't have access to that."

Berners-Lee also called upon governments to release data -- not data about military sites or perhaps power infrastructure that could make a country vulnerable, but information like pothole locations and hospital health outcome statistics that can improve accountability, provide economic opportunities for companies, help the public, and enable organizations to learn what works or not.

"It's very difficult to measure. That's the difficulty. But you're making a common good that makes the world run more efficiently," he said. "It's a question of unlocking this potential we already have. It's a huge benefit for very little cost."

He also wanted reforms that would let academic papers be copied freely and let music be distributed more easily with payments to musicians.

"There was a lot of pushback against the online world by the recording industry because it upset their way of selling these plastic things," he said, referring to compact discs. " We need to find a whole other new business model. We should develop a new payment protocol so when you're using things it becomes easy to pay."

Some of these ideas are recurring themes for Berners-Lee, who developed the first incarnation as a way for scientists to share information at CERN, the European nuclear physics lab and particle accelerator site on the border of Switzerland and France.

Berners-Lee has voiced concerns over the future of the Web, notably walled gardens such as Facebook and government interference. He's staunchly opposed to "silos" where users no longer have control over their own information.

Remembering Aaron Swartz
And invoking the memory of Aaron Swartz, the programmer and activist who committed suicide earlier this month after facing felony charges for downloading numerous academic papers, Berners-Lee said legislators must realize that accessing that information isn't necessarily a crime.

"There seems to be a deep suspicion of anybody accessing a computer system," he said. There's a place for legislation to deal with the problems of cybersecurity, he said, but "what can happen is the legislation gets too strong." And that led to prosecutors' overreach, Berners-Lee said.

"Aaron was a hacker in the good sense. He used his programming to try to make a point," he said. "They ended up using the law [which states] if you break into a computer system anywhere then you are guilty of a felony. Never mind whether you were taking out too many library books or trying to destroy the infrastructure of a country."

Berners-Lee called Swartz "an incredibly ethical person who thought a huge amount about what was right and how the world should be." One action that brought unwelcome attention from the FBI was downloading public-domain court records from the governmental systems that charge for the service, then republishing those documents for free. The reason he did so: "To point out that the government ought to be doing that."

Swartz was exemplary because he could use his programming skills to change the world. Most computer users merely know how to use a word processor at best, but Berners-Lee called for more and better computer education.

"I'm not talking about a course to tell them what buttons to press. When you're told how to program a computer, you're taking a leap into an area, joining a group of people who do incredible things."

And looking at the very big picture, Berners-Lee said there's plenty more work to be done getting the Internet to change the world.

"World peace has not miraculously occurred. People still mainly talk to the people who have the same religion and same culture," he said. "It hasn't really broken down cultural barriers. Wan we develop systems that will cause that kind of change?"

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