In video message, Malala says she's 'getting better'

LONDON: Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot in the head by the Taliban for campaigning for girls' education, said she was "getting better day by day" in her first public statement released Monday.

The 15-year-old said she had been given a "second life" to campaign for girls to have the right to go to school, in a video statement recorded before she underwent surgery to repair her skull at a hospital in Britain on Saturday.

"Today you can see that I am alive. I can speak, I can see you, I can see everyone and I am getting better day by day," she said.

She spoke clearly in English, but displayed a lack of movement on the left side of her face.

She said: "It's just because of the prayers of people. Because all people -- men, women, children -- all of them have prayed for me.

"And because of all these prayers God has given me this new life -- a second life. And I want to serve. I want to serve the people. I want every girl, every child, to be educated. For that reason, we have organised the Malala Fund."

The Malala Fund is a charity set up in late 2012 to promote education for girls.

In the video, Malala is wearing a headscarf and flicking through some of the cards sent to her by wellwishers. She also recorded a message in Urdu.

Malala was shot at point-blank range by a Taliban gunman as her school bus travelled through Pakistan's Swat Valley on October 9, in an attack that drew worldwide condemnation.

Doctors say the bullet grazed Malala's brain and travelled through her head and neck before lodging in her left shoulder.

Surgeons in Pakistan saved her life with an operation to relieve the pressure on her brain before she was flown to Britain to be treated at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, central England.

The hospital has extensive experience of treating gunshot wounds suffered by British soldiers in Afghanistan.

In the surgery this weekend, Malala had a custom-made piece of titanium fitted to replace the missing part of her skull and surgeons also inserted an implant to help restore her hearing in her left ear.

Malala first rose to prominence aged 11 with a blog for the BBC's Urdu-language service charting her life under the Taliban.

Since her attempted murder, millions of people have signed petitions supporting her cause, and she has been nominated for this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown, a UN special envoy for education, has also taken up her cause.

The hospital's medical director Dave Rosser said on Monday that Malala was doing "very well" after spending about five hours in surgery and praised her for continuing to speak out for her cause.

Neurosurgeon Anwen White said that Malala did not need any more operations, would now continue with her rehabilitation and "hopefully she'll be discharged fairly soon."

Asked if there was any damage to Malala's brain, White said: "She hasn't got any long-lasting cognitive problems. There was a brain injury at the time of the wound but she's healing very well."

Before the latest operation Malala had left the hospital and had been staying with her parents and siblings who have joined her in Britain.

Her father has been given a job as education attache at Pakistan's consulate in Birmingham, a city with a large Pakistani community.

- AFP/jc

Read More..

The 404 1,201: Where REL comes out of the dungeon (podcast)

REL gets our attention with a press conference that exposes his role-playing days back in high school, but we should probably start today's 404 episode with a few words about how CBS squeezed a football game into the Beyonce concert last night.

Justin Yu

Justin Yu covers headphones and peripherals for CNET. When he's not wading through Web gulch or challenging colleagues to typing tests, you can find him making fun of technology with Jeff Bakalar every afternoon on The 404 show..

Read More..

Angry Birds? "Shy" Sparrows Show Aggression With Wings

In the hugely popular video game Angry Birds, frustrated victims of egg theft vent their wrath by turning themselves into living bombs and blowing up their piggie tormentors. Of course, the successively more difficult levels of the game make things a little more complicated than that, as the millions who've been hooked know all too well.

Real-life birds don't have quite that kind of firepower, but, as I discovered as I researched my National Geographic book Angry Birds: 50 True Stories of the Fed Up, Feathered, and Furious, they've evolved an amazing array of ways to display their ire. Mockingbirds dive-bombing intruders, bellbirds ringing their nests with paralyzed poisonous caterpillars, eagles attacking hang gliders, frigatebirds pirating food from weaker birds—the variations of avian aggression seem endless.

And you probably don't even want to hear about baby fulmars, who projectile-vomit oily gunk to defend themselves against predators. (What's that bird? See National Geographic's Backyard Birding guide.)

Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow's Wing

Birds don't have to be big and powerful to show anger. Even sparrows—small, shy, brownish birds that tend to skulk in the underbrush—turn into mini-Hulks when breeding season comes around.

The swamp sparrow, a species found in wetlands through much of eastern North America, performs an odd display called the wing wave. Raising and quivering one wing at a time, the sparrow seems to be bidding good-bye to a friend, or maybe trying to dry its deodorant.

A team of scientists led by Duke University's Rindy Anderson, a specialist in animal communication, decided to look into the swamp sparrow's wing wave. "On a basic level, we wanted to know: Is wing-waving a communications signal?" Anderson said. "And if so, what information is being communicated? Our hunch was that wing-waving behavior, which is often paired with singing of various kinds, was playing some role in male-male aggressive signaling." (Find out why animals are smarter than you think.)

In simple terms, wing-waving may be the bird's way of saying, "Bring it on, buddy"—the equivalent of a stare-down in a biker bar.

Enter the Robo-bird

Many birds use song to claim a nesting territory, but it was difficult to test whether wing-waving was truly part of the male sparrow's homeland defense. As reported in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Anderson's team came up with a clever experiment. They put a tiny mechanism inside a stuffed swamp sparrow so the taxidermied bird could mimic the wing wave, then placed the "robo-bird" in territories of nesting swamp sparrows. While playing a recorded song, they watched real birds' responses to the robo-bird in three modes: motionless, turning from side to side (to test whether simple movement had an affect), and wing-waving.

"It turned out the real birds were significantly more aggressive to the wing-waving robot than they were to either the motionless robot or the turning robot," Anderson said. "The intruder's wing wave might be signaling aggressive intentions, in the sense that it's signaling, 'I am here, and I am prepared to fight.' And the other bird then has to decide what they're going to do about it."

The Studs and the Wimps

Anderson found that individual birds varied in how aggressively they approached and attacked the robot. "You have wimps and you have studs and everybody in between," she says. She was surprised, though, that wing-waving reaction to the intruder didn't vary for individual birds; each male waved its wings a certain number of times that remained consistent no matter the robo-bird's behavior.

"I expected that there would be more wing-waving by the live birds in response to the wing-waving robot than in response to the other robots, but that didn't happen," Anderson says. "The birds were consistent in their own signaling behavior regardless of what the intruder was doing." Because actual fights can cause injury or even death, each male seems to have its own level of attempted visual intimidation through wing-waving before attacking a rival. No matter the provocation, studs stay studly and wimps stay wimpy.

There's still more to learn about the swamp sparrow's wave, Anderson says. "Because wing-waves and song are almost always given together, we're still not clear about whether those two displays are redundant. If a bird sings and wing-waves at the same time, is it signaling the same thing by the two behaviors, or does the wing-waving signal something different?"

Read More..

Which Super Bowl Commercial Won the Night?

External links are provided for reference purposes. ABC News is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites. Copyright © 2013 ABC News Internet Ventures. Yahoo! - ABC News Network

Quotes delayed 15 minutes for NASDAQ. 20 minutes for NYSE and AMEX. Market Data provided by Interactive Data. Terms & Conditions.

Powered and implemented by Interactive Data Managed Solutions

Read More..

Bug protects itself by turning its environment to gold

Mythical King Midas was ultimately doomed because everything he touched turned to gold. Now, the reverse has been found in bacteria that owe their survival to a natural Midas touch.

Delftia acidovorans lives in sticky biofilms that form on top of gold deposits, but exposure to dissolved gold ions can kill it. That's because although metallic gold is unreactive, the ions are toxic.

To protect itself, the bacterium has evolved a chemical that detoxifies gold ions by turning them into harmless gold nanoparticles. These accumulate safely outside the bacterial cells.

"This could have potential for gold extraction," says Nathan Magarvey of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who led the team that uncovered the bugs' protective trick. "You could use the bug, or the molecules they secrete."

He says the discovery could be used to dissolve gold out of water carrying it, or to design sensors that would identify gold-rich streams and rivers.

The protective chemical is a protein dubbed delftibactin A. The bugs secrete it into the surroundings when they sense gold ions, and it chemically changes the ions into particles of gold 25 to 50 nanometres across. The particles accumulate wherever the bugs grow, creating patches of gold.

Deep purple gold

But don't go scanning streams for golden shimmers: the nanoparticle patches do not reflect light in the same way as bigger chunks of the metal – giving them a deep purple colour.

When Magarvey deliberately snipped out the gene that makes delftibactin A, the bacteria died or struggled to survive exposure to gold chloride. Adding the protein to the petri dish rescued them.

The bacterium Magarvey investigated is one of two species that thrive on gold, both identified a decade or so ago by Frank Reith of the University of Adelaide in Australia. In 2009 Reith discovered that the other species, Cupriavidus metallidurans, survives using the slightly riskier strategy of changing gold ions into gold inside its cells.

"If delftibactin is selective for gold, it might be useful for gold recovery or as a biosensor," says Reith. "But how much dissolved gold is out there is difficult to say."

Journal reference: Nature Chemical Biology, DOI: 10.1038/NCHEMBIO.1179

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Read More..

S-League go topless to promote 2013 season

SINGAPORE: Topless - that's how some S-League players were spotted at Orchard Road on Sunday.

The bare-bodied manoeuvre was a publicity stunt for the 2013 S-League season, which kicks off later this month.

The 10 players were not completely naked from the waist up though; their bodies were painted in their respective team strip.

Joining them was S-League CEO Lim Chin, who was game enough to market the league in the bold and rather bare fashion.

Accompanied by fans, the entourage walked down Singapore's famous shopping district distributing flyers.

The approach was a departure from the usual carnivals held by organisers to connect with potential supporters, giving new meaning to 'meeting your heroes in the flesh'.

"I want the players to be involved ... We wanted to something to show… that we really want to reach out to the public, from the players right down to the kit man, to myself," said Mr Lim.

The 2013 season kicks off with the Charity Shield on 15 February, where defending champions Tampines Rovers will take on League Cup winners the Warriors at Jalan Besar Stadium.

- CNA/jc

Read More..

How can Amy Poehler help Best Buy during the Super Bowl?

Can she help?

(Credit:
Best Buy/YouTube Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)

In the first quarter of today's Big Game featuring big people doing big things to each other, Amy Poehler will be trying to do big things for Best Buy.

Unlike the players -- who will probably be tied 3-3 in a dull defensive battle when Amy appears -- Poehler has one shot to give the Best Buy brand a shot in arm. Or perhaps a shot at redemption.

Best Buy has been crossing some turbulent oceans recently, so securing the services of one of America' funniest actors is a pleasant coup.

The company has released a sneak preview (embedded here) of Poehler asking questions that are sweetly self-referential, so it may be that this theme will continue during today's spot.

More Technically Incorrect

The idea seems to be that whatever questions you have, those nice people in blue polo shirts will have the answer for you.

In order to reinforce this dream, Best Buy has co-opted the hashtag #infiniteanswers on Twitter.

Naturally, there have already been slight setbacks with this strategy.

For example, a twitterer called Jonathan has already offered: "#infiniteanswers not at your Willimar MN location I have seen smarter things come out of a dead animal."

Worse, another tweeter, Billy Byler seemed to be experiencing a little humorous bile: "Every answer was 'Not sure. Check Amazon.' @BestBuy: Amy Poehler visited us & had A LOT of questions. http://youtu.be/PcmW8HCuLo8 #infiniteanswers."

Can you win them over, Amy? Can you?

Read More..

Pictures We Love: Best of January

Photograph by Dieu Nalio Chery, AP

The magnitude 7 earthquake that struck near Port au Prince, Haiti, in January 2010 so devastated the country that recovery efforts are still ongoing.

Professional dancer Georges Exantus, one of the many casualties of that day, was trapped in his flattened apartment for three days, according to news reports. After friends dug him out, doctors amputated his right leg below the knee. With the help of a prosthetic leg, Exantus is able to dance again. (Read about his comeback.)

Why We Love It

"This is an intimate photo, taken in the subject's most personal space as he lies asleep and vulnerable, perhaps unaware of the photographer. The dancer's prosthetic leg lies in the foreground as an unavoidable reminder of the hardships he faced in the 2010 earthquake. This image makes me want to hear more of Georges' story."—Ben Fitch, associate photo editor

"This image uses aesthetics and the beauty of suggestion to tell a story. We are not given all the details in the image, but it is enough to make us question and wonder."—Janna Dotschkal, associate photo editor

Published February 1, 2013

Read More..

Former SEAL Killed at Gun Range; Suspect Arrested

A former Marine has been charged with three counts of murder in the killing of former Navy SEAL and "American Sniper" author Chris Kyle, the most deadly sniper in U.S. history, and another man at an Erath County, Texas, gun range, police said.

"We have lost more than we can replace. Chris was a patriot, a great father, and a true supporter of this country and its ideals. This is a tragedy for all of us. I send my deepest prayers and thoughts to his wife and two children," Scott McEwen, co-author of "American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History," said in a statement to ABC News.

Remembering Kyle for the number of Iraqi insurgents he killed misstates his legacy, McEwen said.

"His legacy is not one of being the most lethal sniper in United States history," McEwen said. In my opinion, his legacy is one of saving lives in a very difficult situation where Americans where going to be killed if he was not able to do his job."

Kyle and a neighbor of his were shot at a gun range in Glen Rose while helping a former Marine who was recovering from post traumatic stress syndrome, ABC affiliate WFAA-TV in Dallas reported.

AP Photo/The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Paul Moseley

The suspect, identified as Eddie Ray Routh, 25, was arrested in Lancaster, Texas, after a brief police chase, a Lancaster Police Department dispatcher told ABC News. Routh was driving Kyle's truck at the time of his arrest, police said.

Routh was arraigned Saturday evening on one count of capital murder and two counts of murder. He was brought to the Erath County Jail this morning and was being held there today on a combined $3 million bond, Officer Kyle Roberts said.

Investigators told WFAA that Routh is a former Marine said to suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Kyle helped found a nonprofit that provides at-home fitness equipment for emotionally and physically wounded veterans, but the director of the foundation said Kyle and Routh had not met through the organization.

"Chris was literally the type of guy if you were a veteran and needed help he'd help you," Travis Cox, the director of FITCO Cares, told The Associated Press. "And from my understanding that's what happened here. I don't know how he came in contact with this gentleman, but I do know that it was not through the foundation."

Authorities identified the other man who was killed with Kyle as 35-year-old Chad Littlefield, who Cox said was Kyle's neighbor and friend.

PHOTOS: Notable Deaths in 2013

Kyle, 38, served four tours in Iraq and was awarded two Silver Stars, five Bronze Stars with Valor, two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medals, and one Navy and Marine Corps Commendation.

From 1999 to 2009, Kyle recorded more than 150 sniper kills, the most in U.S. military history.

After leaving combat duty, Kyle became chief instructor training Naval Special Warfare Sniper and Counter-Sniper teams, and he authored the Naval Special Warfare Sniper Doctrine, the first Navy SEAL sniper manual. He left the Navy in 2009.

"American Sniper," which was published last year by William Morrow, became a New York Times best seller.

Read More..

Two worms, same brains – but one eats the other

IF TWO animals have identical brain cells, how different can they really be? Extremely. Two worm species have exactly the same set of neurons, but extensive rewiring allows them to lead completely different lives.

Ralf Sommer of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, and colleagues compared Caenorhabditis elegans, which eats bacteria, with Pristionchus pacificus, which hunts other worms. Both have a cluster of 20 neurons to control their foregut.

Sommer found that the clusters were identical. "These species are separated by 200 to 300 million years, but have the same cells," he says. P. pacificus, however, has denser connections than C. elegans, with neural signals passing through many more cells before reaching the muscles (Cell, doi.org/kbh). This suggests that P. pacificus is performing more complex motor functions, says Detlev Arendt of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.

Arendt thinks predators were the first animals to evolve complex brains, to find and catch moving prey. He suggests their brains had flexible wiring, enabling them to swap from plant-eating to hunting.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Identical brains, but one eats the other"

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Read More..