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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The budget deficit will jump by $246 billion to $407 billion this year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates in a report released Tuesday.

"Over the long run, growing budget deficits and the resulting increases in federal debt would lead to slower economic growth," the agency said.

The budget deficit shot up 153% from last year's shortfall of $161 billion. The government's fiscal year ends Sept. 30. The agency attributes the jump to "a substantial increase in spending and a halt in the growth of tax revenues."

That drop in revenue is driven in part by an estimated 15% decline in corporate tax receipts. They fell as a result of lower corporate profits and tax rules governing how businesses depreciate their investments this year. A second factor is the rebates provided to tax filers from the economic stimulus law Congress passed earlier this year.

The spending hike is partly due to efforts by the government "to cover the insured deposits of insolvent financial institutions," the agency said.

To date, 11 banks have been seized by the FDIC this year - not a high number historically, but higher than it's been in recent years - and that number is expected to grow in the coming months.

The CBO said it expected the deficit to exceed $400 billion - or 3% of gross domestic product - for each of the next two years if current policies remain in place. It also forecast several more months of "very slow" economic growth.

"The nation is experiencing a significant period of economic weakness," said Peter Orszag, director of the CBO, in a press briefing.

The CBO's estimate for the cumulative deficit over the next 10 years is now $2.3 trillion. Earlier this year, the CBO estimated the country would have a $300 billion surplus by 2018. But that was wiped out in part because of new spending approved by lawmakers for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and revised economic projections.

And the 2.3 trillion figure doesn't account for the likelihood that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts will be extended or that the middle class will continue to be protected from the Alternative Minimum Tax - or so-called wealth tax.If those extensions are made - and both presidential nominees have been calling for that, at least in part - then the 10-year deficit projection jumps to more than $7 trillion.

The agency's latest estimates do not reflect the Treasury announcement this weekend that the government would temporarily takeover Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises that form the backbone of the mortgage market.

But Orszag said that come January, the CBO will be incorporating the activities of Fannie and Freddie in its baseline for the federal budget. The CBO will be working with House and Senate budget committees to address questions of just how transactions by both companies should be accounted for - the answers to which will greatly influence the net effect the companies have on the federal deficit.

"The degree of control exercised by the federal government is so strong that the best treatment is to incorporate [the agencies] into the federal budget," Orszag said.

To allay one concern that many taxpayers have expressed, the roughly $5 trillion in loans that Fannie and Freddie own or back would not be added wholesale to the debt held by the public, Orszag told CNNMoney.com.

"I don't see a scenario in which you take a total of the mortgages backed and add that to the federal deficit," he said.

But beyond all these near-term concerns affecting the government's debt load, he said the biggest challenge facing the country's coffers is rising health care costs. Federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid alone is expected to jump 30% in the next decade - from 4.6% of GDP this year to 6% in 2018. By 2050, it could jump to 12% of GDP.

As a result, Orszag said in the press briefing, "The nation is on an unsustainable fiscal course." 

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Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.  

 While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

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By MALCOLM RITTER – Aug 27, 2008

 

NEW YORK (AP) — Talk about an extreme makeover: Scientists have transformed one type of cell into another in living mice, a big step toward the goal of growing replacement tissues to treat a variety of diseases.

 

The cell identity switch turned ordinary pancreas cells into the rarer type that churns out insulin, essential for preventing diabetes. But its implications go beyond diabetes to a host of possibilities, scientists said.

 

It's the second advance in about a year that suggests that someday doctors might be able to use a patient's own cells to treat disease or injury without turning to stem cells taken from embryos.

The work is "a major leap" in reprogramming cells from one kind to another, said one expert not involved in the research, John Gearhart of the University of Pennsylvania.

 

That's because the feat was performed in living mice rather than a lab dish, the process was efficient and it was achieved directly without going through a middleman like embryonic stem cells, he said.

The newly created cells made insulin in diabetic mice, though they were not cured. But if the experiment's approach proves viable, it might lead to treatments like growing new heart cells after a heart attack or nerve cells to treat disorders like ALS, formerly Lou Gehrig's disease.

Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and a researcher with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, cautioned that the approach is not ready for people.

He and his colleagues report the research in a paper published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

 

Basically, the identity switch comes about by a reprogramming process that changes the pattern of which genes are active and which are shut off.

 

Scientists have long hoped to find a way to reprogram a patient's cells to produce new ones. Research with stem cells, and similar entities called iPS cells that were announced last year, has aimed to achieve this in a two-step process.

 

The first step results in a primitive and highly versatile cell. This intermediary is then guided to mature into whatever cell type scientists want. That guiding process has proven difficult to do efficiently, especially for creating insulin-producing cells, Gearhart noted.

 

In contrast, the new method holds the promise of going directly from one mature cell type to another. It's like a scientist becoming a lawyer without having to go back to kindergarten and grow up again, Melton says.

 

So, he says, someday scientists may be able to replace dead nerve or heart cells in people by converting some neighboring cells. At the same time, he stressed that it's still important to study embryonic stem cells and iPS cells.

 

The Melton team started its work with pancreas cells that pump out gut enzymes used in digestion and turned them into pancreatic "beta" cells, which make insulin.

 

The researchers destroyed beta cells in mice with a poison, giving the mice diabetes. Then they injected the pancreas with viruses that slipped into the enzyme-making cells. These viruses delivered three genes that control the activity of other genes.

 

Just three days later, new insulin-secreting cells started to show up. By a week after that, more than a fifth of the virally infected cells started making insulin. That shows "an amazingly efficient effect," commented Richard Insel, executive vice president of research at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

 

Scientists found evidence that the newcomers were converts from mature enzyme-making cells. They identified the new cells as beta cells by their detailed appearance and behavior, and Melton said they've continued functioning for months.

 

The new cells didn't fully replenish the insulin supply, but maybe there were too few of them, or they were hampered by not forming clusters like ordinary beta cells do, researchers said.

 

The work brings "more excitement to the idea of using reprogramming as a way to treat diabetes," said researcher Mark Kay of Stanford University, who is studying the approach with liver cells.

 

Christopher Newgard, who studies beta cells at Duke University Medical Center, called the work convincing but cautioned that significant scientific questions remained about using the approach in treating disease.

 

Melton, who began his diabetes research in 1993 when his infant son was diagnosed with the illness, said he's obsessed with trying to find a new treatment or cure for Type 1 diabetes, in which beta cells are destroyed.

 

"I wake up every day thinking about how to make beta cells," he said.

 

Melton said he hopes drugs can replace the virus approach because of concern about injecting viruses into people.

 

As for converting other kinds of cells, scientists noted that the two cell types in the mouse experiment are closely related, and it remains to be shown whether the trick can be achieved with more distant combinations. In any case, scientists would have to deliver different reprogramming signals to other kinds of cells, Melton said.

 

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CERN, Switzerland (CNN) -- Scientists Wednesday applauded as one of the most ambitious experiments ever conceived got successfully underway, with protons being fired around a 27-kilometer (17-mile) tunnel deep beneath the border of France and Switzerland in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the universe.

The experiment will look at how the universe formed by analyzing particle collisions.

The Large Hadron Collider -- a $9 billion particle accelerator designed to simulate conditions of the Big Bang that created the physical Universe -- was switched on at 0732 GMT to cheers and applause from experts gathered to witness the event.

While observers were left nonplussed by the anticlimactic flashing dots on a TV screen that signalled the machine's successful test run, among teams of scientists involved around the world there were jubilant celebrations and popping champagne corks.

In the coming months, the collider is expected to begin smashing particles into each other by sending two beams of protons around the tunnel in opposite directions.

Skeptics, who claim that the experiment could lead to the creation of a black hole capable of swallowing the planet, failed in a legal bid to halt the project at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Others have branded it a colossal waste of cash, draining resources from its multinational collaborators that could have been spent on scientific research with more tangible benefits to mankind.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy hailed the project as a major achievement for Europe.

"The repercussions of this scientific investment without precedent in the history of humanity will be essential not only for the intimate knowledge of our universe, but also for the direct applications in fields as varied as intensive calculation or even medicine," he said. Watch as Big Bang experiment gets underway »

The collider will operate at higher energies and intensities in the next year, potentially generating enough data to make a discovery by 2009, experts say.

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They say the experiment has the potential to confirm theories that physicists have been working on for decades including the possible existence of extra dimensions. They also hope to find a theoretical particle called the Higgs boson -- sometimes referred to as the "God particle," which has never been detected, but would help explain why matter has mass.

The collider will recreate the conditions of less than a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, when there was a hot "soup" of tiny particles called quarks and gluons, to look at how the universe evolved, said John Harris, U.S. coordinator for ALICE, a huge detector specialized to analyze that question.

Since this is exploratory science, the collider may uncover surprises that contradict prevailing theories, but which are just as interesting, said Joseph Lykken, theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

"When Columbus sails west, he thought he was going to find something. He didn't find what he thought he was going to find, but he did find something interesting," said Lykken, who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid, one of six experiments inside the collider complex.

Why should the layperson care about this particular exploration? Years ago, when electrons were first identified, no one knew what they were good for, but they have since transformed our entire economy, said Howard Gordon, deputy research program manager for the collider's ATLAS experiment.

"The transformative effect of this research will be to understand the world we live in much better," said Gordon, at Brookhaven National Laboratory. "It's important for just who we are, what we are."

Fears have emerged that the collider could produce black holes that could suck up anything around them -- including the whole Earth. Such fears prompted legal actions in the U.S. and Europe to halt the operation of the Large Hadron Collider, alleging safety concerns regarding black holes and other phenomena that could theoretically emerge.

Although physicists acknowledge that the collider could, in theory, create small black holes, they say they do not pose any risk. A study released Friday by CERN scientists explains that any black hole created would be tiny, and would not have enough energy to stick around very long before dissolving. Five collider collaborators who did not pen the report independently told CNN there would be no danger from potential black holes.

John Huth, who works on the collider's ATLAS experiment, called such fears "baloney" in a recent interview, and noted that in normal physics, even if the black hole were stable, it could just pass through the Earth without being detected or without interacting at all.

"The gravitational force is so weak that you'd have to wait many, many, many, many, many lifetimes of the universe before one of these things could [get] big enough to even get close to being a problem," said Huth, professor of physics at Harvard University.

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(Even Google has changed its logo on September 10)

 

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September 8, 2008 (Computerworld) Last week's unveiling of a new browser is the latest in a series of moves by Google Inc. to rid the world of Microsoft Windows, according to analysts.

In fact, said Matt Rosoff, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash., the new Chrome browser could be the key component of Google's plan to convince consumers and business users to replace Windows-based software with hosted Web applications.

"This is the potential threat that Microsoft has been worried about since the 1990s," Rosoff said. "This is Google trying to really push applications to the Web and make that the way people do computing."

Google began offering a beta version of the new open-source browser on its Web site last week.

Chrome includes a new high-performance Java-Script engine and Google Gears, which will let users store and access Web applications off-line. The browser is powered by the WebKit open-source rendering engine, also used in Apple Inc.'s Safari browser, and includes unspecified Firefox components.

At a press briefing, Sergey Brin, co-founder and technology president at Google, said he expects Chrome to serve as a strong vehicle for running Web applications. "I wouldn't call Chrome the OS of Web apps," Brin said. "It's a very basic, fast engine to run Web apps."

Google likely won't position Chrome simply as a competitor to established browsers from vendors like Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple and Opera Software, noted Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner Inc.

"It's about the Web apps battle," Valdes said. "It's about having a platform that will support the next generation of Web apps."

Google spent two years making sure its system could overcome the growing inability of current technologies to run new online applications. It was "definitely a strategic initiative," Valdes said.

Earlier steps in Google's long-term plan to kill Windows include the 2006 launch of the Google Apps hosted applications suite. That offering includes the Google Docs collaboration tool, Gmail e-mail software, Google Calendar, the Talk instant messaging and voice-over-IP application, and the Sites wiki service.

Google is also expected to soon unveil an online storage offering.

Corporate IT managers have so far been unenthusiastic about replacing packaged software with Google's Web-based offerings. Robert Ford, CIO at Virgin Entertainment Group Inc., said Chrome likely won't change that view, at least at Virgin.

Although Chrome is impressive, "there would have to be astronomical performance improvements for us to switch," Ford said.

He noted that IE is the Los Angeles-based retailer's corporate standard, and developers there are expert in Microsoft .Net-based technologies. "I don't see any reason to challenge our IE standard," Ford said. "I'd have to make sure Chrome worked well with all of our other apps. What is the business value in that?"

In a statement, Dean Hachamovitch, IE general manager at Microsoft, said the company expects most users to continue turning to Internet Explorer, which holds about 72% of the browser market, according to Net Applications Inc., an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Web metrics research firm.

Sheri McLeish, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said that Chrome "is not compelling enough to erode Microsoft's dominance. Too many IT shops are comfortable with IE."

McLeish noted that persuading users to switch browsers is a difficult task for any vendor. Even Microsoft has faced challenges getting users to upgrade to new versions of IE, she said.

Rosoff added that Google also faces a significant challenge in finding ways to distribute the new browser.

"Google is a powerful brand, but they do need a way to distribute the browser," he noted. PC makers, an obvious potential distribution path, may be wary of replacing Windows with Web-based applications.

 

 

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After 16 days, the Olympics concluded with 43 world records being broken. However, there's now another record that's no less exciting.

QinetiQ claimed Sunday that its propeller-driven aircraft called Zephyr flew for 83 hours and 37 minutes nonstop, more than doubling the official world record set by Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk in 2001.

The Zephyr is much different from the Global Hawk, which is about the size of a fighter and requires a runway for taking off and landing.

Zephyr, on the other hand, is an ultra-lightweight carbon-fiber aircraft that weighs less than 70 pounds and is designed to launch by hand. The little aircraft flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon arrays covering the aircraft's paper-thin wings. It's powered day and night by lithium sulfur batteries that are recharged during the day using solar power.

QinnetiQ claims that last year, Zephyr also managed to stay up in the air for 54 hours on another flight.

However, both the Zephyr's reported flight times didn't meet all criteria laid down by The World Air Sports Federation--the governing body for air sports and aeronautical world records--and will probably remain unofficial.

Nonetheless, Zephyr's impressive fight time opens up a lot of potential for the aircraft the fields of earth observation and communications relay.

(Via Associated Press)

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SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- Imagine juicing up your laptop computer or cell phone without plugging it into an electrical socket.

 

 

 

That's a luxury that could be provided by wireless power transmission, a concept that has been bandied about for decades but is creeping closer to becoming viable.

Building off work unveiled last year by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, Intel Corp. demonstrated Thursday how to make a 60-watt light bulb glow from an energy source 3 feet away.

The Intel team did it with relatively high efficiency, losing only a quarter of the energy the researchers started with.

"That, to me, is the most striking part about it: transmitting 60 watts at 75 percent efficiency over several feet," said Intel's chief technology officer, Justin Rattner.

"The power pack for your laptop isn't that efficient. ... It's one of those things that's almost too good to be true."

Wireless transmission of electricity makes use of some basic physics. Electric coils that resonate at the same frequency can transmit energy to each other at a distance.

But this technology has a long way to evolve before it becomes a commercial product. In both the MIT and the Intel work, researchers used charging coils far too large for wide-scale use.

Even so, Rattner said Intel is in the early stages of trying to modify a laptop to accept wireless power. One challenge is figuring out how to prevent the electromagnetic field from interfering with the computer's other parts, he said.

Eventually, a homeowner could attach a large transmitter to a wall -- or even bury it inside the wall -- and plant many smaller receivers inside nearby tables and chairs and other pieces of furniture, creating the ultimate in recharging convenience.

MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic said researchers have proposed many intriguing ideas for real-world applications since his group disclosed its breakthrough last year in a scientific journal. Those include the possibility of wirelessly powering pacemakers and artificial hearts.

One of the big challenges in transmitting wireless power is preventing too much energy from escaping while in transit.

The MIT researchers, who call the technology WiTricity, a combination of "wireless" and "electricity," had lit their bulb from 7 feet away with larger charging coils and between 40 percent to 45 percent efficiency.

That means most of the energy didn't make it to the light bulb.

But Soljacic said his group has been able to get up to 90 percent efficiency when the devices were moved to about 3 feet apart, better than the Intel demo.

Soljacic, who didn't work with Intel, said Thursday that he was pleased the world's largest computer chip maker is getting behind the technology and helping push the envelope.

"For me, it's like a confirmation that it's so exciting, it's something people would like to have," Soljacic said. "Now, the question is if it's feasible or not. It's exciting that they're also inspired, and it seems closer to reality every day."

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by Kitta MacPherson · Posted September 4, 2008; 02:00 p.m.

 

Princeton scientists have discovered a way of stimulating organic molecules that they expect will prompt researchers to create materials from new kinds of chemical reactions.

The method of catalysis, when used, could lead to groundbreaking kinds of drugs and agricultural chemicals and will provide a shortcut to standard multi-step methods of chemical production.

The work, conducted by David MacMillan, the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Organic Chemistry at Princeton, and David Nicewicz, a postdoctoral fellow, will appear in a special online edition of Science on Sept. 4.
The method is disarmingly easy to perform but deeply complex in terms of the science behind it. At its simplest, the process involves using a weak source of light -- like a household light bulb -- to catalyze or propel a reaction in a flask of fluid containing two different classes of chemicals.

Like magic or even a child's tabletop science experiment, the chemicals in the container start to selectively react with each other when exposed to the light.

"This is the first time that chemists have realized the potential to use simple light bulbs -- or weak light -- to catalytically propel organic chemical reactions … as extremely simple as it sounds," MacMillan said.

The method brings together two different fields of chemistry -- organic catalysis and inorganic photoredox catalysis and involves combining two different compounds and two different catalysts. "There are two interwoven catalytic cycles where everything is happening at just the right time," MacMillan said. "It's like an orchestra with the perfect conductor."

Experts agreed that the discovery points to exciting possibilities.

"It will provide access to a variety of interesting compounds currently unavailable due to the new bond connections that it enables," said Stephen Buchwald, the Camille Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "This method as well as the basic concepts enunciated in the paper are sure to be of great importance, both in academia and in pharmaceutical and other industries."

"What MacMillan has succeeded in doing is to effect a challenging transformation with an efficient, versatile, mild and environmentally benign process," said John Schwab, who oversees organic synthesis grants at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health. "It's also a beautiful example of taking lessons from nature and applying them to great practical advantage in a non-natural setting.”

The reaction involves the chemicals alpha-bromoketone and aldehyde and two catalysts.

Once the chemicals are placed in a flask, the bulb starts the reaction by emitting a light particle or photon that escapes and is absorbed by the inorganic catalyst in the solution.

Once that catalyst becomes excited, it passes off an electron to an alpha-bromoketone molecule. The alpha fragments and produces a highly active, unstable organic molecule. At exactly the same moment, the organic catalyst interacts with the aldehyde, forming an enamine, also an activated unstable molecule. The two unstable molecules are mutually attracted, race toward each other and then combine.

The resulting chemical bond is significant, MacMillan said, because it represents a new chemical reaction that the field of asymmetric catalysis has been trying to make for many years. Moreover, this light bulb strategy, invented in the University's Merck Center for Catalysis, opens the door to many other chemical reactions that have previously been impossible yet now should be easy to make.

Catalysis, the speeding up or sometimes the slowing down of the rate of a chemical reaction, is caused by the addition of some substance that does not undergo a permanent chemical change. Ten years ago, MacMillan led a team that created a new way of instigating chemical reactions -- a new form of catalysis called organocatalysis.

Instead of using metals to propel a chemical reaction (a standard method called organometallic catalysis widely used in the creation of pharmaceuticals), the team developed a way to use organic chemicals such as carbon in the reaction, an environmentally safer, easier and cheaper way to produce drugs. In most cases, the chemical process that creates drugs produces two forms of it, the desired one and a "mirror" image compound.

Because this chemical cousin can often cause untoward side effects, drug industry chemists must find a way to eliminate it. By inventing a method that replaces the expensive and often toxic metallic catalysts with simpler, more readily available organic ones, MacMillan gave them a cheaper shortcut that is now becoming widely adopted on a global scale.

The work appearing in Science was funded by Merck and the National Institutes of Health.

 

 

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