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Steer clear of fads and erroneous information, and rely only on solid resources. This article is full of useful tips you should use to design a multilevel marketing campaign.
When writing content for your multilevel marketing website, ebooks or seminars, make sure to go outside of the box. Be sure to hit every point.
The top players in your industry have valuable skills that you can learn from. Learning from the leaders helps you to side-pass the common mistakes other fledgling marketers are making.
TIP! When it comes to network marketing, demonstrate leadership in all that you do. Be creative with unique offerings from your company.
Treat network marketing like a business. A lot of people fail due to the fact that they don?t take it seriously. There is a ton of work involved in MLM and it will become a full time job when you dedicate enough time to it. Before you begin to develop your skills, do your homework and learn as much as possible.
Social arenas such as online forums are great places to learn through participation. These forums can provide valuable tips and information on MLM, and as a bonus, they are free. Do a quick search online, and scroll through until you find a forum you like. To find useful tips, read a few posts each day and ask any questions you have.
There isn?t a person alive who doesn?t enjoy a great deal! Consider partnering up with a company that allows you to distribute some of their coupons to your customers. There are several marketing strategies you can use that involve coupons. For example, you can distribute them to loyal customers, or start a raffle with coupon prizes. You can increase consumer interest in your product by offering it at a reduced price.
TIP! Double your successes whenever you can! Look for inspiration in your organization or industry. Try to adopt a similar approach and attitude, while following their success.
Business Books
If you want to see more growth from your multi-level marketing efforts, you have to constantly learn new things. Spend time daily reading business books, social media books, business books and other literature designed to inspire success. You can learn a lot from webinars featuring successful online marketing businessmen. The greater your arsenal of marketing knowledge and techniques, the greater your success.
A great piece of advice in helping you improve your network marketing success is to keep an open mind. Always having an open-mind will increase your chances for business success.
TIP! Having an e-mail list, and using it consistently is a fundamental part of successful network marketing. A large email list is essential, whether it is compiled yourself or purchased from a service.
When you create your MLM website, design it as a tutorial. By structuring your website in this way, you are likely to see increased traffic. Also, your visitors will spend more time on your site. Each of these factors can increase the likelihood that your network will attract new members; it also brings in additional income from advertisements.
Always leave time for your friends and family. This keeps you happy and stress-free. You may find that you must schedule more time for business initially. However, this time will pay off in profits and flexibility later on down the line.
Starting off with a well thought out business plan can help you make your multi-level marketing endeavors more successful more quickly. Write down your goals and the methods to achieving them. Have an idea of how much business you will need to turn a profit, your monthly sales goals and what your marketing plans are.
TIP! Creating a blog on your website can help you keep your clients up-to-date with the happenings of your business. This effort to connect with your customers will be appreciated and may lead them to make more purchases from you.
You should aim to draw prospects to your page. Without paying customers, your business will fail. Once you have lured a viewer to your page, you have a better opportunity to sell your products, and make this person aware of just how valuable your service is to him or her.
Business Plan
While it is important to have a business plan in place, ensure that there is flexibility to deal with any surprising occasions that arise. You don?t need the extra pressure if the unexpected occurs and you miss a self imposed deadline. Be aware of what needs to be done each month, and then adjust this according to what you are actually capable of doing. A good business plan should reflect how you can turn a profit based on these two factors.
TIP! Always treat your network marketing projects as a business. When it comes to your networking profit potential, you get what you give.
Make use of the advice and suggestions you have seen here and you will be on your way to a successful campaign in MLM. If you can implement these tactics, you can be successful.
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Thanks to Houston's late-season slump, Denver and New England will have byes when the AFC playoffs begin next week.
The Texans fell from first to third in the conference Sunday when they lost 28-16 at Indianapolis, which welcomed back coach Chuck Pagano after nearly three months of treatments for leukemia.
AFC West champion Denver won its 11th straight game, 38-3 over Kansas City to secure the top seed. New England blanked Miami 28-0 for the second spot.
Minnesota edged Green Bay 37-34 to grab the final NFC wild card, sinking the Packers to the third seed. Those teams will meet again next Saturday night at Lambeau Field.
The other NFC matchup will have Seattle (11-5), which beat St. Louis 20-13, at either Washington or Dallas on Sunday at 4:30 p.m. ET. Those teams met Sunday night for the NFC East crown.
Cincinnati (10-6) will be at Houston on Saturday at 4:30 p.m. ET, and Indianapolis (11-5) goes to at Baltimore (10-6) on Sunday at 1 p.m. in the AFC wild-card rounds.
The divisional round games will be hosted by Denver on Saturday, Jan. 12, followed by San Francisco at night. On Sunday, Jan. 13, Atlanta will host the early game, followed by New England.
Peyton Manning threw for three touchdowns as Denver (13-3) routed the Chiefs. New England (12-4) got the second seed despite having the same record as Houston because it beat the Texans, who lost three of their final four games.
Adrian Peterson had 199 yards against the Packers, finishing with 2,097 ? Dickerson's single-season rushing mark in 2,105. But it was rookie kicker Blair Walsh who won it with a 29-yard field goal as time expired.
"''Ultimately we got the 'W,'" Peterson said.
Baltimore Pro Bowl safety Ed Reed is looking forward to a reunion with Pagano. He wishes it would come a little later in the postseason.
"Chuck's like a dad to me," Reed said "He means a lot to me. I would have much rather seen them in the AFC championship game than the first game."
But Reed will see him next week at Baltimore.
The Ravens had a chance to move up to the AFC's third seed with a win and a New England loss. But Baltimore lost at Cincinnati as both teams played backups for much of the game.
Pagano coached the Ravens' secondary for three seasons and was promoted to coordinator last year. Players and coaches in Baltimore have kept in touch, offering encouragement as he fought through the cancer treatments.
"Going back to Baltimore, obviously there's some familiarity there," Pagano said. "We had four great years there as a family. It's a top-notch organization, you know, really good football club. It's a great challenge and they have a great team and they have great players all over the place."
The Colts were 2-14 last season and chose quarterback Andrew Luck with the top selection in the draft. Luck and offensive coordinator Bruce Arians, who stepped in as interim coach with Pagano sidelined, led the turnaround.
Next week, Pagano goes up against former boss John Harbaugh.
"I love his family, and he's one of my closest personal friends in coaching," Harbaugh said. "What he's been through is phenomenal, but we're all competitors so that gets set aside."
The defending Super Bowl champion Giants are out of contention. When Chicago beat Detroit 26-24, the Giants (9-7) were eliminated, even though they routed Philadelphia 42-7.
"It hurts," said Eli Manning. "Each year you want to make the playoffs to give yourself an opportunity to win a championship; 9-7 last year was good enough. It wasn't good enough this year and we knew it wouldn't be."
Minnesota's win eliminated Chicago, which the Vikings swept this season.
___
Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL
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TIP! Use wallpaper and varnish to make a backsplash in your kitchen. Select wallpaper that you like.
It is a wonderful undertaking to do home improvement jobs, regardless of your skill or knowledge. Don?t let the shows you see on T.V. regarding home improvement fool you. Home improvement includes more than just huge jobs. Read along with the tips above and apply the choices that seem beneficial to your individual needs.
TIP! You will be able to save a bunch of money if you live in your home while you do any home improvement, so try doing it room by room. This helps to ensure that your home is still livable, until of course the only bathroom needs to get worked on! Think about staying with friends then.
For storing materials, try placing them between floor joists or ceiling rafters. Pieces of molding that are long, and materials that are larger than that can be placed in this area with minimal effort. All you have to do is put some furring strips on floor joists or your rafters.
TIP! Sort your tools by project, in multiple tool boxes. You might have one toolbox for plumbing tools and assorted pipes, fittings, and connections used in plumbing.
Is your home too drafty? Lots of new products exist that utilize air as a means of insulation. That?s right, air! It operates in a manner similar to the principles behind bubble wrap. Air is pre-pumped into the cushions, which are then attached to your home?s walls and ceilings. It is a new and convenient way to insulate your home on a budget.
Are you looking to do some home improvement? Personalize your home without spending money by creatively arranging family photos. Purchase some decorative frames that will match your existing decor.
TIP! For complicated home improvement repairs, it may be wise to hire a professional. Professionals, like architects and contractors, are called professionals for a reason.
Install some motion detectors in the entrance of your house. By turning off the lights when no one is there to use them, these will save you money on your utilities. Motion detectors can detect thieves as their lights turn on due to their presence.
TIP! Home improvement tasks can be ?improved? by the use of the correct tools. Making sure you have the right tool for the job guarantees the work can be done right and as easy as possible.
Never go over your budget! Make sure to establish a budget so your costs don?t end up being absurd. Create a detailed budget and follow it as you work on your project.
TIP! If you want to resell your home, you should focus on the bathroom. Living rooms and bedrooms are quite changeable by the new occupants of the home, but a bathroom is far more costly to update, so it needs to be in good shape from the start.
Home improvement could be very enjoyable for anyone that wants to do it. You need to know a few things but you don?t need to go crazy researching about everything. Just remember this advice so you can being on your home improvement project!
MIC Masonry offers residential and commercial masonry construction and installation solutions. For more than 4 years, we have furnished custom brick masonry solutions for citizens of Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania and the surrounding communities in a 40 mile radius. Regardless if you are a contractor, architect or property owner, we are ready and waiting to assist you with your next masonry venture. To guarantee that you are thoroughly pleased with our project, our crew of professionals takes care of one venture a time. We take our time to ensure the project is done correctly the first time. From landscape design organizations and architects to fence business and community developers, we have dealt with numerous organizations and individuals to create custom masonry structures that will last for ages.
SERVICES? OVER 20 YEARS EXPERIENCE
At MIC Masonry, we carry only the highest quality products and offer a extensive assortment of colors, styles, shapes and sizes. Our knowledgeable staff is accessible to support you with all facets of your building project. At MIC Masonry, consumer service is our priority. If you are in demand of any of the following solutions, contact us today!
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Gaming prowess rarely comes cheap, but that doesn't mean it can't at least be affordable. The Asus G75VW-DH72 gaming laptop may offer pricing and performance well below what tricked out systems like the Eurocom Scorpius can offer, but when stacked against mid-range gaming systems like the Alienware M17x R4, it still holds its own, getting you on the gaming grid for under two grand.
Design and Features While previous incarnations of Asus' Republic of Gamers line have emulated stealth fighter jets and naval vessels, the G75VW's design is a little more conservative, especially for a gaming machine. It's not as slim as the Razer Blade (2012), by any means. The laptop is still large, measuring 2.0 by 16.3 by 12.6 inches (HWD), but has changed up the look a bit, adding metal accents around the keyboard and across the speaker grille, which break up the imposing all-matte-black look seen in designs past. The result is a gaming rig that looks almost professional. Now, don't misunderstand, at 8.7 pounds (10.9 with the power brick) you won't be lugging this laptop to and from work, but it wouldn't look completely out of place in an office environment.
Despite the conservative look, the gaming DNA is still there. The back end of the G75VW is dominated by large cooling vents, and Asus' designs are tweaked to keep the system cool but quiet, grouping the heat generating components toward the back of the system. The chiclet keyboard sits at a slight slope, but is otherwise competent, providing a shallow but firm key movement. The touchpad is the same high-quality touchpad found on the Asus G75VW-DS71, but with the shift to Windows 8, Asus has also added some gesture support for Windows 8-specific controls. A swipe from the right edge of the touchpad pulls up the Charms Bar, while a three-fingered swipe down cycles through open apps. Pinch and zoom and two-finger scrolling aren't new additions, but they take on new importance in the absence of a touchscreen.
You may not be touching the screen, but the 17.3-inch display is still bright and sharp, with 1920-by-1080 resolution providing 1080p whether you're playing Skyrim or watching The Dark Knight on Blu-ray. The sound is also pretty good (as tested with the new trailer for The Man of Steel), staying clear at high volumes and providing a fair amount of bass thanks to an integrated subwoofer.
In addition to a Blu-ray/DVD combo drive, the Asus G75VW is outfitted with four USB 3.0 ports (one with power for charging devices), Gigabit Ethernet, a 3-in-1 card reader (SDHC, MMC, MS), and jacks for headphone and microphone. You also get several options for video connectivity, with HDMI, VGA, and mini DisplayPort outputs. Wireless connections provide 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0.
The G75VW-DH72 pairs a 750GB spinning hard drive with a separate 256GB solid-state drive (SSD), letting you shift bulk data storage to the hard drive while keeping programs on the SSD for optimum performance. Included on the drive are Microsoft Office Starter 2010, a 60-day trial of Trend Micro Antivirus, Adobe Reader X, and Asus' Application Suite, which includes 3GB of free cloud backup with Asus WebStorage. Asus covers the G75VW-DH72 with a two-year warranty, but also includes a full-year of additional accidental damage coverage, 24/7 tech support, and 30-day "Zero Bright Dot" warranty on the display panel.
Performance The Asus G75VW-DH72 is outfitted with a 2.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-3630QM processor with 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 670M with 3GB of dedicated VRAM. The combination is potent?in Cinebench R11.5, the processor scored 6.44 points, outperforming both the Alienware M17x R4 (6.19 points) and the MSI GT70 0NE-276US (6.23 points), but falling behind both the Razer Blade (6.86) and the Eurocom Scorpius (7.29). The Asus G75VW-DH72 also made short work of our multimedia tests, completing our Handbrake video encoding test in 36 seconds, and Photoshop CS6 in 3 minutes 32 seconds.
Perhaps more important than general performance is how the G75VW-DH72 does with games. In Aliens vs. Predator, it racked up a respectable 55 frames per second (fps) at medium detail settings and 1,366-by-768 resolution, but dropped to a less than playable 18 fps when resolution was dialed up to 1,920-by-1,080. When tested with Heaven, however, it scored 70 fps at medium settings and a nearly playable 28 fps at 1080p. While you won't be able to go all out with the detail settings on high-end games, you will still see excellent performance on even the most demanding games, provided you back off on the eye-candy a bit.
The Asus G75VW-DH72 also did well in battery tests, lasting 3 hours and two minutes in our battery rundown test. While not even long enough to make it through a screening of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, it's still pretty decent performance for a gaming laptop. Few laptops pass the three hour mark, with one of the few exceptions being the portability minded Razer Blade, which still only lasted 3 hours 53 minutes when tested with MobileMark 2006, our previous battery test.
As a decently priced mid-range gaming laptop, the Asus G75VW-DH72 offers great performance at an affordable price, letting you enjoy top of the line games (albeit with middle of the road graphics performance) for far less than a tricked out high-end system. It's an affordable option to the Alienware M17X R4, and as such, replaces it for our Editors' Choice mid-range gaming laptop.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS:
COMPARISON TABLE Compare the Asus G75VW-DH72 with several other laptops side by side.
More laptop reviews: ??? Asus G75VW-DH72 ??? Toshiba Satellite U845W-S430 ??? Panasonic Toughbook CF-53 ??? Lenovo ThinkPad Twist (3347-4HU) ??? Acer Iconia W700-6465 ?? more
When Lions return man Stefan Logan fielded a kick at the 4-yard line on Saturday against the Falcons, he did something extraordinarily stupid: He took a knee and downed it. At the 4-yard line.
TV cameras caught Lions coach Jim Schwartz calling that, ?the f?king stupidest thing I?ve ever seen.? Now Logan has been benched.
?I won?t be [returning kicks] this Sunday,? Logan confirmed today. ?I?m mad, but at the same time there?s nothing I can do about that. That?s coach?s decision. I blame myself. I?m not blaming the coaches, I blame myself. I?m my worst critic.?
Logan didn?t have much of an explanation for why he downed the ball.
?It was a messed up play by me and I have to live with it and move on from it. It?s just a bad play by me and I have to pay the consequences and I have to live with it. I just have to work through it and just be ready for whenever your opportunity comes back up,? Logan said.
Schwartz said that if Logan can?t be trusted not to down the ball at the 4-yard line, then he can?t be trusted to return kicks.
?Part of a returner?s job is to know where he is on the field. Saying ?I didn?t know where I was, I thought I was in the end zone,? is not a valid excuse. Your job as a returner is to know where you are on the field, particularly after we had gotten a safety,? Schwartz said.
Frankly, Schwartz?s decision to bench Logan is long overdue, regardless of his bonehead play last week. Logan is dead last in the NFL with a 21.3-yard kickoff return average and 16th with a 9.1-yard punt return average, and he has six fumbles this season.
Still, Logan is confident in himself going forward.
?Things happen. I didn?t lose the game,? Logan said. ?The game was already over. So it?s not like I lost the game for us, but you can look at it however you want to look at it. We?ve all struggled as a team so far. Not just one individual. I?m like the quarterback on special teams. When the camera goes on special teams it comes straight to me so if anything happens on special teams as far as muffing a punt or a guy running into me or something like that it?s going to be my fault because the light is on me.?
The reality is that Logan is wrong when he says the game was over. It wasn?t over. The Lions were losing by 13 points with 1:21 remaining at the time of Logan?s blunder, so they certainly weren?t in good shape, but teams have come back from being down 13 with 1:21 remaining and gone on to win. In fact, just this season the Lions came back to force overtime after trailing the Titans by more than 13 with less than 1:21 remaining. In that game, Logan fielded a kick with the Lions down by 14 with 1:16 remaining. Fortunately for the Lions, when Logan downed that kick he really was in the end zone. (Apparently Logan thought at the time that the game was over, but his teammates still fought their way back into it.)
Logan?s ?the game was already over? statement doesn?t speak well for his competitiveness, but Logan said he still expects to be an NFL return man in 2013.
?I?ll just keep moving forward whether it?s with Detroit or another team,? he said.
Given Schwartz?s comments about Logan, it will probably not be with Detroit.
Stowers study hints that stem cells prepare for maturity much earlier than anticipatedPublic release date: 27-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Gina Kirchweger gxk@stowers.org 816-806-1036 Stowers Institute for Medical Research
KANSAS CITY, MOUnlike less versatile muscle or nerve cells, embryonic stem cells are by definition equipped to assume any cellular role. Scientists call this flexibility "pluripotency," meaning that as an organism develops, stem cells must be ready at a moment's notice to activate highly diverse gene expression programs used to turn them into blood, brain, or kidney cells.
Scientists from the lab of Stowers Investigator Ali Shilatifard, Ph.D., report in the December 27, 2012 online issue of Cell that one way cells stay so plastic is by stationing a protein called Ell3 at stretches of DNA known as "enhancers" required to activate a neighboring gene. Their findings suggest that Ell3 parked at the enhancer of a developmentally regulated gene, even one that is silent, primes it for future expression. This finding is significant as many of these same genes are abnormally switched on in cancer.
"We now know that some enhancer misregulation is involved in the pathogenesis of solid and hematological malignances," says Shilatifard. "But a problem in the field has been how to identify inactive or poised enhancer elements. Our discovery that Ell3 interacts with enhancers in ES cells gives us a hand-hold to identify and to study them."
In 2000, Shilatifard identified Ell3 as the third member of the Ell (for "Eleven-nineteen lysine-rich leukemia gene") family of elongation factors, proteins that increase the rate at which genes are expressed. "At the time, we didn't think much of Ell3 because it was highly expressed in testes," says Shilatifard, noting that then people thought that sperm were merely vessels used to carry paternal DNA to an egg and that associated factors would have little relevance to the regulation of future gene expression in the resulting embryo.
But a few years back, a curious Open University graduate student working in the Shilatifard lab, Chengqi Lin, started exploring a potential function for the neglected gene by initiating a global search for regions occupied by Ell3 in the genome of mouse embryonic stem cells. His search in collaboration with a bioinformatician in the Shilatifard lab, Alexander S. Garruss, revealed that Ell3 sits on more than 5,000 enhancers, including many that regulate genes governing stem cell maturation into spinal cord, kidney, and blood cells.
"What was interesting was that Ell3 marked enhancers that are active and inactive, as well as enhancers that are known as "poised," says Lin, referring to a transition state from inactive to active. "That indicated that Ell3's major function might be to prime activation of genes that are just about to be expressed during development."
The fact that silent genes can be "primed" for expression was no surprise: researchers knew that the enzymatic machine that copies DNA into the RNA blueprint for proteinsa protein called Pol IIoften pauses at the start of a gene, presumably revving its engine in preparation to jump across the genetic start gate in response to a developmental signal. However, Shilatifard and colleagues showed several years ago that paused Pol II is not a prerequisite for rapid transcriptional induction.
The surprise came when researchers used a molecular trick to deplete mouse ES cells of Ell3 and then did a "genomic" survey. They found that paused Pol II vanished from the start sites of many genes in Ell3-deficient cells. This means that not only does Ell3 preferentially mark stem enhancers, but also that its presence there is necessary to keep an idling Pol II ready for action.
Most of the current study defines how, when the developmental time is right, enhancer-bound Ell3 cooperates with components of a big-boss elongation factor called the Super Elongation Complex to release Pol II from the start gate, allowing the expression of genes required for stem cell differentiation. Critical among those findings is their observation that mouse stem cells depleted of Ell3 failed to activate genes expressed in mature cell types.
These results alone are cause for any lab to start chilling the champagne, yet a surprising coda to the study, leaves readers with yet another revelation. Collaborating with Fengli Guo, Ph.D., head of the Stowers electron microscopy core, the team prepared highly magnified images of mouse sperm and observed that both Ell3 and Pol II were present, in sperm nuclei.
In mammals, gene expression regulated by Pol II, a process known as transcription, does not begin until the formation of a single-celled zygote, that is, well after the union of sperm and egg germ cells. "It is very significant that Ell3 and other factors that regulate transcription are found in sperm," says Lin, the study's first author. Lin is cautious in interpreting this finding, "but it would be very exciting to further investigate whether transcription factors found in sperm could contribute to the decondensation of sperm chromatin or even further gene activation after fertilization by serving as epigenetic markers."
Shilatifard is also cautious as questions remain to be explored, among them whether Ell3 and Pol II actually contact DNA inside sperm or whether similar processes occur in unfertilized eggs and function in this process. Nonetheless, he feels this finding has fundamental implications, not only for development, but also for where he's going next.
"This work has opened up a whole new area of research in my lab," says Shilatifard, who has in the last decade focused on aberrant gene expression associated with leukemia. "If we find that transcription factors bind to specific regions of chromatin in germ cells, I may focus on germ cells in the next few decades. This would open a huge door enabling us to determine the role of these factors in early development."
###
Zhuojuan Luo, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Shilatifard lab, also contributed to the study.
Funding for the study came from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, the National Institutes of Health (Shilatifard R01CA89455 and R01CA150265), and Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation.
About the Stowers Institute for Medical Research
The Stowers Institute for Medical Research is a non-profit, basic biomedical research organization dedicated to improving human health by studying the fundamental processes of life. Jim Stowers, founder of American Century Investments, and his wife, Virginia, opened the Institute in 2000. Since then, the Institute has spent over 900 million dollars in pursuit of its mission.
Currently, the Institute is home to nearly 550 researchers and support personnel; over 20 independent research programs; and more than a dozen technology-development and core facilities.
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Stowers study hints that stem cells prepare for maturity much earlier than anticipatedPublic release date: 27-Dec-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Gina Kirchweger gxk@stowers.org 816-806-1036 Stowers Institute for Medical Research
KANSAS CITY, MOUnlike less versatile muscle or nerve cells, embryonic stem cells are by definition equipped to assume any cellular role. Scientists call this flexibility "pluripotency," meaning that as an organism develops, stem cells must be ready at a moment's notice to activate highly diverse gene expression programs used to turn them into blood, brain, or kidney cells.
Scientists from the lab of Stowers Investigator Ali Shilatifard, Ph.D., report in the December 27, 2012 online issue of Cell that one way cells stay so plastic is by stationing a protein called Ell3 at stretches of DNA known as "enhancers" required to activate a neighboring gene. Their findings suggest that Ell3 parked at the enhancer of a developmentally regulated gene, even one that is silent, primes it for future expression. This finding is significant as many of these same genes are abnormally switched on in cancer.
"We now know that some enhancer misregulation is involved in the pathogenesis of solid and hematological malignances," says Shilatifard. "But a problem in the field has been how to identify inactive or poised enhancer elements. Our discovery that Ell3 interacts with enhancers in ES cells gives us a hand-hold to identify and to study them."
In 2000, Shilatifard identified Ell3 as the third member of the Ell (for "Eleven-nineteen lysine-rich leukemia gene") family of elongation factors, proteins that increase the rate at which genes are expressed. "At the time, we didn't think much of Ell3 because it was highly expressed in testes," says Shilatifard, noting that then people thought that sperm were merely vessels used to carry paternal DNA to an egg and that associated factors would have little relevance to the regulation of future gene expression in the resulting embryo.
But a few years back, a curious Open University graduate student working in the Shilatifard lab, Chengqi Lin, started exploring a potential function for the neglected gene by initiating a global search for regions occupied by Ell3 in the genome of mouse embryonic stem cells. His search in collaboration with a bioinformatician in the Shilatifard lab, Alexander S. Garruss, revealed that Ell3 sits on more than 5,000 enhancers, including many that regulate genes governing stem cell maturation into spinal cord, kidney, and blood cells.
"What was interesting was that Ell3 marked enhancers that are active and inactive, as well as enhancers that are known as "poised," says Lin, referring to a transition state from inactive to active. "That indicated that Ell3's major function might be to prime activation of genes that are just about to be expressed during development."
The fact that silent genes can be "primed" for expression was no surprise: researchers knew that the enzymatic machine that copies DNA into the RNA blueprint for proteinsa protein called Pol IIoften pauses at the start of a gene, presumably revving its engine in preparation to jump across the genetic start gate in response to a developmental signal. However, Shilatifard and colleagues showed several years ago that paused Pol II is not a prerequisite for rapid transcriptional induction.
The surprise came when researchers used a molecular trick to deplete mouse ES cells of Ell3 and then did a "genomic" survey. They found that paused Pol II vanished from the start sites of many genes in Ell3-deficient cells. This means that not only does Ell3 preferentially mark stem enhancers, but also that its presence there is necessary to keep an idling Pol II ready for action.
Most of the current study defines how, when the developmental time is right, enhancer-bound Ell3 cooperates with components of a big-boss elongation factor called the Super Elongation Complex to release Pol II from the start gate, allowing the expression of genes required for stem cell differentiation. Critical among those findings is their observation that mouse stem cells depleted of Ell3 failed to activate genes expressed in mature cell types.
These results alone are cause for any lab to start chilling the champagne, yet a surprising coda to the study, leaves readers with yet another revelation. Collaborating with Fengli Guo, Ph.D., head of the Stowers electron microscopy core, the team prepared highly magnified images of mouse sperm and observed that both Ell3 and Pol II were present, in sperm nuclei.
In mammals, gene expression regulated by Pol II, a process known as transcription, does not begin until the formation of a single-celled zygote, that is, well after the union of sperm and egg germ cells. "It is very significant that Ell3 and other factors that regulate transcription are found in sperm," says Lin, the study's first author. Lin is cautious in interpreting this finding, "but it would be very exciting to further investigate whether transcription factors found in sperm could contribute to the decondensation of sperm chromatin or even further gene activation after fertilization by serving as epigenetic markers."
Shilatifard is also cautious as questions remain to be explored, among them whether Ell3 and Pol II actually contact DNA inside sperm or whether similar processes occur in unfertilized eggs and function in this process. Nonetheless, he feels this finding has fundamental implications, not only for development, but also for where he's going next.
"This work has opened up a whole new area of research in my lab," says Shilatifard, who has in the last decade focused on aberrant gene expression associated with leukemia. "If we find that transcription factors bind to specific regions of chromatin in germ cells, I may focus on germ cells in the next few decades. This would open a huge door enabling us to determine the role of these factors in early development."
###
Zhuojuan Luo, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Shilatifard lab, also contributed to the study.
Funding for the study came from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, the National Institutes of Health (Shilatifard R01CA89455 and R01CA150265), and Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation.
About the Stowers Institute for Medical Research
The Stowers Institute for Medical Research is a non-profit, basic biomedical research organization dedicated to improving human health by studying the fundamental processes of life. Jim Stowers, founder of American Century Investments, and his wife, Virginia, opened the Institute in 2000. Since then, the Institute has spent over 900 million dollars in pursuit of its mission.
Currently, the Institute is home to nearly 550 researchers and support personnel; over 20 independent research programs; and more than a dozen technology-development and core facilities.
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President Barack Obama waves to reporters as he steps off the Marine One helicopter and walks on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 27, 2012, as he returns early from his Hawaii vacation for meetings on the fiscal cliff. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
President Barack Obama waves to reporters as he steps off the Marine One helicopter and walks on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 27, 2012, as he returns early from his Hawaii vacation for meetings on the fiscal cliff. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
President Barack Obama walks past a Marine honor guard as he steps off the Marine One helicopter and walks on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 27, 2012, as he returned early from his Hawaii vacation for meetings on the fiscal cliff. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky. walks to the Senate floor on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 27, 2012. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
House Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer of Md. gestures during a news conference in Washington, Capitol Hill, Thursday, Dec. 27, 2012, where he urged House Republicans to end the pro forma session and call the House back into legislative session to negotiate a solution to the fiscal cliff. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)
WASHINGTON (AP) ? A deadline looming, President Barack Obama will meet with congressional leaders at the White House on Friday in search of a compromise to avoid a year-end "fiscal cliff" of across-the-board tax increases and deep spending cuts.
The development capped a day of growing urgency in which Obama returned early from a Hawaiian vacation while lawmakers snarled across a partisan divide over responsibility for gridlock on key pocketbook issues. Speaker John Boehner called the House back into session for a highly unusual Sunday evening session.
Adding to the woes confronting the middle class was a pending spike of $2 per gallon or more in milk prices if lawmakers failed to pass farm legislation by year's end.
Four days before the deadline, the White House disputed reports that Obama was sending lawmakers a scaled-down plan to avoid the fiscal cliff of tax increases and spending cuts.
Administration officials confirmed the Friday meeting at the White House in a bare-bones announcement that said the president would "host a meeting."
An aide to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said the Kentucky lawmaker "is eager to hear from the president."
A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner issued a statement that said the Ohio Republican would attend and "continue to stress that the House has already passed legislation to avert the entire fiscal cliff and now the Senate must act."
While there was no guarantee of a compromise, Republicans and Democrats said privately elements of any agreement would likely include an extension of middle class tax cuts with increased rates at upper incomes as well as cancellation of the scheduled spending cuts. An extension of expiring unemployment benefits, a reprieve for doctors who face a cut in Medicare payments and possibly a short-term measure to prevent dairy prices from soaring could also become part of a year-end bill, they said.
That would postpone politically contentious disputes over spending cuts for 2013.
Top Senate leaders said they remain ready to seek a last-minute agreement. Yet there was no legislation pending and no sign of negotiations in either the House or the Senate on a bill to prevent the tax hikes and spending cuts that economists say could send the economy into a recession.
Far from conciliatory, the rhetoric was confrontational and at times unusually personal.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., accused Boehner of running a dictatorship, citing his refusal to call a vote on legislation to keep taxes steady for most while letting them rise at upper incomes. The bill "would pass overwhelmingly," Reid predicted, and said the Ohio Republican won't change his mind because he fears it might cost him re-election as speaker when the new Congress convenes next week.
Boehner seems "to care more about keeping his speakership than keeping the nation on a firm financial footing," he said in remarks on the Senate floor.
A few hours later, McConnell expressed frustration and blamed the standoff on Obama and the Democrats. "Republicans have bent over backwards. We stepped way, way out of our comfort zone," he said, referring to GOP offers to accept higher tax rates on some taxpayers.
"We wanted an agreement, but we had no takers. The phone never rang, and so here we are five days from the new year and we might finally start talking," McConnell said.
Still, he warned: "Republicans aren't about to write a blank check for anything the Democrats put forward just because we find ourselves at the edge of the cliff."
Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Boehner, responded in a similar vein to Reid's comments. "Harry Reid should talk less and legislate more if he wants to avert the fiscal cliff. The House has already passed legislation to do so," he said, referring to a measure that extends existing cuts at all income levels.
Addressing the GOP rank and file by conference call, Boehner said the next move is up to the Senate, which has yet to act on House-passed bills to retain expiring tax cuts at all income levels and replace across-the-board spending cuts with targeted savings aimed largely at social programs.
"The House will take this action on whatever the Senate can pass - but the Senate must act," he said, according to a participant in the call.
Boehner told Republican lawmakers the House would convene on Sunday evening. Majority Leader Eric Cantor said the House could be in session until Jan. 2, the day before the new congress is sworn in.
The risk of higher milk prices stems from the possibility that existing farm programs will expire at year's end, and neither chamber of Congress has scheduled a vote on even a temporary extension to prevent a spike. There have been unverified estimates that the cost to consumers of a gallon of milk could double without action by Congress.
The president flew home from Hawaii overnight after speaking with top congressional leaders.
Before leaving the White House last Friday, the president had called on lawmakers to pass scaled-down legislation that prevents tax increases for the middle class, raises rates at upper incomes and renews expiring unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless. He said he still supports a more sweeping measure to include spending cuts to reduce deficits, but said they could wait until the new year.
That capped an unpredictable week in which Boehner pivoted away from comprehensive deficit reduction talks with Obama to an aborted attempt to push legislation through the House that retained existing tax levels except above $1 million. Anti-tax Republicans rebelled at raising rates on million-dollar earners, and Boehner backpedaled and canceled the planned vote.
Without congressional action, current tax rates will expire on Dec. 31, resulting in a $536 billion tax increase over a decade that would touch nearly all Americans. In addition, the military and other federal departments would have to begin absorbing about $110 billion in spending cuts.
Failure to avoid the "fiscal cliff" doesn't necessarily mean tax increases and spending cuts would become permanent, since the new Congress could pass legislation cancelling them retroactively after it begins its work next year.
But gridlock through the end of the year would mark a sour beginning to a two-year extension of divided government that resulted from last month's elections in which Obama won a new term and Republicans retained their majority in the House.
The tax issue in particular has been Obama's first test of muscle after his re-election in November. He ran for a new term calling for higher taxes on the wealthy, and postelection public opinion polls show continued support for his position.
Boehner's decision to support higher rates on million-dollar earners marked a significant break with long-standing GOP orthodoxy, but the resistance among his rank and file so far has trumped him as well as any mandate the president claims.
___
Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Jim Kuhnhenn contributed to this report.
As any fan of Doctor Who knows, the title character's ship does some pretty incredible things even when it's not traveling through time and space. For starters, the TARDIS is bigger in the inside, letting it keep its diminutive Police Box shape even though there's room for the entire crew (not to mention several swimming pools) on board.
[More from Mashable: 7 Ways Augmented Reality Will Improve Your Life]
Of course, that idea is a little difficult to get across in toys and models, which tend to be limited by known physical laws. However, one clever fan has discovered a workaround, giving a model TARDIS back its dimensional transcendentality.
Greg Kumparak, who used to be the mobile editor at TechCrunch, started by building a TARDIS model with a removable side. Behind the Police Box doors he put a distinctive wavy pattern that probably would have qualified for a special effect in the classic Doctor Who, a series which ran from 1963 to 1989.
[More from Mashable: Minecraft Creations Enter the Real World With Augmented Reality App [VIDEO]]
It looks pretty lame, but the magic begins when you hold up your smartphone or tablet to the device.
If you look at the TARDIS through a custom app that Kumparak designed with Blender, the pattern disappears, replaced with a 3D point of view that looks just like the console room from the most recent series of the TV show.
The perspective changes as you move your screen, giving the illusion of an impossibly massive interior. Kumparak spent days creating the app, but the results are worth it -- it's a way-cool effect.
We hope the BBC gives Kumparak a call, which would allow this augmented-reality TARDIS to get to market ASAP. In the meantime, give us your ideas on how to take the idea even further in the comments.
Homepage image courtesy of BBC America
Doctor Who Returns
Matt Smith (The Doctor) and Karen Gillan (Amy Pond) attended a special screening of the premiere of Doctor Who Series 7 at New York City's Ziegfeld Theater. The episode, "Asylum of the Daleks," debuts on BBC America on Sept. 1.
Alison Pill and fiance Jay Baruchel starred in a Christmas short posted to YouTube.
The clip was produced and directed by Shane Ladd.
Pill and Baruchel play a couple spending a rather low-key evening together, until Pill's character decides to spice things up with some Christmas cheer.
Michael Phelps' 12,000-calorie-a-day training diet and Beyonce's maple syrup cleanse may top Google's list of the 10 most-searched diets of 2012, but the popular website Diets in Review.com found that when people want to get serious about weight loss, ? See all stories on this topic ?
In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click ?Fullscreen? under the image and use zoom controls or download arrow.
Painted in the mid 15th century, this astonishingly sculptural Nativity scene is a marvel of details and textures, from the craggy face of a weary Joseph and the grotesque face of the foreground shepherd, to the wonderfully geometrical rocks, banks and cliffs that form the setting.
The deep and richly detailed background is filled with marvelous landscape elements; multiple scenes unfold on the roads, hills, waterway and cliffside.
Even the multitude of pebbles throughout the image are rendered with loving detail.
NEW YORK (AP) ? Clearly, Bob Costas stirred up a hornet's nest Sunday with a halftime commentary about Kansas City Chiefs player Jovan Belcher, who killed his girlfriend (and the mother of his child) before killing himself.
On Twitter, someone posed this question: "Who put Costas on in the middle of a football game so he could spew his one sided beliefs?" Another tweeter sharply recommended Costas "stick to football ... the more you talk, the dumber you sound." And on and on it went. The message resounded: Bob Costas, just shut up.
All from this: "If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun," Costas told a TV audience of more than 20 million, "he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today."
The reasons for the pushback were familiar when a celebrity ? be it musician, sportscaster, even news anchor ? bypasses what the public believes is that star's area and expounds on issues in the larger world. But as our world grows into a place where anyone with a smartphone and an Internet connection can rant far and wide, celebrities, it seems, are still held to a higher standard ? or a different one ? than the rest of us.
Reaction to Costas' remarks was swift, with much of it harsh, ranging from the scolding hosts of Fox News Channel's "Fox & Friends" the next morning to agitated sports fans typing tweets as they watched him on NBC's broadcast of the Philadelphia Eagles-Dallas Cowboys game.
Numerous reasons were advanced for why Costas had no business weighing in on the issue of gun ownership (while others expressed their support for him).
But in an odd lapse of reasoning, many of the opinion slingers who condemned Costas blasted him for simply voicing his opinion.
Technology has leveled the playing field (so to speak) for distributing opinions and ideas to the world. Granted, most people don't have 20 million listeners at their command, as Costas did Sunday. But everyone can post a comment on any topic that, via social media, can reach a global audience.
Consumer feedback is solicited by media outlets and other organizations around the clock. A public forum for opinions that can span the world is guaranteed anyone in reach of a Wi-Fi connection.
And yet, in an era when widespread opining is deemed our basic human right, an opinion that is often leveled at others for doing so is "You should shut up!"
With that in mind, much debate surrounding Costas' commentary has sought to tease out a distinction between acceptable opinion and opinions that are out of bounds.
It's been said that politics and religion don't mix. But the response to Costas' commentary suggests that, for many within earshot, sports are even more sacred.
By this argument, a fractious world of partisan politics and cultural clashes has no place in the football sanctuary. Sports should be a refuge from life's harsher truths, a comfort zone for a special brand of clashing between rival teams. Here, Red State/Blue State differences can take a break and unite for a red-white-and-blue brand of partisanship.
So when politics encroaches on sports, it inevitably makes some fans queasy. Or livid.
Just recall President Jimmy Carter's controversial decision that the United States would boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, two U.S. athletes raised a black-gloved fist in a black power salute during the medal ceremony. The two African-American athletes were expelled from the Games.
If Costas played politics for 90 seconds Sunday night, it was on a much reduced scale than those examples.
Yet many people "insist that an NFL broadcast is supposedly a sacrosanct and therefore apolitical space that must remain free of 'hot-button issues,'" noted David Sirota in a Salon column on Tuesday. "But, then, in commenting on the Kansas City Chiefs murder-suicide, Costas was merely weighing in on the biggest NFL story of the day, which is exactly what he's paid to do and what typically happens during an NFL halftime show."
Were Costas' reflections on when "ugly reality intrudes upon our games" really so intrusive and outrageous?
Did his status as a professional commentator really disqualify him from sharing a thought about a tragedy that millions of his fellow Americans were talking about?
Should he really lose his job? (That was an opinion voiced on Fox News Channel.)
"What I was talking about here ? and I'm sorry if that wasn't clear to everybody ? was a gun culture," Costas said in an appearance on MSNBC's "Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" on Tuesday. "I never mentioned the Second Amendment. I never used the words 'gun control.' People inferred that."
Even so, it may be that Costas crossed a line by bringing politics into his football coverage.
But it wasn't the first time a hot-button issue had been pressed in a sports broadcast. In 2003, conservative radio superstar Rush Limbaugh resigned from a brief stint on the panel of ESPN's "Sunday NFL Countdown." His departure followed his race-tinged comments about Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb.
"Sports people say they don't want any politics involved," Limbaugh said in a Tuesday commentary addressing the Costas affair (where he cracked "I don't blame Bob Costas. I blame the microphone").
Limbaugh said there had been no provision in his deal with ESPN not to bring up politics. "But I never asked to be able to, either. It wasn't even on my mind."
Keeping sports and politics in separate spheres may be less and less possible in a world that breeds opinions and crossbreeds its performers.
In his Salon column, David Sirota noted that boundaries are disappearing between sports, culture, entertainment and politics: "Modern America is a place where an actor can become president, a pro wrestler can become a governor, a football player can become a congressman, and a comedian can become a U.S. senator." And (as he could've added) where a real estate mogul can become a TV host, political pundit and prospective presidential candidate.
Meanwhile, everyone is talking, with Costas only one among the chattering multitude. And that, of course, means there's a danger of less and less time being set aside for listening.
___
EDITOR'S NOTE ? Frazier Moore is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. He can be reached at fmoore(at)ap.org and at http://www.twitter.com/tvfrazier
Is it not good if a borrower does not require standing in a queue for hours for learning about loan programs and for submission of the loan application finally? In this era of information technology, he finds details about the finance programs at a click of mouse. He can study the quotes for loan programs displayed in the websites of the finance agencies. Online mode of loan application is convenient and a person can submit the application within five minutes or so. He can do it from his home or from his place of employment. The task is simple and is just entering one?s primary personal information. Fine it is again for the reason that finance agencies has enriched their websites with the application of encryption technology that ensures protection of identity of the loan seekers. The lenders, on receipt of the application, contact the borrowers within half of an hour. People living in Great Britain can have an access to payday loans online UK.
Finance agencies are ready to pay the granted amount to the eligible borrowers within hours. They do make the payment surely within twenty four hours. The payment towards payday loans online UK is made against the paycheck of the following month. The loan seekers must have a job of permanent type and they must work in any registered organization for the half of the year last. Their salary check of the month should contain ?1,000. An eligible borrower can fetch a sum between ?100 and ?1,500, but the lending agencies keep in mind how much the applicants do earn while granting the amount of loans.
Payday loans online UK are available to the British citizens who are already adult and who are in possession of a valid and active bank account. The lenders transfer the payable amount to the bank address of the applicants electronically. They want that the loan amount must be paid back within two to four weeks, but finance of this style is offered at higher rates of interest. If the finance providers do not get back their investment within the stipulated time, they charge the borrowers with fines or penalties.
Payday loans online UK are free from faxing. The cash schemes are available in unsecured kind, and for this reason, borrowers are not to be worried of providing collateral. Borrowers with unhealthy credit history can also go for such payday loans, because they will get the finance in absence of credit verification.
Naomi Shang is writer of this article. For more information about Unemployed Cash Advance please visit http://www.Unemployedcashadvances.co.uk
The British royal was hospitalized on Monday for a rare pregnancy complication that causes nausea and vomiting so extreme it has the potential to kill
By Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato
Image: InSapphoWeTrust/Flickr
The happy news for the British monarchy is that Kate Middleton, the duchess of Cambridge, is with child?a potential heir to the throne. Sadly, the royal isn't having an easy go of her first pregnancy.
Middleton has been diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), which is a dangerous type of morning sickness. HG affects anywhere between 0.2 to 2 percent of all pregnant women in developed countries. The disease is associated with nausea and vomiting so severe that women can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result.
Scientific American spoke with Marlena Fejzo, a geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, David Geffen School of Medicine. Fejzo developed HG during her own pregnancy. Now she hopes to find the genes responsible for the most severe cases of HG. Fejzo explains what is known about this condition and its impact on pregnant women.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
What is morning sickness? General morning sickness is just a feeling of nausea and some vomiting in the first trimester of pregnancy. ("Morning") is a misnomer; there can be nausea and vomiting at any time of the day and even during the night.
How common is it? Well, at least 70 percent of women have some sort of nausea and vomiting in the first trimester. It's a spectrum, so it can range from just feelings of nausea where you don't feel like eating something all the way to the extreme end of the spectrum, which is hyperemesis gravidarum.
What is hyperemesis gravidarum? Hyperemesis is defined as nausea and vomiting that's persistent and prolonged and associated with a more than 5 percent weight loss. That's inability to perform your regular, daily routine due to nausea and vomiting.
There can be fainting. We have women who are vomiting so hard that they get rib fractures or their retina detaches. They can blow out their eardrums. They can get esophageal tears. We have women whose nails have fallen off due to malnutrition.
You can get Wernicke's encephalopathy, which is a thiamine deficiency that leads to a neurological disorder. It's generally seen in alcoholics because when you drink a lot you also have a problem with your brain absorbing thiamine. You get this inability to walk straight and mental confusion, and it can also end up in death of the baby and the mother.
How many people get this disease? It's generally quoted between 0.2 and 2 percent of women. That could be an underestimate because it's often not diagnosed. Worldwide, I've seen it go all the way to 10 percent. There's (an academic) paper in Shanghai, China, that says 10 percent of women are hospitalized for HG.
How long does HG generally last? Twenty-two percent of women have HG lasting through term. And most of them resolve around 20 weeks.
What are the consequences for the child? How dangerous is this? Babies born from HG pregnancies are more likely to be low birth weight, small for gestational age and born prematurely.
Mothers who had severe nausea were more likely to have children with attention problems. Babies exposed to severe nausea in utero tend to have lower task persistence and attention problems. We found that adults who were exposed to HG in utero are more likely to have emotional and behavioral disorders?a 3.6-fold increased risk.
What causes HG? Why does it affect some so profoundly, but not others? We are trying to find the cause of HG; we found that the number-one risk factor besides having a previous pregnancy (with HG) is having a sibling with HG. We know that there is likely to be a genetic component, and we're trying to find the predisposing genes. Once we find that, hopefully we can find the cause. It's likely to be something involved in hormone metabolism, but that's just speculation at this point.
ScienceDaily (Dec. 4, 2012) ? The latest work assignment for NASA's long-lived Mars rover Opportunity is a further examination of an area where the robot just completed a walkabout.
"If you are a geologist studying a site like this, one of the first things you do is walk the outcrop, and that's what we've done with Opportunity," said Steve Squyres, the mission's principal investigator at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
Coming up on its ninth anniversary, Opportunity still is a capable robotic explorer. It has been investigating a crater-rim site where observations from orbiting Mars spacecraft detected traces of clay minerals, which form under wet, non-acidic conditions that can be favorable for life. The rover's current activities were presented at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
The rover team chose this site as a driving destination years earlier. The site is named Matijevic Hill in honor of the late Jacob Matijevic, who led the engineering team for the twin Mars exploration rovers Spirit and Opportunity for several years.
Opportunity drove about 1,160 feet (354 meters) in a counterclockwise circuit around Matijevic Hill in October and November, bringing the total miles driven on the mission to 22 miles (35.4 kilometers). Researchers used the rover to survey the extent of Matijevic Hill outcrops and identify the best places to investigate further.
"We've got a list of questions posed by the observations so far," Squyres said. "We did this walkabout to determine the most efficient use of time to answer the questions. Now we have a good idea what we're dealing with, and we're ready to start the detailed work."
The hill is on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, a bowl 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter. An impact from a celestial object dug this crater more than 3 billion years ago, pushing rocks onto the rim from a greater depth than Opportunity reached during its first several years on Mars. Since the impact, those rocks may have been altered by environmental conditions. Sorting out the relative ages of local outcrops is a key to understanding the area's environmental history.
"Almost nine years into a mission planned to last for three months, Opportunity is fit and ready for driving, robotic-arm operations and communication with Earth," said the mission's deputy project scientist, Diana Blaney, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Two outcrops of high interest on Matijevic Hill are "Whitewater Lake" and "Kirkwood." Whitewater Lake is light-toned material that science team members believe may contain clay. Kirkwood contains small spheres with composition, structure and distribution that differ from other iron-rich spherules, nicknamed blueberries, that Opportunity found at its landing site and throughout the Meridiani Planum area it has explored. Squyres calls the Kirkwood spheres "newberries."
"We don't know yet whether Whitewood Lake and Kirkland are from before or after the crater formed," he said. "One of the most important things to work out is the order and position of the rock layers to tell us the relative ages. We also need more work on the composition of Whitewater and debris shed by Whitewater to understand the clay signature seen from orbit, and on the composition of the newberries to understand how they formed."
NASA launched Spirit and Opportunity in 2003. Both completed their three-month prime missions in April 2004 with Spirit ceasing operations in 2010. The mission's goal is to learn about the history of wet environments on ancient Mars. JPL manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
For more information about Opportunity, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .
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The Asus G75VW-DH72 is outfitted with a 2.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-3630QM processor with 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 670M with 3GB of dedicated VRAM. The combination is potent?in Cinebench R11.5, the processor scored 6.44 points, outperforming both the Alienware M17x R4 (6.19 points) and the MSI GT70 0NE-276US (6.23 points), but falling behind both the Razer Blade (6.86) and the Eurocom Scorpius (7.29). The Asus G75VW-DH72 also made short work of our multimedia tests, completing our Handbrake video encoding test in 36 seconds, and Photoshop CS6 in 3 minutes 32 seconds.
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Public release date: 27-Dec-2012
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