What’s New in the New, Slim IMac?

Apple‘s iMac, or all-in-one desktop Mac, has always had a flair for the dramatic. From the “transparent gumdrop” original, to the “Pixar lamp” model, through to today’s enormous flatscreens, it’s been perhaps the most distinctive desktop computer in each of its iterations.

Now, at the event where Apple introduced the new iPad Mini, it also refreshed its mainstream desktop Mac lineups. Both the Mac Mini and iMac got new models, each faster and more powerful than the previous year’s. But while the Mac Mini still looks basically the same, the iMac now cuts an incredibly slim profile, which Apple says is 5 millimeters thin at its edge.

It’s not as thin as it seems — it curves substantially towards the back, not that you’d be able to tell from most of the photos on Apple’s site. But it doesn’t just have its looks going for it.

Improved display

The iMac still doesn’t have a Retina Display; that honor went to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the second Mac to get a screen so sharp you can’t discern individual pixels with your unaided eye. Apple claims that the iMac’s screen now features 75 percent glare reduction, however, as well as an IPS display for improved viewing angles. Finally, the screen is now flush with the glass, so that it looks like there’s nothing in between you and the picture.

No optical drive

The new iMac has an SDXC card slot, so you can plug in up to 64 GB digital camera memory cards. It also has two high-speed Thunderbolt ports, for attaching external displays and backup hard drives, as well as four USB ports. The slot-loading DVD drive, however, has been removed … so make room in the budget for an external drive, if you still need one.

Dramatically improved performance

It’s a cliche that each new generation of computers is faster, better, and smaller than the last these days. Apple provides concrete numbers and handy benchmarks, however: “up to 60 percent faster graphics,” for instance, and it says that they feature the new third-generation quad-core Intel Core processors. Obviously, how much faster it is than the last iMac will depend on the specs of each, but the high end is now much higher.

Fusion Drive

What about hard disk access speeds — the tightest bottleneck, when it comes to computer performance? One way to get around those is to use a solid-state drive, or SSD, which uses flash memory like on the iPad and is much faster than a magnetic hard disk. SSDs cost more, though, and don’t offer nearly as much storage space.

Apple’s solution to get around this is Fusion Drive, which pairs a smaller SSD with a 1 TB (or larger) hard disk. OS X and its core apps are preloaded on the faster SSD, and Fusion Drive automatically puts your most-used stuff on it as well. Expect this add-on option to be pricey, however; it costs $ 250 extra on the Mac Mini, and isn’t even available on the cheapest Mac Mini model.

Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

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Disney to buy “Star Wars” producer for $4.05 billion

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Walt Disney Co agreed to buy filmmaker George Lucas‘s Lucasfilm Ltd and its “Star Wars” franchise for $ 4.05 billion in cash and stock, a blockbuster deal that includes the surprise promise of a new film in the series in 2015.

Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger told analysts on Tuesday that the plan is to release a new movie in the series every two to three years thereafter. The last “Star Wars” picture was “Revenge of the Sith” in 2005, and Lucas has in the past denied any plans for more.

Lucas, a Hollywood icon known for exercising control over the most minute details of the fictional universe he created, will remain as a creative consultant on the new films.

“It’s now time for me to pass ‘Star Wars’ on to a new generation of filmmakers,” he said in a statement. Lucas will become the second-largest individual holder of Disney shares, with a 2.2 percent stake.

Disney will pay about half the purchase price in cash and issue about 40 million shares at closing.

“This is one of the greatest entertainment properties of all time,” Iger said. Like Disney’s purchases of Marvel Entertainment and Pixar studio, LucasFilm will “drive long-term value to our shareholders,” he said.

Chief Financial Officer Jay Rasulo said the deal would lower Disney’s earnings per share by a low single-digits percentage in fiscal 2013 and 2014. He also said Disney would repurchase all of the issued shares on the open market within the next two years, on top of planned buybacks.

This agreement marks the third time in less than seven years that Disney has signed a massive deal to take over a beloved studio or character portfolio, part of its strategy to acquire brands that can be stretched across TV, movies, theme parks and the Internet.

In early 2006, Disney struck a deal to acquire “Toy Story” creator Pixar, and in the summer of 2009 it bought the comic book powerhouse Marvel.

“Disney already has a great portfolio and this adds one more,” said Morningstar analyst Michael Corty. “They don’t have any holes, but their past deals have been additive.”

Iger said he and Lucas first discussed a possible sale about 18 months ago. Lucas was pondering his retirement, and Iger was looking to add another well-known brand to the Disney empire. The two signed the deal at Disney’s Burbank, California, headquarters on Tuesday.

“Everywhere I went, ‘Star Wars’ was already there, and sometimes they got there ahead of us,” said Iger in an interview. “I kept seeing that brand and decided maybe we should buy it.”

He told analysts he believed there was “substantial pent-up demand” for new “Star Wars” movies. Each of the last three films in the series would have grossed $ 1.5 billion in today’s dollars at the box office, CFO Rasulo estimated.

The film’s iconic characters also will boost Disney’s sales of toys and other consumer products, particularly overseas, executives said. Sales of “Star Wars” items such as Darth Vader and Yoda action figures total roughly $ 215 million a year, Rasulo said.

In 2005, the year the last “Star Wars” film was released, LucasFilm generated $ 550 million in operating income, Rasulo said.

Disney also will be able to extend the presence of the franchise at its theme parks around the globe, Iger said. The company’s parks already feature rides based on “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones,” another Lucas property.

“Star Wars” characters also are likely to find a home on the Disney XD cable channel, which is aimed at young boys, Iger said.

Iger wouldn’t commit to keeping the “Star Wars” operation separate from Disney, as he did with Pixar and Marvel.

And Lucas won’t sit on the Disney board despite his 2.2 percent stake in the company, Iger said. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who held a large stake in Disney after it bought his Pixar studio, had a seat on the Disney board.

From a fan’s perspective, critics said there was sure to be at least some excitement at the prospect of episode seven in the saga of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader.

“Do I want to see more Star Wars movies? Not really, but they’re not making these movies for me,” the film writer “Mr. Beaks” wrote on the well-regarded industry site Ain’t It Cool News. “There’s a whole new generation of Star Wars fans, and they worship the prequels like folks my age worshipped the original trilogy.”

Besides “Star Wars,” the Lucasfilm deal also includes rights to the “Indiana Jones” franchise, though Disney did not elaborate on any plans for that series.

(Additional reporting by Michael Erman in New York and Himank Sharma in Bangalore; Writing by Ben Berkowitz; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty and Ciro Scotti)

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Kids who smoke menthol more likely to get hooked

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Kids who experiment with menthol cigarettes are more likely to become habitual smokers than their peers who start out with the regular variety, new research findings suggest.

In a study of tens of thousands of U.S. students, researchers found that kids who were dabbling with menthol cigarettes were 80 percent more likely to become regular smokers over the next few years, versus those experimenting with regular cigarettes.

Menthol is added to cigarettes to give them a minty “refreshing” flavor. Critics have charged that menthol makes cigarettes more palatable to new smokers – many of whom are kids – and may be especially likely to encourage addiction.

“This study adds additional evidence that menthol cigarettes are a potential risk factor for kids becoming established, adult smokers,” said study leader James Nonnemaker, of the research institute RTI International in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Still, the findings, which appear in the journal Addiction, do not prove that menthol cigarettes are to blame.

“The study’s subject to a number of limitations,” Nonnemaker said. “This shows an association, not cause-and-effect.”

One issue, he said, is that the study was not set up specifically to answer the question of whether menthol might encourage habitual smoking.

The findings come from three years’ worth of surveys of over 47,000 U.S. middle school and high school students. That included almost 1,800 kids who had just started smoking during the first or second survey – one-third of whom had opted for menthol cigarettes.

By the third-year survey, more than half of those experimenters had quit smoking. Another third were still occasional smokers, and 15 percent had become habitual smokers.

The odds of becoming a regular smoker, the study found, were 80 percent higher for kids who’d started off with menthol cigarettes. That was with the kids’ age, gender and race taken into account.

The results are consistent with the idea that menthol cigarettes encourage kids to get hooked because of menthol’s “sensory properties,” according to Nonnemaker.

But, he said, more studies are needed. One question is whether the findings might vary by race. This study included mostly white students. But it’s known that young African Americans and Asian Americans are especially likely to smoke menthol varieties.

Last year, an advisory committee to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said taking mentholated cigarettes off the shelves may benefit public health.

But studies have varied on the possible effects of the cigarettes versus regular ones.

One recent study found that menthol smokers had a higher stroke rate than those who favored the non-menthol variety. Another, however, found no higher risk of lung cancer, and no evidence that menthol fans had a harder time kicking the smoking habit.

Of course, not smoking at all is the wisest choice. The risks of the habits go beyond lung cancer, and include a range of other cancers, emphysema and heart disease – the number-one killer of Americans.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, smoking any type of cigarettes increases a person’s risk of heart disease two- to four-fold compared to non-smokers.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/TlBpP3 Addiction, online October 18, 2012.

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NYC Rats: Stronger Than Sandy

Unprecedented flooding throughout low-lying portions of New York City over the past two days undoubtedly left hundreds—if not thousands—of rats scrambling for their dear lives. According to experts, most of them likely survived. “They’re a jack of all trades when it comes to locomotion,” says Rick Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. “They can’t sprint, but they run well; they’re not Michael Phelps, but they’re strong swimmers; and even though they don’t have prehensile tails, they climb well. They do it all.”

Ostfeld notes that rats can easily swim a couple hundred yards. In fact, he says, “one of the ways that rats have dispersed around the world is by jumping off of ships and swimming to shore—the proverbial ‘rats leaving a sinking ship’ is actually based on reality.”

No one knows exactly how many rats live in New York City, but Ostfeld suspects that there are at least as many rats as humans. The city’s population is dominated by the Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), an invader from Europe, and the Black rat (Rattus rattus), which originated in Asia. These highly resilient rats can be found throughout New York City, but they usually don’t travel far within those limits.

The displacement of rats caused by Hurricane Sandy—a dispersal of rats that is likely unprecedented for the city in terms of numbers—has Ostfeld concerned about a possible increased spread of rat-borne diseases. “You get infected individuals mixing with uninfected individuals and that’s a recipe for an outbreak,” says Ostfeld. “It spreads like the flu, from rat to rat.”

Urban rats are known to carry infectious diseases including leptospirosis, typhus, salmonella, hantavirus, and even the plague. The incubation period for these diseases in humans is usually a couple of weeks or months, and symptoms are often similar to those of a common flu. According to Ostfeld, “In the coming weeks and months, health-care providers should have rat-borne diseases on their radars and potentially test for them.”

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Hurricane’s death toll rises to 65 in Caribbean

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — As Americans braced Sunday for Hurricane Sandy, Haiti was still suffering.

Officials raised the storm-related death toll across the Caribbean to 65, with 51 of those coming in Haiti, which was pelted by three days of constant rains that ended only on Friday.

As the rains stopped and rivers began to recede, authorities were getting a fuller idea of how much damage Sandy brought on Haiti. Bridges collapsed. Banana crops were ruined. Homes were underwater. Officials said the death toll might still rise.

“This is a disaster of major proportions,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told The Associated Press, adding with a touch of hyperbole, “The whole south is under water.”

The country’s ramshackle housing and denuded hillsides are especially vulnerable to flooding. The bulk of the deaths were in the southern part of the country and the area around Port-au-Prince, the capital, which holds most of the 370,000 Haitians who are still living in flimsy shelters as a result of the devastating 2010 earthquake.

Santos Alexis, mayor of the southern city of Leogane, said Sunday that the rivers were receding and that people were beginning to dry their belongings in the sun.

“Things are back to being a little quiet,” Alexis said by telephone. “We have seen the end.”

Sandy also killed 11 in Cuba, where officials said it destroyed or damaged tens of thousands of houses. Deaths were also reported in Jamaica, the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. Authorities in the Dominican Republic said the storm destroyed several bridges and isolated at least 130 communities while damaging an estimated 3,500 homes.

Jamaica’s emergency management office on Sunday was airlifting supplies to marooned communities in remote areas of four badly impacted parishes.

In the Bahamas, Wolf Seyfert, operations director at local airline Western Air, said the domestic terminal of Grand Bahamas‘ airport received “substantial damage” from Sandy’s battering storm surge and would need to be rebuilt.

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Steve Ballmer Wants You to Come Over to Windows 8 [VIDEO]

On the fence about Windows 8, or Microsoft‘s Surface Tablet, or the new batch of Windows phones? Wondering whether to develop for them, or purchase one? The CEO of Microsoft would like a word with you.

[More from Mashable: Steve Ballmer on Tim Cook’s Attack: ‘I’m Glad He’s Paying Attention’]

I sat down with Steve Ballmer at the Windows 8 Phone launch in San Francisco Monday (full interview to follow), and we shot this quick one-on-one above. (Appropriately enough, it was shot on the HTC Windows Phone 8X; Ballmer was keen to test the image stabilization feature.)

[More from Mashable: Battle of the Tablets: Nexus 10 vs. iPad 4, Surface and Kindle Fire HD [CHART]]

Here, then, is Ballmer’s pitch for why you should buy into the Windows 8 ecosystem, Live Tiles and all. For consumers, it comes down to familiarity and personalization with a fresh interface. For developers, it’s about considering how many users will be on the new mobile platform in a year’s time.

Microsoft is having some success at persuading users to switch over: as the company announced at its Build conference Tuesday morning, there have been four million Windows 8 upgrades since Friday.

Are you convinced by the pitch? Let us know in the comments.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

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Armstrong rehab stint forces Green Day cancellations

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Green Day said on Monday they are canceling their fall club tour and postponing early 2013 dates as frontman Billie Joe Armstrong continues treatment for substance abuse.

“Obviously the timing for this isn’t ideal, but Billie Joe‘s well-being is our main concern,” band member Mike Dirnt said in a posting on Green Day’s website.

“We are happy to say that Billie Joe is doing well, and we want to thank you all for the outpouring of support and well wishes that we have received, and we can’t wait to see you all again soon,” he added.

Armstrong, lead singer and guitarist for the Grammy-winning rock band, sought substance abuse treatment late last month following an angry, guitar-smashing on-stage outburst in Las Vegas. Details of his substance abuse have not been released.

Green Day also announced on Monday it was moving up the release date of “iTré!,” part of an ambitious trilogy of albums that marks their first collection of new music since 2009, to December 11 from its original date of January 15, in part to make up for the canceled and postponed dates.

“If we couldn’t be there to play it for you live, the least we could do was give you the next best thing,” said drummer Tre Cool.

The band’s latest tour, including dates in Seattle, Sacramento and Reno, was due to wind down in Tempe, Arizona, on December 10. The website said tickets for the club shows would be refunded, and that new dates for the postponed shows would be announced shortly.

The California-based punk rock band, formed in the late 1980s, has sold more than 65 million records worldwide and won five Grammys, including best alternative album for its 1994 major-label debut, “Dookie,” and best rock album for “American Idiot” and “21st Century Breakdown.”

(Reporting by Chris Michaud; Editing by Jill Serjeant, Gary Hill)

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Acupuncture may ease cancer-related fatigue

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Acupuncture may help relieve fatigue in women who’ve had breast cancer, a new UK study suggests.

Researchers found that women who attended six weekly acupuncture sessions had greater improvements in fatigue as well as anxiety, depression and quality of life, compared to those who only received educational materials.

But that still doesn’t prove it was the needles, themselves, that boosted women’s energy levels, they said. And one cancer and alternative medicine researcher not part of the study team said the acupuncture group only showed a “modest improvement in fatigue – it was not a very remarkable, strong effect.”

Still, acupuncture could be “well worth a try” for some people, Dr. Amit Sood, from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Reuters Health.

“Fatigue is the most common symptom for all cancer patients,” said Carol Enderlin, who has studied that topic at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.

She said cancer and cancer treatments can cause chronic pain, psychological stress and anemia – a decrease in healthy red blood cells – all of which contribute to fatigue. In addition, people who are nauseated after chemo might not be getting the most nutritious diet for maintaining energy levels.

Enderlin, who also wasn’t involved in the new study, said acupuncture may help as an add-on therapy for women who’ve had their fatigue checked out by a doctor and tinkered with their physical activity and diet – but are still frequently tired.

Approximately one in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in her life.

For the new research, Alexander Molassiotis from the University of Manchester and his colleagues tracked 227 women with moderate or severe cancer-related fatigue treated with acupuncture and another 75 fatigued women who didn’t get acupuncture.

The women had all received chemotherapy for breast cancer in the five years before the study, and most had felt chronically tired for a year or more. Participants were given a booklet about cancer-related fatigue when they started the study.

The researchers found that after six weeks, general fatigue had dropped by almost four points on a 0-20 scale among women who had acupuncture, compared to a less than one-point decline in the comparison group. That is “mild to modest” improvement, according to Sood – not enough to allow someone who is stuck in bed to start walking, but maybe enough to get people who are too tired to exercise to start doing some activity.

Anxiety and depression scores, measured from 0-21, dropped by two additional points post-acupuncture, compared to scores in women given educational materials only. Emotional and physical well-being got a greater boost with acupuncture therapy as well, Molassiotis’s team found.

The researchers couldn’t tell how much of that benefit might have been due to the “placebo effect” – women who felt better because they expected to benefit from acupuncture.

In an ideal trial, participants would get either real or fake acupuncture, without knowing which. But it’s very hard to design a convincing but ineffective fake acupuncture treatment to use for comparison, researchers noted.

According to an editorial published with the study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, close to one-third of cancer patients have persistent fatigue that may continue for years after treatment. Doctors typically encourage moderate exercise and talk therapy to improve their energy, wrote psychologist Julienne Bower, from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Still, she added, it’s unclear how well any therapies work over the long term in people with severe fatigue.

Enderlin said people who’ve been treated for cancer should make sure they’re not at high risk of bleeding or infection before considering acupuncture for fatigue.

But if they’re medically cleared, she said the alternative therapy “looks really intriguing.”

Enderlin recommended “maintaining activity to tolerance, unless there are other problems with that, good nutrition, getting adequate sleep, and if the fatigue continues, considering there might be an alternative that could complement (those things).”

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/gPtMdm Journal of Clinical Oncology, online October 29, 2012.

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Economy may skirt direct hit from Hurricane Sandy

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – Hurricane Sandy is shaping up to be one of the biggest storms ever to hit the United States but even with the severe damage that is expected, the blow to the economy is seen as short-term.

Economists say some of the impact caused by businesses closing will be offset by reconstruction efforts, and point to catastrophic storms like Katrina, which devastated New Orleans but did not deal lasting damage to the national economy.

Still, Sandy’s sheer breadth – 10 states have declared a state of emergency – means it could hurt this quarter’s economic output, even if the long-term impact ultimately proves neutral.

Gross domestic product in the region between New York and Washington amounts to some $ 2.5 trillion, so that every day the region’s economy grinds to a halt amounts to about $ 10 billion in foregone output, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

At the local level of course, the destruction can be severe, and vary in direction depending on the industry affected.

Peter Morici at the University of Maryland estimates that Sandy will cause about $ 35 billion to $ 45 billion in losses and damages but then be followed by as much as $ 36 billion in recovery spending.

Damage caused by last year’s Hurricane Irene totaled as much as $ 20 billion, he said.

Predicting the impact of Sandy is made all the harder by complexity of the rare, hybrid “super storm” involving other weather systems that could get trapped over the Northeastern United States and amplify inland flooding.

“The range of possible scenarios for Hurricane Sandy remains enormous. There are examples of natural disasters ultimately exacting only minimal toll – Irene – and others having an outsized impact, such as Hurricane Katrina when the (New Orleans) levees broke,” said Eric Lascelles, chief economist RBC Global Asset Management Inc. “Really, it is a game of probabilities.”

Disaster modeling company Eqecat forecast economic losses caused by Sandy at $ 10 billion to $ 20 billion.

The toll from Katrina in 2005 exceeded $ 100 billion by most accounts. U.S. economic growth slowed in the quarter immediately after the devastation inflicted on New Orleans but bounced back quickly.

The U.S. economy grew 2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, picking up from earlier in the year but still a weak number, as consumer spending helped to offset a worrisome pullback in business investment. Many analysts were already concerned that retail sales could suffer later this year.

Retailers bear a significant brunt of any storm’s economic impact as shoppers stay at home. But the last-minute scramble for supplies and emergency goods has a moderating effect on the overall sales declines.

Still, Evan Gold, a senior vice-president at Planalytics, a Philadelphia consulting firm that advises businesses on weather-related matters, was less optimistic about seeing any upside, particularly with Sandy hitting so close to the holiday season.

“If consumers in this part of the country are spending hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to buy things like generators, or after the storm, to do clean-up, that is likely going to cut into budgets that people might have for their holiday shopping,” said Gold.

FORECASTERS CHANNEL METEOROLOGISTS

One thing economists do agree on is that data releases in coming weeks will be even harder than usual to forecast. For instance, the impact of Sandy is likely to skew figures on weekly jobless benefit applications and chain store sales.

“The monthly economic data will become more volatile – October retail sales, vehicle sales, and industrial production will be hurt, but they will bounce back in November and December,” Zandi said.

“Restaurants will be hurt, but grocery stores will benefit; general merchandise stores will lose business, but online retailing should get a boost, he added. “Of course, if the storm knocks out major infrastructure like refineries, cell towers, trains, sea and airports, then the economic damage will be more severe and difficult to recover from.”

The hurricane has the potential to cause some of the largest losses the global insurance industry has faced this year, but nothing that would strain insurers financially aside from hurting earnings this quarter, according to analysts.

(Additional reporting by Phil Wahba and Ben Berkowitz; Editing By Bill Schomberg and Sandra Maler)

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Pole gets 30 years for killing 6 on Channel Island

LONDON (AP) — A Polish builder who killed six people, including his wife and children, on the British Channel Island of Jersey has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Damian Rzeszowski, 31, carried out the knife attack in August 2011 at his home. He was said to have become depressed after his wife admitted to an affair.

Rzeszowski was convicted of six counts of manslaughter but cleared of murder. On Monday, Judge Michael Birt sentenced him to 30 years in jail for each victim, but the sentences are to run concurrently.

Rzeszowski’s victims were his wife Izabela Rzeszowska, 30; 5-year-old daughter, Kinga; 2-year-old son, Kacper; father-in-law, Marek Gartska, 56; his wife’s friend Marta De La Haye, 34; and her 5-year-old daughter, Julia.

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