Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/283651390?client_source=feed&format=rss
joan crawford john goodman kendall marshall whitney houston news sylvia plath whitney houston whitney houston autopsy results
Friday, February 8, 2013
Market rises on data but caution settles on Wall Street
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Stocks edged higher on Friday, with the benchmark S&P index hitting a five-year high after a batch of positive economic reports, but gains were capped as investors grew cautious about a further advance.
Data showing stronger international trade from China and Germany and a report showing a smaller U.S. trade deficit in December were seen as encouraging signs of global demand.
Among stocks on the rise, the technology sector was boosted by gains in LinkedIn Corp
The S&P 500 <.spx>, up 6.3 percent for the year, is on track for six straight weeks of gains. But the index has found it tougher to climb in recent days as investors await strong trading incentives to drive it further upward.
"We are going to have this churn and this consolidation, which actually isn't a bad thing," said Ken Polcari, director of the NYSE floor division at O'Neil Securities in New York.
The market is building a base by consolidating and showing less volatility, he said.
"If it builds a base, from there it is easier to make the argument that you move ahead," Polcari said.
The Dow Jones industrial average <.dji> was up 34.83 points, or 0.25 percent, at 13,978.88. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index <.spx> was up 6.06 points, or 0.40 percent, at 1,515.45. The Nasdaq Composite Index <.ixic> was up 25.90 points, or 0.82 percent, at 3,191.04.
The CBOE Volatility index <.vix>, Wall Street's so-called fear gauge, was down 4.2 percent at 12.94. The gauge generally moves inversely to the S&P 500.
Still, there were concerns whether the market would stride higher.
"I'm watching the 14 level closely. The break below it at the beginning of the year signaled the sharp rally in January, and a rally back above it could be a sign to exercise some caution," said Bryan Sapp, senior trading analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research.
Healthcare stocks also performed well. The Morgan Stanley healthcare payor index <.hmo> was up 2.3 percent. Molina Healthcare Inc
McDonald's Corp
Data showed Chinese exports grew more than expected in January, while imports climbed 28.8 percent, highlighting robust domestic demand, while German data showed a 2012 surplus that was the nation's second highest in more than 60 years, an indication of the underlying strength of Europe's biggest economy.
Another positive sign was U.S. economic data which showed the trade deficit shrank in December to $38.5 billion, its narrowest in nearly three years, indicating the economy did much better in the fourth quarter than initially estimated.
Shares of LinkedIn jumped 18.8 percent to $147.40 after announcing quarterly profits and giving a bullish forecast for the year.
AOL Inc shares also jumped 7 percent to $33.60 after the online company said its quarterly profit had jumped, boosted by a 13 percent rise in advertising sales.
According to Thomson Reuters data through Friday morning, of 339 companies in the S&P 500 that have reported earnings, 69.9 percent have exceeded analysts' expectations, above a 62 percent average since 1994 and 65 percent over the past four quarters.
Fourth-quarter earnings for S&P 500 companies grew 5.2 percent, according to the data, above a 1.9 percent forecast at the start of the earnings season.
(Reporting By Angela Moon; Editing by Kenneth Barry)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/stock-futures-signal-flat-open-linkedin-eyed-105219109--finance.html
Jack Klugman merry Christmas a christmas story twas the night before christmas santa Capital STEEZ George Bush
Earth-buzzing asteroid: Big enough to level a city, it was found by amateurs
Asteroid 2012 DA14 will set a record when it zips by within 17,000 miles of Earth next week. The 150-foot object was discovered by a team of dedicated amateur astronomers in southern Spain.
Diagram depicting the passage of asteroid 2012 DA14 through the Earth-moon system on Feb. 15, 2013.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
EnlargeThe solar system is sending Earth a fleeting Valentine's greeting in the form of asteroid 2012 DA14, which makes a whisker-close (cosmically speaking) approach on Feb. 15.
Skip to next paragraph' +
google_ads[0].line2 + '
' +
google_ads[0].line3 + '
Subscribe Today to the Monitor
The rocky asteroid, which measures roughly 150 feet across, is predicted to pass within 17,000 miles of Earth's surface, slipping below the 22,236-mile altitude where major weather and communications satellites operate, but well above low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station and the vast majority of satellites hurtle around the planet.
Its close encounter with Earth is expected to shift its orbit enough to shave 51 days off of its current 368-day orbital period.
Asteroid specialists note that the object presents no threat to either Earth or satellites, although for the record, experts currently calculate a 1 in 7.5 million chance it could strike our planet in February 2110.
Next week's fly-by represents a record ??the closest that a known object of this size has buzzed the planet, according to Paul Chodas and Don Yeomans, astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who study asteroids and the potential hazards they pose.
Objects in this size class come this close about once every 40 years, on average, and collide with Earth at an average rate of one every 1,200 years, they say.
Such an event wouldn't be a civilization buster, but it could put a world of hurt on a major metropolitan area, suggests Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society in Pasadena, Calif.
In 1908, a similarly sized object plummeted through the atmosphere and burst above the Siberian forest near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, some 480 miles northeast of Krasnoyarsk. The air-burst flattened an estimated 80 million trees in a blast zone that covered 830 square miles, comparable in size to Louisville, Ky., or San Diego, Calif.
"This would have leveled a city," says Dr. Betts.
Since astronomers began efforts dedicated to the search for near-Earth objects around 1995, some 9,668 have been discovered. Of those, 861 are more than half a mile wide, while 1,373 are considered potentially hazardous.
By some estimates, the number of asteroids in the 20-meter (65.6 feet) to 200-meter (656 feet) size range could reach as high as 500,000.
Asteroid 2012 DA14 was discovered last year by a team of dedicated amateur astronomers operating a small observatory in the mountains of southern Spain. The effort highlights the role more-sophisticated amateurs can play in hunting for near-Earth objects, especially those that pose a threat to Earth.
Using a high-speed camera bolted to the back of an 18-inch telescope, the team, led by Jaime Nomen, a Barcelona dental surgeon, first detected the asteroid last February. The group is hunting for the smaller objects that are so faint that they don't appear until perhaps a week before closest approach.
"These small objects can appear at any moment," says Dr. Nomen, who notes that he has cut his once full-time dental practice down to two days a week to allow for more observing and more-rapid processing of the images the telescope takes.
Indeed, he and his team discovered another object much like 2012 DA14 on Feb. 4 and are awaiting confirmation of the siting from other observatories, he said in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday. Initial calculations of the object's orbit suggest it won't pass as close to Earth as 2012 DA14. Two days ago, calculations suggested that the object, estimated at 100 to 130 feet across, would make its closest approach to Earth some 72,000 miles beyond the moon.
Moonlit nights and bouts of cloudy weather slow the pace of discovery of objects in ths size range.
"There are a lot of reasons [why] it's possible still to discover many of those objects, even working with small devices as we have," he says.
The team, which runs the La Sagra Observatory and its three 18-inch telecopes, were able to add the high-speed camera to one of them thanks to a grant from the Planetary Society in a program aimed at upgrading the hardware that hard-core amateur astronomers use to hunt for near-Earth objects.
While professional observatories dedicated to such searches bag the highest number of asteroids, perhaps as many as 100 amateurs worldwide conduct the follow-up observations needed to refine calculations of an object's orbit, figure out if an asteroid has a companion, and provide some initial characterizations of the type of asteroid the professionals discover, Betts says.
anguilla gone with the wind michael jordan checkers imbibe msg network ray j
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Lungs of the planet reveal their true sensitivity to global warming
Feb. 6, 2013 ? Tropical rainforests are often called the "lungs of the planet" because they generally draw in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. But the amount of carbon dioxide that rainforests absorb, or produce, varies hugely with year-to-year variations in the climate. In a paper published online Feb 6 2013 by the journal Nature, a team of climate scientists from the University of Exeter, the Met Office-Hadley Centre and the NERC Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, has shown that these variations reveal how vulnerable the rainforest is to climate change.
Lead author Professor Peter Cox of the University of Exeter explained: "We have been struggling for more than a decade to answer the question 'will the Amazon forest die back under climate change?' Our study indicates that the risk is low if climate change is associated with increased plant growth under elevated carbon dioxide. But if this effect declines, or climate warming occurs due to something other than a carbon dioxide increase, we expect to see a significant release of carbon from tropical ecosystems."
The study reveals a new way to find out how sensitive biological systems are to changes in climate. The key was to learn how to read the year-to-year variations in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide increases each year as a result of burning fossil fuels and deforestation. But the amount it goes up from one year to the next depends on whether tropical forests are absorbing carbon dioxide or releasing it -- and this in turn depends on whether the tropical climate was warmer and dryer than usual, or wetter and cooler. So the trace of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere holds a record of how the lungs of the planet respond when the climate warms or cools.
The team studied how these year-to-year variations in carbon dioxide concentration relate to long-term changes in the amount of carbon stored in tropical rainforests. They found that climate models that predicted tropical forest dieback under climate change also had a very large year-to-year variation in carbon dioxide concentration, while models in which the rainforest was more robust to climate change had more realistic year-to-year variation in carbon dioxide concentration.
By combining this relationship with the year-to-year variation in carbon dioxide as seen in the real world, the team were able to determine that about 50 billion tonnes of carbon would be released for each degree Celsius of warming in the tropics. Peter Cox said the findings were initially a relief: "Fortunately, this carbon release is counteracted by the positive effects of carbon dioxide fertilisation on plant growth under most scenarios of the 21st century, so that overall forests are expected to continue to accumulate carbon."
The researchers are however certain that tropical forests will suffer under climate change if carbon dioxide doesn't fertilise tree growth as strongly as climate models suggest.
Co-author, Chris Jones, of the Met Office said: "The long-term health of tropical forests will depend on their ability to withstand multiple pressures from changing climate and deforestation. Our research has shed light on the former, but the latter remains a significant pressure on this ecosystem."
Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:
Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Exeter, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
- Peter M. Cox, David Pearson, Ben B. Booth, Pierre Friedlingstein, Chris Huntingford, Chris D. Jones, Catherine M. Luke. Sensitivity of tropical carbon to climate change constrained by carbon dioxide variability. Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nature11882
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/qlykoxbku4U/130206131050.htm
whale shark whale shark platypus platypus overboard east of eden weather radio
Cuisine Paradise | Eat, Shop And Travel: [Sponsored Post] NANA's ...
Nana?s Green Tea Caf? is offering a special lunch set which is available on weekday from 11.00am - 2.30pm at an affordable price of S$13.90 with a whole list of choices to choose from. And each lunch set comes with a complimentary drink and a main course of your choice. Consumers gets to choose any kind of beverages below S$8.00, ranging fromHoji, Matcha, Azuki to other beverages from the menu. On top of that, their signature dishes such as Salmon Don, Locomoko Don and Mushi-Dori Goma Dare Udon will also be available too. (read more about Nana's Green Tea Cafe from my previous post here)
Thanks to NANA's Green Tea Cafe, Cuisine Paradise has 5 Lunch Set Vouchers (worth S$13.90 each) to giveaway to five lucky readers.
How To Win:-
1. Like Nana's Green Tea Cafe on facebook page HERE;2. Click LIKE and SHARE the above photo over at Cuisine Paradise Facebook Page (here); AND
3. Leaving a comment (on facebook) that sharing with us your favourite matcha drinks/dessert .
Closing Date: 07 February 2013 (Thursday), 5.00PM
*Giveaway is open to those reside in SINGAPORE only and with a valid mailing address.
Source: http://cuisineparadise-eatout.blogspot.com/2013/02/sponsored-post-nanas-green-tea-week-day.html
gisele bundchen turbotax the bourne legacy roland martin suspended lake vostok montgomery county public schools the river
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
The 585 sq. ft. Small House Floor Plan Concept Lilly Pad | Cozy ...
The new and improved Lilly Pad was created for a client. It has a garage now plus Bedroom access to the backyard, were sharing it with you just in case you wanted one too!
This contemporary rendered home is all about being cozy with a touch of class. However it would make a great cabin look too. The open foyer has room for your favorite artwork and a nice coat/linen closet. The open Kitchen, Dining and Gathering room is flooded with natural light from 7 windows and makes a statement with its vaulted ceiling and Fireplace. The spacious Bedroom has room for a King size bed, plenty of storage areas, direct access to the Bathroom and now with a door to your backyard oasis. The full bath includes the combo W/D and is next to the kitchen keeping all the plumbing runs within 20? making for a more cost effective design to build.
The ?Lilly Pad? 3D Top View
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
Cozy?s ?6 Must Haves? make any house more of a home and this one is no exception.
#1 The open ?L? Kitchen has 14 cabinets including two ?lazy Susan?s? and a pantry next to the fridge plus a built in Dining table with additional storage.
The ?Lilly Pad? 3D Kitchen & Dining View
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
?
#2 Enough room for a King or Queen Size mattress.
#3 This full Bath has a large 36? Vanity cabinet.
#4 The Multiple Storage areas include the coat/linen closet, W/D area, 13 kitchen cabinets & pantry, Dressers, Bedroom closet plus under the Bed and a garage too!
#5 Room for the combo Washer/Dryer in the Bathroom makes full time living easy and convenient.
#6 Extra Spaces for friends & family and entertaining makes this one of our best Cozy homes.
We love the Lilly pad and think you will too, it would make a great vacation getaway, elegant guest house, granny flat, country retreat or the perfect full time small home. Cozy Home Plans has choices that you won?t find anywhere else with over a 100 choices now in Flickr with 1786 3D renderings to give you a really good idea what living in a Cozy home floor plan would look like..
It?s all about living Large in a Cozy Home for us?
?
Cozy,? Kevin Harrington
?
Source: http://www.cozyhomeplans.com/small-house-floor-plan-lilly-pad.html/
sandy Time Change 2012 Marcus Lattimore news 12 world series Natina Reed giants
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)