Google reportedly working on Android-powered watch, game console and next-gen Nexus Q

Self-branded hardware could showcase features of the latest version of Android made for more than just phones

Google is concurrently working on three new self-branded Android devices to expand its reach into new market segments, if current rumors are to be believed. According to sources of The Wall Street Journal, Google is currently developing an Android-powered watch, home gaming console and also a successor to the failed Nexus Q media streamer. At least one of the products, WSJ sources report, will be launched to consumers by the end of this year.

The purported Google smart watch will (as expected) pair to a user's phone over Bluetooth, much like Google Glass currently does, but details beyond this are murky. They certainly aren't the only ones looking at watches though -- Samsung has expressed interest in making a smart watch-style device previously, and Sony has even released products to consumers in the category.

As for the expected refresh to the Nexus Q, reports are that the new version will be much less expensive (remember the original Nexus Q had a sticker price of $299), and as was the case with the first iteration be a portal for Google to sell more content such as music and movies through Google Play. No surprises there, but it helps calm some worries that nearly all functionality in the current Nexus Q has been lost through app updates.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/3sEmXDWjKLo/story01.htm

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Ancient Elephants Grazed Before They Had Teeth for It

Ancient elephants switched from eating primarily leaves and shrubs to feeding on grass several million years before their teeth were fully adapted for grazing, according to a new study.

The findings indicate that as the ancestors to modern elephants evolved, anatomical changes significantly lagged behind habitat and behavioral adaptations, said Adrian Lister, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, England.

"It only makes sense that behavior is a powerful driver of evolution, and that by taking the behavioral step to eat grass, it imposes the selection pressure for the right kind of teeth," Lister told LiveScience. "The idea has been around for around 100 years, but there have been few demonstrated examples. This is the first example from the fossil record."

About 10 million years ago, during a time period known as the Miocene epoch, the east African climate became dryer and cooler, prompting the gradual spread of grasslands over areas that were once heavily forested. [In Photos: Mammals Through Time]

"What we find with a lot of mammal groups is that some species switched their diets," Lister said. "During this time, the earliest true elephants went from what we describe as 'browsers,' which eat mostly leaves from trees and shrubs, to what we call 'grazers,' which mostly eat grass."

Lister used data that looked for specific chemical signatures in the fossilized teeth of ancient elephants in east Africa. As animals' teeth grow and form, chemical traces of food and water become locked into the enamel, which enable paleontologists to determine the diets of extinct animals.

By studying these fossilized teeth, Lister noticed that the change in feeding behavior occurred about 7 million years ago, which is about 3 million years before corresponding anatomical changes ? evident in the structure and shape of the teeth ? can be found in the fossil record.

Since grass is tougher to eat than leafy greens, grazing animals tend to have higher-crowned teeth with more enamel ridges, Lister said. This is because grazers tend to pick up more grit from the soil, which can wear teeth down

"We don't see this change in crown height until about 4 million years ago, so there's a lag of several million years," Lister said. "Even with the wrong teeth for it, by starting to eat grass as food, these animals were imposing a lot of selective pressure. But, it required the behavioral change first."

While Lister is still unsure why the gap between the behavioral and anatomical changes is so great, he hopes future studies will be able to unearth more clues.

"The reason for the lag is not completely and satisfactorily explained," Lister said. "What I was hoping to do with this paper is show the kind of data that we can put together to answer these types of questions. We can see whether behaviors drive the evolutionary process, which, in my opinion, has been sidelined in evolutionary biology. Now, because we have the means to look at it directly in the fossil record, we can try looking for it."

Detailed results of the study were published online today (June 26) in the journal Nature.

Follow Denise Chow on Twitter @denisechow. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook?& Google+. Original article on?LiveScience.com.

Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/ancient-elephants-grazed-had-teeth-174529583.html

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Anchor is like Facebook for the workplace, launches today on iOS and the web (video)

We don't usually cover business software around these parts, but Anchor, a social networking app launching today on iOS, goes out of its way to look like a regular app. The brain child of a former GM of Flickr and ex-VP at AOL, it's sort of like Facebook, in that it allows coworkers to join groups, post status updates, upload photos (complete with filters) and like each other's activity. (In lieu of a thumbs up, you give someone a rock-on sign.) It also has built-in chat and contact cards, so in theory you could use it as a one-stop shop for communicating with coworkers instead of cobbling together various other apps.

You could even compare it to Yammer, the social network eventually bought by Microsoft, except Anchor's co-founders say the app is more about coworkers bonding with each other, than necessarily being productive. (Imagine that!) Again, it's available today for iOS (and the web too), with free lifetime membership if you get it before September 25th. It's also coming soon to Android and Google Glass, we're told. With no commitment you should give it a try -- the UI is extremely slick -- though we have to wonder if it's really that big a faux pas to friend your coworkers on Facebook. After all, who's afraid of the occasional like from Tim Stevens?

Gallery: Anchor screenshots

Comments

Source: iOS app, web version

Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/0ZGNWDGWZX4/

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Experts: Deen's TODAY apology 'failed,' 'bizarre'

Celebs

Randee Dawn TODAY contributor

22 hours ago

On Wednesday, Paula Deen appeared on TODAY with Matt Lauer to address the scandal over revelations that she had used racial slurs in the past. Her apology and explanation for her behavior was lengthy, but opinions are split over how effective her 13-minute mea culpa really was.

"She appeared very genuine," said Lily Golightly, owner and publicist with New York-based Golightly Media. "Her YouTube videos were kind of strange, and this interview should have cleared things up."

Unfortunately for Deen, the interview may have had the opposite effect.

David E. Johnson, CEO of Strategic Vision, a public relations and branding agency, calls her appearance a "non-apology" of Nixonian proportions. "(Former President Richard Nixon) never apologized by saying he was guilty or wrong about Watergate; she was the same way," he said.

And Golightly admits, "Toward the end it was kind of bizarre."

"From a PR aspect, what people wanted to know is -- could there be any more fallout, any more shoes to drop," he says. But Deen's categorically saying she'd never used the N-word other than what has already been discussed was a terrible move. "From a PR standpoint, that's a horrendous scandal. Now if anyone ever comes out with anything, ever caught her on a cell phone making a racial slur, she's done."

Other low points, according to Johnson:

• Referring to her work in the African-American/minority community: "That was odd because the one thing we have not heard from outside of her family is a rush of colleagues, ex-employees or African-American community members coming to her defense about all she's done in the community."
• Getting personal by naming Food Network (which canceled her show) and QVC (which has not yet disassociated with her): "The Food Network reference came almost as a veiled threat, wink-wink to her fans, daring them to boycott... With QVC she was almost daring them to take some action, as if she was calling them out."
• Her gestures and manner of speech seemed stilted and practiced: "It was almost mechanical, especially when she reached over and touched Matt's leg."
• Her poor, poor me stance: "She appeared angry at everyone who's been talking or questioning her, and it was almost like she felt she was a victim. The public and corporations wanted her to sincerely, humbly apologize and assume responsibility. Instead she went into a long thing about young African-Americans using the N-word."
• Saying, "I is what I is": The pidgin colloquialism rang instantly with racial connotations, something Deen seemed tone deaf about. "My wife was saying that's what she's going to remember from this interview most."

The fate of Deen's star power and her cooking empire remains to be seen; the apology (or lack thereof) could mean the difference between Paula Deen rising again or not. A successful mea culpa may put famous faces back into the public eye, though rarely without tarnish. Think of Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, Alec Baldwin -- they've all been involved with scandals of varying degree and complexities, yet they all have returned to a place where they're accepted if not celebrated.

Deen seems to have done enough, according to some fans, who Tweeted post-interview with their support:

For other fans, reaction was a little more mixed.

So what can Deen do next? Golightly says she still has a few more steps to take.

"She needs to do something good now," she explains. "You have to outweigh the bad with good. She needs to come out on the other side and start inspiring social change. As an international businesswoman, she has the power to do that."

But in Johnson's perception, it's over. "There are some people who will still go crazy over Paula Deen, but the brand as we knew it is gone forever," he said. "She can't resurrect it -- and it's all due to the failed apology. Watching her on TODAY, she clearly doesn't understand the changes that have gone on in civil society. The apology has done her in."

Source: http://www.today.com/entertainment/paula-deens-today-apology-failed-was-bizarre-experts-say-6C10452611

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Unexpected discovery of the ways cells move could boost understanding of complex diseases

June 23, 2013 ? A new discovery about how cells move inside the body may provide scientists with crucial information about disease mechanisms such as the spread of cancer or the constriction of airways caused by asthma. Led by researchers at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), investigators found that epithelial cells -- the type that form a barrier between the inside and the outside of the body, such as skin cells -- move in a group, propelled by forces both from within and from nearby cells -- to fill any unfilled spaces they encounter.

The study appears June 23, 2013 in an advance online edition of Nature Materials.

"We were trying to understand the basic relationship between collective cellular motions and collective cellular forces, as might occur during cancer cell invasion, for example. But in doing so we stumbled onto a phenomenon that was totally unexpected," said senior author Jeffrey Fredberg, professor of bioengineering and physiology in the HSPH Department of Environmental Health and co-senior investigator of HSPH's Molecular and Integrative Cellular Dynamics lab.

Biologists, engineers, and physicists from HSPH and IBEC worked together to shed light on collective cellular motion because it plays a key role in functions such as wound healing, organ development, and tumor growth. Using a technique called monolayer stress microscopy -- which they invented themselves -- they measured the forces affecting a single layer of moving epithelial cells. They examined the cells' velocity and direction as well as traction -- how some cells either pull or push themselves and thus force collective movement.

As they expected, the researchers found that when an obstacle was placed in the path of an advancing cell layer -- in this case, a gel that provided no traction -- the cells moved around it, tightly hugging the sides of the gel as they passed. However, the researchers also found something surprising -- that the cells, in addition to moving forward, continued to pull themselves collectively back toward the gel, as if yearning to fill the unfilled space. The researchers dubbed this movement "kenotaxis," from the Greek words "keno" (vacuum) and "taxis" (arrangement), because it seemed the cells were attempting to fill a vacuum.

This new finding could help researchers better understand cell behavior -- and evaluate potential drugs to influence that behavior -- in a variety of complex diseases, such as cancer, asthma, cardiovascular disease, developmental abnormalities, and glaucoma. The finding could also help with tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, both of which rely on cell migration.

In carcinomas, for instance -- which represent 90% of all cancers and involve epithelial cells -- the new information on cell movement could improve understanding of how cancer cells migrate through the body. Asthma research could also get a boost, because scientists think migration of damaged epithelial cells in the lungs are involved in the airway narrowing caused by the disease.

"Kenotaxis is a property of the cellular collective, not the individual cell," said Jae Hun Kim, the study's first author. "It was amazing to us that the cellular collective can organize to pull itself systematically in one direction while moving systematically in an altogether different direction."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/z8YbWatzDnE/130623145100.htm

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