Health-Exchange Deadline Looms

All of the Affordable Care Act, also known as "Obamacare," doesn't go into effect until 2014, but states are required to set up their own health care exchanges or leave it to the federal government to step in by next year. The deadline for the governors' decisions is Friday.

The health insurance exchanges are one of the key stipulations of the new health care law. They will offer consumers an Internet-based marketplace for purchasing private health insurance plans.

But the president's signature health care plan has become so fraught with politics that whether governors agreed to set up the exchanges has fallen mostly along party lines.

Such partisanship is largely symbolic because if a state opts not to set up the exchange, the Department of Health and Human Services will do it for them as part of the federal program. That would not likely be well-received by Republican governors, either, but the law forces each state's chief executive to make a decision one way or the other.

Here's what it looks like in all 50 states and the District of Columbia:

20 states that have opted out -- N.J., S.C., La., Wis., Ohio, Maine, Ala., Alaska, Ariz., Ga., Pa., Kan., Neb., N.H., N.D., Okla., S.D., Tenn., Texas and Wyo.

Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

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Several Republican governors have said they will not set up the exchanges, including Chris Christie (N.J.), Nikki Haley (S.C.), Bobby Jindal (La.), Scott Walker (Wis.), John Kasich (Ohio), Paul LePage (Maine), Robert Bentley (Ala.), Sean Parnell (Ark.), Jan Brewer (Ariz.), Nathan Deal (Ga.), Tom Corbett (Pa.), Sam Brownback (Kan.), Dave Heineman (Neb.), John Lynch (N.H.), Jack Dalrymple (N.D.), Mary Fallin (Okla.), Dennis Daugaard (S.D.), Bill Haslam (Tenn.), Rick Perry (Texas), and Matt Mead (Wyo.).

3 States Out, but a Little More Complicated -- Mont., Ind. and Mo.

The Montana outgoing and incoming governors are both Democrats, but the Republican state legislature rejected the Democratic state auditor's request to start setting up a state exchange. So a federal exchange will be set up in Montana as well.

The Indiana outgoing and incoming governors are both Republicans and outgoing Gov. Mitch Daniels deferred the decision to governor-elect and U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, who said his preference is not to set up a state health care exchange, paving the way for the feds to come in too.

In Missouri, Gov. Jay Nixon is a Democrat, but Prop E passed on Nov. 6, which barred his administration from creating a state-based exchange without a public vote or the approval of the state legislature. After the election, he sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services saying he would be unable to set up a state-based exchange, meaning the federal government would have to set up its own.

1 State Waiting for the White House -- Utah

Utah already has a state exchange set up, a Web-based tool where small-business employees can shop and compare health insurance with contributions from their employee. In a letter Republican Gov. Gary Herbert sent to the White House Tuesday, he asked for its exchange, called Avenue H, to be approved as a state-based exchange under the Affordable Care Act as long as state officials can open it to individuals and larger businesses.

Norm Thurston, the state's health reform implementation coordinator, says authorities there "haven't received an official response" from the White House, but "we anticipate getting one soon."

There are some sticking points that don't comply with the exchanges envisioned by the Affordable Care Act and Utah would like to keep it that way.

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First results from James Cameron's trip to the abyss

IT'S not Pandora, but the Mariana trench holds life just as strange as that in James Cameron's film Avatar. And most is unknown to us, despite the film-maker's 11-kilometre descent into Earth's deepest point in a titanium sphere.

Cameron and scientists on the team presented early findings at the American Geophysical Union's meeting in San Francisco last week. They told of microbial mats growing at the edge of hydrothermal vents on rocks that appeared to be undergoing serpentinisation - where seawater reacts with the mineral olivine to release hydrogen and methane: food for the microbes. The first life on Earth may have appeared at a similar vent, as serpentinisation provides all the raw materials necessary for metabolism.

Cameron urged further trips into unexplored ocean trenches: "Saying I made any dent would be like dropping out of an airplane at night onto a wheat field in Nebraska, walking for 2 kilometres, and saying I explored America."

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S. Korea seeks to recover N. Korea rocket debris

SEOUL: South Korea's navy has launched a salvage operation in the Yellow Sea to retrieve debris from North Korea's long-range rocket launch, military officials said Thursday.

The first stage of the North's Unha-3 rocket launched on Wednesday fell in the sea off the Korean peninsula, while the second splashed down east of the Philippines.

"Our navy discovered what appeared to be a part from the first stage of North Korea's rocket in the Yellow Sea Wednesday afternoon," a defence ministry spokesman told AFP.

"A salvage operation is now under way to retrieve it," he said, declining to give details.

The chunk of the debris was found on the sea bed, some 160 kilometers (100 miles) west of the southwestern port of Gunsan, Yonhap news agency said, at a depth of around 80 meters (260 feet).

Before its last rocket launch attempt in April -- which ended in failure -- North Korea had warned both Japan and South Korea that any effort to salvage debris from the rocket would be considered an "act of war".

The warning was not repeated before Wednesday's launch.

Pyongyang said its latest launch was a purely scientific mission aimed at placing a polar-orbiting earth observation satellite in space.

Most of the world saw it as a disguised ballistic missile test that violates UN resolutions imposed after the North's nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009.

The UN Security Council has condemned the launch and warned of possible measures over what the US called a "highly provocative" act.

- AFP/ck

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Google, Microsoft 'challenged' vs. Apple, says Goldman Sachs

The iPad 4, iPad Mini, and iPhone 5. Loyalty to Apple is increasing in the age of 'multiple device ownership' says Goldman Sachs.

(Credit:
CNET)

Google and Microsoft will struggle to vend off Apple's smartphone-tablet juggernaut, according to a recent study by Goldman Sachs.

Titled "Clash of the titans," the 75-page study depicts Google and Microsoft as "challenged" in their bids to compete with Apple.

Some salient points made by Goldman Sachs, which based many of their findings on internal survey results:

• Well positioned v. challenged: In the "context of platform adoption," companies that are defined as "well positioned" include Apple, Facebook, Samsung. Amazon is "straddling the line." Google and Microsoft are "challenged" in platform adoption.
  
• Google: "Tablet share loss leads to smartphone share defection."
  Android
  tablet share (excluding the
  Kindle Fire) will drop to 21 percent next year from 33 percent this year. Android smartphone share
  will decline next year to 53 percent from 55 percent this year. "We ultimately see Google as trying to find a way to stay just as relevant in the new compute paradigm as it was during Web 1.0 and 2.0."
  
• Microsoft: Market share of "total consumer compute" has fallen from 93 percent in 2000 to an expected 20 percent in 2012 due to smartphones and, more recently, tablets. Though Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 tablets will help the company "reclaim some share in coming years," the consumer PC market will be flat in 2013 and Microsoft "would have to sell roughly 5 Windows Phones or roughly two Windows 8 RT tablets to offset the loss of one traditional Windows PC sale."
  

Apple comes across in the report as a technological juggernaut that will be hard to stop.

Spending on complements (products or services that sit on top of the platform) is rising and Apple continues to lead, Goldman said.

"We believe loyalty to the company's ecosystem is only increasing and this should translate into continued growth going forward...In particular, we see the potential for Apple to capture additional growth as existing iOS users move to multiple device ownership."

With new devices such as the iPad mini and lower priced iPhones, Apple's market share in phones "has room to rise much further, and that its dominant tablet market share appears to be more resilient than most expect."

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Hubble Discovers Oldest Known Galaxy

The Hubble space telescope has discovered seven primitive galaxies formed in the earliest days of the cosmos, including one believed to be the oldest ever detected.

The discovery, announced Wednesday, is part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field campaign to determine how and when galaxies first assembled following the Big Bang.

"This 'cosmic dawn' was not a single, dramatic event," said astrophysicist Richard Ellis with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Rather, galaxies appear to have been formed over hundreds of millions of years.

Ellis led a team that used Hubble to look at one small section of the sky for a hundred hours. The grainy images of faint galaxies include one researchers determined to be from a period 380 million years after the onset of the universe—the closest in time to the Big Bang ever observed.

The cosmos is about 13.7 billion years old, so the newly discovered galaxy was present when the universe was 4 percent of its current age. The other six galaxies were sending out light from between 380 million and 600 million years after the Big Bang. (See pictures of "Hubble's Top Ten Discoveries.")

Baby Pictures

The images are "like the first ultrasounds of [an] infant," said Abraham Loeb, a specialist in the early cosmos at Harvard University. "These are the building blocks of the galaxies we now have."

These early galaxies were a thousand times denser than galaxies are now and were much closer together as well, Ellis said. But they were also less luminous than later galaxies.

The team used a set of four filters to analyze the near infrared wavelengths captured by Hubble Wide Field Camera 3, and estimated the galaxies' distances from Earth by studying their colors. At a NASA teleconference, team members said they had pushed Hubble's detection capabilities about as far as they could go and would most likely not be able to identify galaxies from further back in time until the James Webb Space Telescope launches toward the end of the decade. (Learn about the Hubble telescope.)

"Although we may have reached back as far as Hubble will see, Hubble has set the stage for Webb," said team member Anton Koekemoer of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "Our work indicates there is a rich field of even earlier galaxies that Webb will be able to study."

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N. Korean Missile Hits Target of Alarming the World

North Korea's successful launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile hit its target: it bolstered the standing of its young tyrant Kim Jong Un and raised the specter of being able to eventually strike the U.S. with a nuclear weapon.

The pride in the success of the launch -- after several failures -- is a huge boost for Kim Jong Un, 29, who took power one year ago. He has been trying to cement his authority and win the hearts of the people with soft social and economic reforms, like allowing women to wear pants or more small businesses to operate based on profit.

But the rocket launch was on a different scale. A North Korean female announcer in a pink and dark grey national costume excitedly read an announcement of the missile's success and national TV aired interviews with people jumping and cheering on the news.

There had been reservations within and outside of North Korea when Kim Jong Un took power after his father's death on Dec. 17 last year as to whether the young Kim could lead a nuclear state. Looking determined at his first official appearance earlier this year, he had pledged to fulfill the legacy of his father Kim Jong Il to become a "self-sufficient strong nation" with space rocket technology.

The missile is believed to have a range of 6,212 miles, enough distance to reach the west coast of the United States. Its existence, along with a small North Korean nuclear arsenal, is an alarming possibility for many.

PHOTOS: An Inside Look At North Korea

North Korea, however, says it was simply putting a satellite in orbit.

"Picking on our launch (and not others) accusing that ours is a long-range missile and a provocative act causing instability comes from seeing us from a hostile point of view," said North Korea's foreign ministry in an official statement. "We do not want this to be overblown into something that none of us intended to be and hope all related nations act with reason and calmness."

But North Korean denials carry little credibility.

This evidence that North Korea has mastered the long-range missile technology does not mean there will be an imminent nuclear threat.

"They haven't figured out how to weaponize a nuclear (bomb) that will fit in a missile, nor do they have accurate guidance at long ranges," said Stephen Ganyard, ABC News consultant and former deputy assistant secretary of state.

Another crucial technology North Korea is yet to achieve is a proper heat shielding required to protect the warhead while re-entering the earth's atmosphere.

"This is a big leap for Pyongyang. They have been a threat with potential capability. But now a new era begins as a threat with possible capability," said Hwee-Rhak Park, professor of political leadership at Kookmin University in Seoul.

There was obvious alarm, however, as the international community condemned the launch, as North Korea is banned from developing nuclear and missile-related technology under U.N. resolutions.

South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak convened an emergency national security meeting. Japan's envoy to the United Nations called for consultations on the launch within the U.N. Security Council. Russian Foreign Ministry said it "has caused us deep regret," and even China "expressed regret," a significant notch up in condemnation from previous statements on North Korea, its traditional ally.

That international attention, analysts in Seoul say, is exactly what North Korea wanted.

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Today on New Scientist: 11 December 2012

Out-of-season's greetings from the Arctic frost flowers

Season's regards from an icy meadow in the Arctic, but it's no winter wonderland and please don't dash out into it

How hacking a mosquito's heart could eradicate malaria

Watch how a double-pronged trick helps mosquitoes remain healthy while carrying disease, a process that could be exploited to eliminate malaria

New drug lifts hard-to-treat depression in hours

A new class of drugs that changes the way neurons interact in the brain can rapidly lift people out of depression

E. O. Wilson and poet laureate on altruism and mystery

Leading evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson and former US poet laureate Robert Hass discuss free will, wilderness and the mysterious origin of the arts

Souped-up immune cells force leukaemia into remission

Genetically engineered white blood cells have been shown to have a strong impact on leukaemia after just three months

War of words: The language paradox explained

If language evolved for communication, how come most people can't understand what most other people are saying?

AC/DC's Highway to Hell sent via a drone's laser beam

A dose of rock music proves that a drone's reconnaisance data can be sent via reflected laser beam instead of radio

'Biology is a manufacturing capability'

Soon we'll be able to engineer living things with mechanical precision, says Tom Knight, father of synthetic biology

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New Yorkers live longer than other Americans: mayor

NEW YORK: New Yorkers are living longer than Americans overall, and the margin is increasing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday as he praised his administration's health policies.

A New Yorker born in 2010 has a life expectancy of 80.9 years, 2.2 years longer than the national life expectancy of 78.7 years at the time.

Since 2001, New Yorkers' life expectancy has increased by three years, against 1.8 years at the national level, according to data released by Bloomberg and the city's health department.

Women in New York are now expected to live 83.3 years and men are expected to live 78.1 years.

Bloomberg has aggressively pushed for sweeping public health policies. In 2003, he banned smoking in bars, restaurants and places of work, a measure widely reproduced elsewhere.

He again stirred controversy this year by announcing a limited ban on super-sized soda drinks he blamed for a national obesity crisis.

"Not only are New Yorkers living longer, but our improvements continue to outpace the gains in the rest of the nation," Bloomberg said.

"Our willingness to invest in health care and bold interventions is paying off in improved health outcomes, decreased infant mortality and increased life expectancy."

- AFP/ck

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MediaTek joins Samsung, Nvidia quad-core club

MediaTek will take on Samsung and Nvidia in the emerging market for quad-core chips for high-end smartphones.

The Hsinchu, Taiwan-based company announced today the MT6589, a quad-core system-on-a-chip (SoC) that integrates a modem that supports HSPA+ and other international standards.

The integration of a modem into a quad-core chip is a first, the company says.

The processor is based on ARM's Cortex-A7 design, the same technology used in Qualcomm's upcoming quad-core S4 processors.

But that Qualcomm chip won't be available commercially until well into next year. The MediaTek chip, on the other hand, will appear in smartphones that are expected to ship in the first quarter of 2013.

That said, it won't be a cakewalk. Nvidia's quad-core Tegra 3 is already used in a number of phones from the likes of HTC and Motorola.

And the Galaxy S3 uses Samsung's new Exynos 4 Quad chip.

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Best Space Pictures of 2012: Editor's Picks

Photograph courtesy Tunç Tezel, APOY/Royal Observatory

This image of the Milky Way's vast star fields hanging over a valley of human-made light was recognized in the 2012 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition run by the U.K.’s Royal Observatory Greenwich.

To get the shot, photographer Tunç Tezel trekked to Uludag National Park near his hometown of Bursa, Turkey. He intended to watch the moon and evening planets, then take in the Perseids meteor shower.

"We live in a spiral arm of the Milky Way, so when we gaze through the thickness of our galaxy, we see it as a band of dense star fields encircling the sky," said Marek Kukula, the Royal Observatory's public astronomer and a contest judge.

Full story>>

Why We Love It

"I like the way this view of the Milky Way also shows us a compelling foreground landscape. It also hints at the astronomy problems caused by light pollution."—Chris Combs, news photo editor

Published December 11, 2012

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