SpaceX cargo ship reaches International Space Station

Astronauts plucked a commercial cargo ship from orbit on Wednesday and attached it to the International Space Station, marking the reopening of a U.S. supply line to the orbital outpost following the space shuttles' retirement last year.

After a 2-1/2 day trip, Space Exploration Technologies' Dragon cargo ship positioned itself 33 feet away from the $100 billion research complex, a project of 15 countries, which has been dependent on Russian, European and Japanese freighters for supplies.

Astronaut Akihiko Hoshide then used the space station's 58-foot-long (17.7-meter) robotic arm to grab hold of a grapple fixture on the side of the capsule at 6:56 a.m. EDT (1056 GMT) as the spacecraft flew 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Baja California in northwest Mexico.

"Looks like we tamed the Dragon," commander Sunita Williams radioed to Mission Control in Houston.

"We're happy she's on board with us. Thanks to everybody at SpaceX and NASA for bringing her here to us. And the ice cream," she said.

The Dragon's cargo includes a freezer to ferry science samples back and forth between the station and Earth. For the flight up, it was packed with chocolate-vanilla swirl ice cream, a rare treat for an orbiting crew.

Williams and Hoshide attached the capsule to a docking port on the station's Harmony connecting module at 9:03 a.m. EDT (1303 GMT).

It is expected to remain docked to the station for about 18 days while the crew unloads its 882 pounds (400 kg) of cargo and fills it with science experiments and equipment no longer needed on the outpost.

The flight is the first of 12 planned under a $1.6 billion contract NASA placed with privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to deliver cargo to the station.

The U.S. space agency's second supplier, Orbital Sciences Corp, plans to debut its Antares rocket later this year. A demonstration run to the station is planned for February or March.

NASA also is working with SpaceX, Boeing Co and privately owned Sierra Nevada Corp to design space taxis that can fly crew to and from the station, with the goal of breaking Russia's monopoly on those flights by 2017.

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Redefining Medicine With Apps and iPads - The Digital Doctor

As a third-year resident in internal medicine, Dr. Rajkomar was the senior member of the team, and the others looked to him for guidance. An infusion of saline was the answer, but the tricky part lay in the details. Concentration? Volume? Improper treatment could lead to brain swelling, seizures or even death. Dr. Rajkomar had been on call for 24 hours and was exhausted, but the clinical uncertainty was “like a shot of adrenaline,” he said. He reached into a deep pocket of his white coat and produced not a well-thumbed handbook but his iPhone. With a tap on an app called MedCalc, he had enough answers within a minute to start the saline at precisely the right rate. The history of medicine is defined by advances born of bioscience. But never before has it been driven to this degree by digital technology. The proliferation of gadgets, apps and Web-based information has given clinicians — especially young ones like Dr. Rajkomar, who is 28 — a black bag of new tools: new ways to diagnose symptoms and treat patients, to obtain and share information, to think about what it means to be both a doctor and a patient. And it has created something of a generational divide. Older doctors admire, even envy, their young colleagues’ ease with new technology. But they worry that the human connections that lie at the core of medical practice are at risk of being lost. “Just adding an app won’t necessarily make people better doctors or more caring clinicians,” said Dr. Paul C. Tang, chief innovation and technology officer at Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif. “What we need to learn is how to use technology to be better, more humane professionals.” Dr. Paul A. Heineken, 66, a primary care physician, is a revered figure at the San Francisco V.A. Medical Center. He is part of a generation that shared longstanding assumptions about the way medicine is practiced: Physicians are the unambiguous source of medical knowledge; notes and orders are written in paper records while standing at the nurses’ station; and X-rays are film placed on light boxes and viewed over a radiologist’s shoulder. One recent morning, while leading trainees through the hospital’s wards, Dr. Heineken faced the delicate task of every teacher of medicine — using the gravely ill to impart knowledge. The team arrived at the room of a 90-year-old World War II veteran who was dying — a ghost of a man, his face etched with pain, the veins in his neck protruding from the pressure of his failing heart. Dr. Heineken apologized for the intrusion, and the patient forced a smile. The doctor knelt at the bedside to perform the time-honored tradition of percussing the heart. “Do it like this,” he said, placing his left hand over the man’s heart, and tapping its middle finger with the middle finger of his right. One by one, each trainee took a turn. An X-ray or echocardiogram would do the job more accurately. But Dr. Heineken wanted the students to experience discovering an enlarged heart in a physical exam. Dr. Heineken fills his teaching days with similar lessons, which can mean struggling upstream against a current of technology. Through his career, he has seen the advent of CT scans, ultrasounds, M.R.I.’s and countless new lab tests. He has watched peers turn their backs on patients while struggling with a new computer system, or rush patients through their appointments while forgetting the most fundamental tools — their eyes and ears. For these reasons, he makes a point of requiring something old-fashioned of his trainees. “I tell them that their first reflex should be to look at the patient, not the computer,” Dr. Heineken said. And he tells the team to return to each patient’s bedside at day’s end. “I say, ‘Don’t go to a computer; go back to the room, sit down and listen to them. And don’t look like you’re in a hurry.’ ” One reason for this, Dr. Heineken said, is to adjust treatment recommendations based on the patient’s own priorities. “Any difficult clinical decision is made easier after discussing it with the patient,” he said. It is not that he opposes digital technology; Dr. Heineken has been using the Department of Veterans Affairs’ computerized patient record system since it was introduced 15 years ago. Still, his cellphone is an old flip model, and his experience with text messaging is limited. His first appointment one recent day was with Eric Conrad, a 65-year-old Vietnam veteran with severe emphysema. First came a conversation. Dr. Heineken had his patient sit on a chair next to his desk. Despondent, the patient looked down at his battered Reeboks, his breaths shallow and labored. Dr. Heineken has been seeing Mr. Conrad since 1993, and since then, he said, “we’ve been fighting a saw-tooth battle with his weight.”
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Citing privacy concerns, U.S. panel urges end to secret DNA testing

They're called discreet DNA samples, and the Elk Grove, California, genetic-testing company easyDNA says it can handle many kinds, from toothpicks to tampons.

Blood stains from bandages and tampons? Ship them in a paper envelope for paternity, ancestry or health testing. EasyDNA also welcomes cigarette butts (two to four), dental floss ("do not touch the floss with your fingers"), razor clippings, gum, toothpicks, licked stamps and used tissues if the more standard cheek swab or tube of saliva isn't obtainable.

If the availability of such services seems like an invitation to mischief or worse - imagine a discarded tissue from a prospective employee being tested to determine whether she's at risk for an expensive disease, for instance - the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues agrees.

On Thursday it released a report on privacy concerns triggered by the advent of whole genome sequencing, determining someone's complete DNA make-up. Although sequencing "holds enormous promise for human health and medicine," commission chairwoman Amy Gutmann told reporters on Wednesday, there is a "potential for misuse of this very personal data."

"In many states someone can pick up your discarded coffee cup and send it for (DNA) testing," said Gutmann, who is the president of the University of Pennsylvania.

"It's not a fantasy to think about how, without baseline privacy protection, people could use this in a way that would be really detrimental," such as by denying someone with a gene that raises their risk of Alzheimer's disease long-term care insurance, or to jack up life insurance premiums for someone with an elevated genetic risk of a deadly cancer that strikes people in middle age.

"Those who are willing to share some of the most intimate information about themselves for the sake of medical progress should be assured appropriate confidentiality, for example, about any discovered genetic variations that link to increased likelihood of certain diseases, such as Alzheimer's, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia," Gutmann said.

The commission took on the issue because whole genome sequencing is poised to become part of mainstream medical care, especially by personalizing medical treatments based on a patient's DNA.

$1,000 GENOME

That has been driven in large part by dramatic cost reductions, from $2.5 billion per genome in the Human Genome Project of the 1990s and early 2000s to $1,000 soon. Several companies, including Illumina Inc. and Life Technology's Ion Torrent division, sell machines that can sequence a genome for a few hundred dollars, but that does not include the analysis to figure out what the string of 3 billion DNA "letters" means.

A three-year-old federal law prohibits discrimination in employment or health insurance based on someone's genetic information but does not address other potential misuses of the data. Without such privacy protection, said Gutmann, people may be reluctant to participate in genetic studies that do whole genome sequencing, for fear their genetic data will not be secure and could be used against them.

Recommendations from such panels are not binding but have been used as the basis for policy and legislation.

One scenario the panel offers is a "contentious spouse" secretly having a DNA sample sequenced and using it in a custody battle "as evidence of unfitness to parent," perhaps because the DNA showed a genetic risk for mental illness or alcoholism. There are no federal laws against that.

Or, the panel said, DNA information might be posted in a social networking site "by a malicious stranger or acquaintance," possibly hurting someone's "chance of finding a spouse, achieving standing in a community, or pursuing a desired career path."

The bioethics panel recommends a dozen forms of privacy protection, including that "surreptitious commercial testing" be banned: No gene sequencing or other genetic testing should be permitted without consent from the person the DNA came from, it said. About 25 states currently allow such DNA testing.

Critics of the lack of genetic privacy thought greater urgency was needed.

"The report lays out a lot of important best practices and does endorse further state and federal regulations, but it doesn't offer a timeline," said Jeremy Gruber, president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a private group that monitors genetic issues. "What will inevitably happen is whole genome sequencing will enter greater use and we won't have proper regulations to insure privacy."

A bill introduced in California, home to many DNA testing companies, by state Senator Alex Padilla would ban surreptitious testing, requiring written authorization from the person the genetic sample was taken from.

It is not clear how many labs are willing to analyze DNA without that authorization. In practice, well-known genetic testing companies such as privately held 23andMe test only saliva samples that are too large to acquire surreptitiously, such as from a drinking glass or licked stamp. "A person would really know that they are spitting into a tube," said 23andMe spokeswoman Jane Rubinstein.

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Nobel for quantum "parlor trick" that could make super computers

A French and an American scientist won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for finding ways to measure quantum particles without destroying them, which could make it possible to build a new kind of computer far more powerful than any seen before.

Serge Haroche of France and American David Wineland, both 68, found ways to manipulate the very smallest particles of matter and light to observe strange behavior that previously could only be imagined in equations and thought experiments.

Wineland once described his own work as a "parlor trick" that performed the seemingly magical feat of putting an object in two places at once. Other scientists praised the achievements as bringing to life the wildest dreams of science fiction.

"The Nobel laureates have opened the door to a new era of experimentation with quantum physics by demonstrating the direct observation of individual quantum particles without destroying them," said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded them the 8 million crown ($1.2 million) prize.

"Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century."

Haroche said he was walking in the street with his wife when he recognized the Swedish country code on the incoming call to inform him of the award.

"I saw the area code 46, then I sat down," he told reporters in Sweden by telephone. "First I called my children, then I called my closest colleagues, without whom I would never have won this prize," he said. Asked how he would celebrate, he said: "I will have champagne, of course."

He told Reuters he hoped the prize would give him a platform "that will allow me to communicate ideas, not just in this field of research but for research in general, fundamental research".

Wineland was asleep at home in Boulder, Colorado, when the phone call from Stockholm arrived before dawn on Tuesday morning, he said at a press conference. (His wife answered.)

Physics is the second of this year's crop of awards; scientists from Britain and Japan shared the first prize on Monday, in medicine, for adult stem cell research. The prizes, which reward achievements in science, literature and peace, were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the will of Swedish dynamite millionaire Alfred Nobel.

"This year's Nobel Prize recognizes some of the most incredible experimental tests of the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics," said Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics at the University of Surrey in Britain.

"Until the last decade or two, some of these results were nothing more than ideas in science fiction or, at best, the wilder imaginations of quantum physicists. Wineland and Haroche and their teams have shown just how strange the quantum world really is and opened up the potential for new technologies undreamt of not so long ago."

INGENIOUS METHODS

Quantum physics studies the behavior of the fundamental building blocks of the universe at a scale smaller than atoms, when tiny particles act in strange ways that can only be described with advanced mathematics.

Researchers have long dreamt of building "quantum computers" that would operate using that mathematics - able to conduct far more complicated calculations and hold vastly more data than classical computers. But they could only be built if the behavior of individual particles could be observed.

"Single particles are not easily isolated from their surrounding environment, and they lose their mysterious quantum properties as soon as they interact with the outside world," the Nobel committee explained.

"Through their ingenious laboratory methods Haroche and Wineland, together with their research groups, have managed to measure and control very fragile quantum states, which were previously thought inaccessible for direct observation. The new methods allow them to examine, control and count the particles."

Both scientists work in the field of quantum optics, studying the fundamental interactions between light and matter. The Nobel committee said they used opposite approaches to the same problem: Wineland uses light particles - or photons - to measure and control particles of matter - electrons - while Haroche uses electrons to control and measure photons.

In one of the strange properties of quantum mechanics, tiny particles act as if they are simultaneously in two locations, based on the likelihood that they would be found at either, known as a "superposition."

It was long thought that it would be impossible to demonstrate this in a lab. But Wineland's "parlor trick" was to hit an atom with laser light, which according to quantum theory had a 50 percent chance of moving it, and observe the atom at two different locations, 80 billionths of a meter apart.

In a normal computer, a switch must either be on or off. A quantum computer would work with switches that, like the particles in Wineland's experiment, behaved as if they were in more than one position at the same time.

An example is a computer trying to work out the shortest route around town for a travelling salesman. A traditional computer might try every possible route and then choose the shortest. A quantum computer could do the calculation in one step, as if the salesman travelled each route simultaneously.

Wineland is a dedicated experimentalist, not bothered by the bizarre philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, such as the notion that reality does not exist until an observer measures it. "You can find debate on this, but I'm not sure we're so special in the universe" as to have the power to bring reality into being, he told Reuters.

His realism extends to applications of his work. "I wouldn't recommend anybody buy stock in a quantum computing company," Wineland told reporters, but he said he was optimistic that it might be possible to build one eventually.

He plans to be part of the quest. Asked if his science career was nearing an end, he said he had no plans to retire "until they drag me out of here for being too old".

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Bits Blog: From the Land of Angry Birds, a Mobile Game Maker Lifts Off

For a country with a population about the size of Minnesota, Finland has produced some giant global hits in the mobile business, like the phone maker Nokia and Rovio, the company responsible for Angry Birds and Bad Piggies. A Finnish mobile games start-up called Supercell wants its crack at glory too.
The Helsinki-based company calls itself a “tablet first” games company, meaning that it designs its games to take advantage of the larger screen of the tablet rather than just blowing up smartphone games to a bigger display (though it releases versions of its games for smartphones too). For now, the dominance of Apple’s iPad in the tablet market means Supercell is focused mainly on that device.

This year it introduced two games for Apple’s iOS device — a farming game called Hay Day and a strategy game featuring wizards and barbarians called Clash of Clans. Both have done well, but Clash of Clans has been especially successful, occupying the No. 1 slot on Apple’s top-grossing iPad game chart in over five dozen countries for weeks, according to Supercell. The games are free to download and play, but, like FarmVille and a variety of other games, Supercell sells its users in-game currency so they can speed up their game progress and buy virtual goods.
Using this model, Supercell executives say its two games are currently grossing over $500,000 a day, which translates into about $350,000 a day in revenue for Supercell after Apple takes its 30 percent cut on transactions through its iOS App Store.
Besides its country of origin, Supercell shares another similarity, an investor, with Rovio: Accel Partners, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that was also an early investor in Facebook. The company has raised $15 million in financing from Accel, London Venture Partners and others, $12 million of it from Accel.
In a phone interview, Ilkka Paananen, the founder and chief executive of Supercell, said he did not believe that Accel’s investment in Supercell was connected to the firm’s investment in Rovio. He said, however, that the quality of Rovio’s games had been a big influence on start-ups in the country.
“One thing they’ve really done for the Finnish gaming community is they’ve done a huge favor in raising the bar for everybody,” Mr. Paananen said.
Separately on Monday, Rovio unveiled a plan to keep its Angry Birds franchise steaming forward, with a new game called Angry Birds Star Wars that it is creating in partnership with Lucasfilm.
Supercell has also opened a San Francisco office to be closer to the action in the technology industry, most notably the two big companies it works with most often, Apple and Facebook. Greg Harper, the general manager of Supercell’s North America operations, said the company believed the tablet was “the ultimate game platform.”
“The technology and hardware performance really is close to on-par with that of consoles,” Mr. Harper said.
Supercell’s executives are especially excited by the prospect of a new smaller iPad from Apple, now popularly referred to as the iPad mini. Although he was quick to say that Supercell had no inside knowledge of such a device, Mr. Harper said a smaller, less expensive iPad could help the device reach a broader audience.
Mr. Harper says he believes that the growth in the tablet market will be a bad development for dedicated portable game devices from companies like Nintendo and Sony. “That market seems in trouble to me,” he said. “The iPad mini could be one of the final nails in the coffin.”

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Design: Who Made That Escape Key?

Jens Mortensen for The New York Times“It’s the ‘Hey, you! Listen to me’ key,” says Jack Dennerlein of the Harvard School of Public Health. According to Dennerlein, an expert on how humans interact with computers, the escape key helped drive the computer revolution of the 1970s and ’80s. “It says to the computer: ‘Stop what you’re doing. I need to take control.’ ” In other words, it reminds the machine that it has a human master. If the astronauts in “2001: A Space Odyssey” had an ESC key, Dennerlein points out, they could have stopped the rogue computer Hal in an instant. The key was born in 1960, when an I.B.M. programmer named Bob Bemer was trying to solve a Tower of Babel problem: computers from different manufacturers communicated in a variety of codes. Bemer invented the ESC key as way for programmers to switch from one kind of code to another. Later on, when computer codes were standardized (an effort in which Bemer played a leading role), ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out.” Why “escape”? Bemer could have used another word — say, “interrupt” — but he opted for “ESC,” a tiny monument to his own angst. Bemer was a worrier. In the 1970s, he began warning about the Y2K bug, explaining to Richard Nixon’s advisers the computer disaster that could occur in the year 2000. Today, with our relatively stable computers, few of us need the panic button. But Bob Frankston, a pioneering programmer, says he still uses the ESC key. “There’s something nice about having a get-me-the-hell-out-of-here key.” I, KEYBOARD Joseph Kaye is a senior scientist at Yahoo! Research. Why do outmoded keys, like ESC, persist? Our devices have legacies built into them. For more than a hundred years, when you wanted to write something, you sat down in front of a typewriter. But computers look different now — they’re like smartphones. It will be interesting to see whether in 10 or 15 years the whole idea of a keyboard will seem strange. We might be saying, “Remember when we used to type things?” How would we control computers in this future-without-typing? Think of the Wii and Kinect, or even specialized input devices for games like Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution. All might be bellwethers for the rest of computing. We might see a rise in all sorts of input, like voice recognition and audio control — think about Siri.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 7, 2012
An earlier version misspelled Joseph Kaye’s surname as Kay and misstated his employer. He is a senior scientist at Yahoo! Research not Nokia Research Center.

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Wal-Mart and American Express Join In Prepaid Card Deal

It is a surprising alliance between the discounter Wal-Mart and American Express, which until recently has been focused on high-end consumers. The move is intended to strengthen both companies’ position in the prepaid card market — which, unlike credit and debit cards, is largely unregulated and has far fewer consumer protections. The account, called Bluebird, will be available next week. The companies are positioning it as an option for people turned off by bank fees. “The only fees consumers will ever pay are clear, transparent and within their control,” such as out-of-network A.T.M. fees, the companies said in a release. Wal-Mart and American Express declined to give details of the financial relationship between the two companies, but indicated both would profit from the card. The fees disclosed by the companies were generally lower than those Wal-Mart now charges for its prepaid MoneyCard. Bluebird means prepaid card holders can have access to features that are usually associated with credit cards, like American Express’s customer service, roadside assistance and mobile banking. But consumer advocates say shoppers should be careful in the largely unregulated world of prepaid cards. The nation’s consumer financial watchdog, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, is preparing restrictions on prepaid debit cards. The agency says it has concerns about high fees and inadequate disclosures. Advocacy groups have questioned whether prepaid card issuers clearly explain to cardholders the fees that come with products, including charges to activate the card, load money on it, check a balance at cash machines and speak to customer service. Consumer advocates have said that the cards, which are typically marketed to lower-income customers, have so many fees that they erode money loaded onto the card. Prepaid cards work much like debit cards, except that they are not tied to a traditional, regulated bank account. The cards are part of a larger strategy by lenders to tap into the so-called unbanked or underbanked population — customers who use few, if any, bank services. Such people are considered a $45 billion market, according to the Center for Financial Services Innovation, which provides advisory services. For the Bluebird account, customers can sign up free online or via mobile phone, or pay $5 in a Walmart store. They receive a card stamped with the American Express logo, which they can use anywhere American Express is accepted. They can set up direct deposit for paychecks and deposit other checks by taking a mobile phone picture of them. And they can withdraw cash. The companies do not perform a credit check before creating an account. American Express and Wal-Mart said there would be no minimum balances to maintain, no monthly or annual fees and no overdraft fees (the account does not allow overdrafts, as it does not issue paper checks). It will cost $2 per out-of-network A.T.M. withdrawal, and $2 per withdrawal without direct deposit, but the companies did not disclose other fees as of now. Wal-Mart’s MoneyCard prepaid card costs $3 to buy, $3 a month and $3 to reload. “We know that the model is financially sustainable for both partners,” said Daniel Eckert, vice president of financial services for Wal-Mart U.S. David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, an industry publication for payment systems, said companies in deals like this typically shared the amount charged to merchants when a card was used. He said he expected that Wal-Mart had negotiated a lower merchant-fee rate for card use at a Walmart than competitors would receive. Mr. Robertson said Wal-Mart had most likely realized that its MoneyCard, run by the company Green Dot, was not appealing to all customers. “This market is growing, and it’s moving beyond just that chunk of people that we consider to be underbanked,” he said. “It includes people who might be wanting to buy a prepaid card for other reasons, like budgeting purposes.” Green Dot’s stock declined 20.2 percent on Monday, though Mr. Eckert said that Wal-Mart would continue to offer its MoneyCard. Wal-Mart’s financial services plans were once more ambitious: to get a federal bank charter, meaning it could make loans and get deposits insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. But there was opposition from the banking industry and politicians who were worried about small banks. Five years ago, Wal-Mart ceased trying to get a charter, and instead started building services that did not require a charter. Lenders have been clamoring to grab a bigger piece of the booming prepaid card market. In 2009, consumers held roughly $29 billion on prepaid cards, according to the Mercator Advisory Group, a payments industry research group. By the end of 2013, that is expected to swell to $90 billion. A number of the nation’s largest lenders, including JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bank, Regions Financial and Wells Fargo, are aggressively rolling out prepaid card offerings. One incentive for banks to dive in is that prepaid cards are not restricted by the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law. Thanks to the exemption from Dodd-Frank, banks can charge merchants high fees when a consumer swipes a prepaid card. A recent study by Pew, a nonprofit research group, also indicated that some customers were unaware their prepaid cards were not necessarily protected by the F.D.I.C. Dan Schulman, group president of enterprise growth for American Express, said in a call with reporters that Bluebird was not F.D.I.C.-backed, but that under money-transmittal regulations, American Express was required to hold assets to back up 100 percent of the money in accounts. Prepaid cards have increasingly come under fire from regulators. Last month, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency brought an action against Urban Trust Bank in Orlando, Fla., which has branches in Walmart stores. The regulator said it discovered “unsafe and unsound banking practices” related to the community bank’s prepaid card offerings.
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