Article by Health-and-Fitness:Anti-Aging Articles from EzineArticles.com (c) Health-and-Fitness:Anti-Aging Articles from EzineArticles.com - Read full story here.
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Monday, December 31, 2012
How To Prevent Facial Wrinkles From Showing Up Too Early
Because of the condition of our environment and the type of lifestyles we lead these days, it's quite difficult to keep the skin healthy and young. Premature facial wrinkles are prevalent thanks to air pollution, stress at work, and unhealthy diets. Though modern medicine has come up with many ways to remove the signs of aging, numerous people remain unwilling to use them. One reason is that these methods are extremely expensive. Surgeries can cost several hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and you may need to go through them more than once to get the results that you need.
New Year: Health, Fitness, Wellness 01/10 by At Home wX Victoria ...
On his show, Comedian Rodney Perry covers arts and entertainment, everything from comedy and politics to music and acting, with his signature comedic slant.
MashUp Radio is a 30-minute podcast that discusses the fusion of technology, life, culture and science. Host Peter Biddle, engineer and executive for Intel?s Atom Software, dishes up a thought-provoking discussion.
Joy Keys provides her listeners with insight to improve their lives mentally, physically, monetarily and emotionally. Past guests on the show have included Meshell Nedegeocello, Blair Underwood, in addition to an impressive list of CEOs, humanitarians and authors.
Host Barry Moltz gets small businesses unstuck. He has founded and run small businesses with a great deal of success and failure for more than 15 years. This is a business radio show where he shares all the craziness of small business. It?s that craziness that actually makes it exciting, interesting and totally unpredictable.
The Bottom Line Sports Show is hosted by former NBA stars Penny Hardaway, Charles Oakley, Mateen Cleaves. Tune in to get the inside scoop on what's happening in sports today.
Deepak Chopra Radio provides an online forum for compelling and thought provoking conversations on success, love, sexuality and relationships, well-being and spirituality.
Hits Radio covers basketball, sports culture and entertainment with past guests including Jason Kidd, Robin Lundberg and Chris Herren.
Listeners get an earful on The Halli Casser-Jayne Show, Talk Radio for Fine Minds. Whether it?s the current political cocktail or the latest must-read award-winning book, Halli tackles all topics and likes to stir ? and sometimes shakes ? things up.
Official Internet radio show of forthcoming epic paranormal investigation book by Eric Olsen and "Haunted Housewife" Theresa Argie.
Award-winning World Footprints is a leading voice in socially responsible travel and lifestyle. Hosts Ian & Tonya celebrate culture and heritage and bring a unique voice to the world of travel.
Football Reporters Online is a group of veteran football experts in the fields of coaching, scouting, talent evaluation, and writing/broadcasting/media placement. Combined, the group brings well over 100 years of expertise in sports.
Host John Martin interviews the nation's leading entrepreneurs and small biz experts to educate small business owners on how to be successful. Past guests have included Emeril Lagasse and Guy Kawasaki.
The Movie Geeks share their passion for the art through interviews with the stars of and creative minds behind your favorite flicks and pay tribute to big-screen legends. From James Cameron and Francis Ford Coppola to Ellen Burstyn and Robert Duvall, The Geeks have got'em all.
Sylvia Global presents global conversations pertaining to women, wealth, business, faith and philanthropy. Sylvia has interviewed an eclectic mix from CEOs and musicians to fashion designers and philanthropists including Randolph Duke and Ne-Yo.
Seasoned entertainment reporter Robin Milling gets up close and personal with the world's most compelling celebs. From Michael Douglas to Katie Holmes to Kevin Kline to Ashley Judd to America Ferrera, she sits down in person each week with each and every A-lister.
Mr. Media host Bob Andelman goes one-on-one with the hottest, most influential minds from the worlds of film, TV, music, comedy, journalism and literature. That means A-listers like Kirk Douglas, Christian Slater, Kathy Ireland, Rick Fox, Chris Hansen and Jackie Collins.
Paula Begoun, best-selling author of Don't Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me, separates fact from fiction on achieving a radiant, youthful complexion at any age. She?s regularly joined by health and beauty experts who offer the latest on keeping your skin in tip-top shape.
Source: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/victoria-gaither/2013/01/11/new-year-health-fitness-wellness
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Official: Men shoot 12, kill 1 at quinceanera party in Mexico
kvue.com
Posted on December 30, 2012 at 3:50 PM
Updated today at 3:52 PM
MEXICO CITY (AP) ? A Mexican official says armed men stormed into a "quinceanera" party in the northern Mexico city of Monterrey and killed a man and injured 11 guests.
The Nuevo Leon state official says the gunmen arrived around midnight on Saturday at the party for a girl's 15th birthday, a traditional Latin American celebration much like a Sweet 16. The official spoke to The Associated Press Sunday on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information.
The aggressors were looking for a man and once they found Julio Cesar Cruz inside the dance hall they killed him, the official said. Family members who tried to protect him before he died were also wounded.
"The friends and relatives tried to intervene and that's why they were shot, too," the official said.
"Fortunately, the wounds were not serious."
Eight victims have already been released from the hospital and three others are reported stable.
The official said the birthday girl was not injured in the attack.
Monterrey has been the scene of bloody turf battles between the Zetas gang and the Gulf drug cartel.
Source: http://www.kvue.com/home/Official-Men-shoot-12-kill-1-at-party-in-Mexico-185226912.html
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Four Benefits of ISO 9001 To Web Hosting Companies
ISO 9001 is a recognized industry standard for the quality management of business procedures. It applies to all processes, offers product control solutions and better management regulation for any business organization, and it can be especially helpful to data centres and their customers
Even so, it is expensive to implement, but once in place can help the data center save money in other operational costs. Virtual Internet can attest to the operational efficiencies and competitive "edge" it has gained by attaining both ISO 9001 and 27001 certification.? The following are four benefits ISO 9001 offers to any data center or Cloud based storage business.
?1 - Customer Trust
ISO 9001 inspires trust in your business customers an accredited certification offers proof of customer commitment. It demonstrates the data center's willingness to continually find new ways of improving their services. Once in place, orders are met consistently, issues resolved immediately and services are offered on-time and to the correct customer specifications. ISO 9001 demonstrates efficient quality management that complies with the most rigorous of external audits made by the ISO 9001 certification team.
?2 ? Cost Savings
An organization that implements ISO 9001 saves money as operations are streamlined. Every cost of every department is analyzed, creating more efficient productivity that costs less, and these savings can often be passed on to customers.
?3 ? Addresses Security Issues
ISO 9001 stresses quality assurance, and an aspect of this is security issues. Data centers complying to these standards also comply with ISO 27001 which ensures that:
- Threats to the business are managed, assessed and managed on a continual basis.
- Physical security is stressed within the physical environment, requiring name and restricted access to work areas.
- ?CCTV security monitoring and planning are continually enforced.
?Bottom Line
Data centers with ISO 9001 compliance offer more efficient security options and efficiencies business clients need. Customers are more confident in trusting their crucial data to a data center that has undergone the stringent requirements of ISO 9001. Additionally, a business that undergoes the expense and the time commitment involved will continually improve services to meet their ISO9001 compliance. The only disadvantage to using an ISO compliant data center is that these require the reliance on the documentation of all procedures, decisions and implementations, including any special procedure requested by a client.
?Further Reading
Source: http://www.vi.net/blog/2012/12/four-benefits-of-iso-9001-for-web-hosting-companies/
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Sunday, December 30, 2012
My Take: If you hear God speak audibly, you (usually) aren't crazy ...
Editor's Note:?Tanya Marie (?T.M.?) Luhrmann is a psychological anthropologist and the Watkins University professor in the department of anthropology at Stanford University in Stanford, California. She is the author of "When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God."
By T.M. Luhrmann, Special to CNN
(CNN)?In the Bible, God spoke directly to Abraham. He spoke directly to Moses. He spoke directly to Job. But to your neighbor down the street?
Most people reading the ancient scriptures understand these accounts of hearing God?s voice as miracles that really did happen but no longer take place today, or maybe as folkloric flourishes to ancient stories. Even Christians who believe that miracles can be an everyday affair can hesitate when someone tells them they heard God speak audibly. There?s an old joke: When you talk to God, we call it prayer, but when God talks to you, we call it schizophrenia.
Except that usually it?s not.
Hearing a voice when alone, or seeing something no one else can see, is pretty common. At least one in 10 people will say they?ve had such an experience if you ask them bluntly. About four in 10 say they have unusual perceptual experiences between sleep and awareness if you interview them about their sleeping habits.
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And if you ask them in a way that allows them to admit they made a mistake, the rate climbs even higher. By contrast, schizophrenia, the most debilitating of all mental disorders, is pretty rare. Only about one in 100 people can be diagnosed with the disorder.
Moreover, the patterns are quite distinct. People with schizophrenia who hear voices hear them frequently. They often hear them throughout the day, sometimes like a rain of sound, or a relentless hammer. They hear not only sentences, but paragraphs: words upon words upon words. What the voices say is horrid?insults, sneers and contemptuous jibes. ?Dirty. You?re dirty.? ?Stupid slut.? ?You should?ve gone under the bus, not into it.?
That was not what Abraham, Moses and Job experienced, even when God was at his most fierce.
For the last 10 years, I have been doing anthropological and psychological research among experientially oriented evangelicals, the sort of people who seek a personal relationship with God and who expect that God will talk back. For most of them, most of the time, God talks back in a quiet voice they hear inside their minds, or through images that come to mind during prayer. But many of them also reported sensory experiences of God. They say God touched their shoulder, or that he spoke up from the back seat and said, in a way they heard with their ears, that he loved them. Indeed, in 1999, Gallup reported that 23% of all Americans had heard a voice or seen a vision in response to prayer.
These experiences were brief: at the most, a few words or short sentences. They were rare. Those who reported them reported no more than a few of them, if that. These experiences were not distressing, although they were often disconcerting and always startling. On the contrary, these experiences often made people feel more intimate with God, and more deeply loved.
In fact, my research has found that these unusual sensory experiences are more common among those who pray in a way that uses the imagination?for example, when prayer involves talking to God in your mind. The unusual sensory experiences were not, in general, associated with mental illness (we checked).
They were more common among those who felt comfortable getting caught up in their imaginations. They were also more common among those who prayed for longer periods. Prayer involves paying attention to words and images in the mind, and giving them significance. There is something about the skilled practice of paying attention to the mind in this way that shifts?just a little bit?the way we judge what is real.
Yet even many of these Christians, who wanted so badly to have a back-and-forth relationship with God, were a little hesitant to talk about hearing God speak with their ears. For all the biblical examples of hearing God speak audibly, they doubt. Augustine reports that when he was in extremis, sobbing at the foot of that fig tree, he heard a voice say, ?Take it and read.? He picked up the scripture and converted. When the Christians I know heard God speak audibly, it often flitted across their minds that they were crazy.
In his new book, "Hallucinations," the noted neurologist Oliver Sacks tells his own story about a hallucinatory experience that changed his life. He took a hearty dose of methamphetamines as a young doctor, and settled down with a 19th century book on migraines. He loved the book, with its detailed observation and its humanity. He wanted more. As he was casting around in his mind for someone who could write more that he could read, a loud internal voice told him ?You silly bugger? that it was he. So he began to write. He never took drugs again.
Now, Sacks does not recommend that anyone take drugs like that. He thinks that what he did was dangerous and he thinks he was lucky to have survived.
What interests me, however, is that he allowed himself to trust the voice because the voice was good. There?s a distinction between voices associated with psychiatric illness (often bad) and those (often good) that are found in the so-called normal population. There?s another distinction between those who choose to listen to a voice, if the advice it gives is good, and those who do not. When people like Sacks hear a voice that gives them good advice, the experience can transform them.
CNN?s Belief Blog: The faith angles behind the biggest stories
This is important, because often, when voices are discussed in the media or around the kitchen table, the voices are treated unequivocally as symptoms of madness. And of course, voice-hearing is associated with psychiatric illness.
But not all the time. In fact, not most of the time.
About a third of the people I interviewed carefully at the church where I did research reported an unusual sensory experience they associated with God. While they found these experiences startling, they also found them deeply reassuring.
Science cannot tell us whether God generated the voice that Abraham or Augustine heard. But it can tell us that many of these events are normal, part of the fabric of human perception. History tells us that those experiences enable people to choose paths they should choose, but for various reasons they hesitate to choose.
When the Rev.?Martin Luther King Jr. sat at his kitchen table, in the winter of 1956, terrified by the fear of what might happen to him and his family during the Montgomery bus boycott, he said he heard the voice of Jesus promising, ?I will be with you.? He went forward.
Voices may form part of human suffering. They also may inspire human greatness.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of TM Luhrmann.
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A personal finance to-do list for the year's end | The Salt Lake Tribune
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., on Monday, Nov. 12, 2012. U.S. stocks trimmed gains as technology and financial shares weighed down the market after an earlier rally boosted by takeover activity. Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
Advice ? Tips for last-minute moves could save you money, lower taxes.
Even as the hours slowly tick down toward 2013, there still is time to make last-minute moves to enhance your finances and lower your taxes for the year, according to financial planners.
Sharla Jessop, a vice president and private wealth management consultant at Smedley Financial Services in Salt Lake City, said that if you?re thinking about giving cash to a favorite charity, you may instead consider donating stock that has appreciated in value.
"Provided [you] have held those shares for at least a year and a day, [you] can donate the stock before the end of the year and not have to pay any capital gains," Jessop said.
She also noted that parents holding stocks that have appreciated may want to give them to their children as a gift before year?s end. Although the children "still will have to pay the capital gains, they typically will be in a lower tax bracket than their parents."
Jessop added that if you anticipate selling stock within the next six months that has risen in value, you may want to liquidate your position now because capital gains taxes are expected to go up in 2013.
Here are some other year-end tips by financial professionals.
Do your donations ? If you want a charitable deduction on this year?s taxes, you need to write that donation check by Dec. 31. Donations made on a credit card by Dec. 31 are deductible for 2012, even if you pay the Visa bill in 2013, the Internal Revenue Service says. A gift by check also counts for 2012, as long it?s mailed in December. Gifts to individuals ? friends, family or strangers ? are not deductible.
Max out the 401(k) ? It?s a gift to yourself, a little more retirement cushion. If you haven?t maxed out the annual contribution to your 401(k) at work, do so now. For 2012, the annual contribution limit is $17,000; next year, it goes up to $17,500. If you?re over age 50, you can make an additional catch-up contribution this year of $5,500.
Ditto for your IRA ? To boost your retirement savings, don?t forget these contributions. In 2012, the maximum contribution to IRAs and Roth IRAs is the smaller of $5,000 or your taxable compensation for the year. For those age 50 or older, the limit is $6,000.
If you?re not covered by a retirement plan at work, you can get a full tax deduction for IRA contributions. If covered by an employer?s retirement plan, you can take a deduction up to certain income limits (i.e. no deduction is allowed for married couples filing jointly with incomes above $112,000).
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"Moving" donations ? If you?re donating a car, boat or plane to a charitable organization at year?s end, the IRS reminds that you can deduct only the fair market amount when the car is sold by the charity. This applies to vehicle deductions valued at $500 or more.
Spend those FSA dollars ? If you have a Flexible Spending Account at work to cover health/dependent care costs, now?s the time to make sure you?ve exhausted all those tax-free, use-it-or-lose-it dollars you squirreled away. Once you?ve spent those dollars, you?ll still need to file claims through your employer?s health plan to get reimbursed.
Know your deadlines ? For dependent care (such as child care or adult day care), the deadline to incur expenses or file claims is Dec. 31. For health care expenses, many employers offer a grace period through the first part of 2013. Check with your employer?s plan for deadlines.
Note that not everything you buy is reimbursable as a health care expense. For a detailed list, go to IRS.gov or your health care provider?s website.
Prepare the paper ? Now is a good time to start gathering the paperwork for filing your 2012 taxes. Even if it?s simply tossing it into a shoebox, start collecting proof of income (pay stubs, 1099s, W-2s) and proof of deductions/donations (charitable receipts, canceled checks, credit card statements, payroll deductions).
Whether you use a professional tax preparer or do your taxes yourself, getting organized now can ease headaches down the road.
Copyright 2012 The Salt Lake Tribune. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/money/55534960-79/care-taxes-2012-health.html.csp
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On coffee, death and making moments that make a life | The ...
?It?s a pleasure to be here with you. It?s a pleasure to be here. It?s a pleasure to be.?
That?s how Michael Fratkin starts his stirring TEDx talk about the lessons he?s learned as an end-of-life doctor.
Michael is an uncle of mine (well, removed by several marriages but I?m still going to claim him as family) who lives in Northern California with his wife and two young children. We met them for the first time at Thanksgiving last month, and just a few weeks later, he gave this wonderful speech about a subject that we might not like to talk about this time of year (or any other time of year, for that matter). But who among us doesn?t have a hint ? or more ? of sadness during this time of celebrating with families and thinking about getting a new start with a new year? 
One of the stories Michael shares is of his first encounter with death: a grandparent when he was six. I was just a few years older than that in 1994 when my great-grandmother Joyce (in the driver?s seat of that oversized motorcycle) died just a few days after Christmas. One of my last memories of her, or perhaps I should say moments with her, was her singing ?Santa Claus Is Coming To Town? as she lay dying from emphysema in her hospital bed. But she sang that song with a smile, which was of great comfort to my sister and I, who didn?t really know how to act when we saw her just a week or so later at the funeral home.
On the flip side, I remember the awkward feeling of relief when the whole family went to see ?Dumb and Dumber? just a few days after her funeral and we laughed so hard we cried. She was the kind of fiery-red headed-lady who would?have laughed so hard she cried, too.
Joyce was certainly a feminist before her time, but with that liberation came personal demons that she didn?t shake until later in life. I think she was probably the happiest when in 1974, she married a cowboy named Jack McKinley on horseback on his ranch in New Mexico. She was almost 60 by the, and so many of those first decades she chased pleasure and personal freedom at the expense of responsibility. When she got the opportunity in the 1950s to raise my dad, she jumped at the second chance. I?m sure he?d be the first to say that she wasn?t a perfect mom, but I know she was the one who instilled in him an appreciation for strong, even bull-headed women.
My sister and I (Chelsea is the dark-haired baby on the bottom) were lucky enough to get to know her a little before her time on this earth expired, and she is just one of the many people who came to mind when I heard Michael?s words on death, dying and life. (For the record, the only food-related memory I have of her is her love of coffee ? she drank coffee all day long ? buttered toast and the hamburger at Wayne?s, her favorite restaurant in Branson, where she lived. By that point in her life, she didn?t do much cooking, and she and her sister Pud and brother-in-law Bob would eat at that restaurant every single day for lunch.)
Please take a few minutes to watch his talk. I have a number of posts rolling around in my head from the past week I spent in Missouri with my sweet little boys, parents and grandmother, during which we laughed so hard we cried at least a handful of times. As I let those moment soak into my consciousness, I leave you with these questions of Michael?s that I really, really needed to hear:
?Is it true that there is never enough time? What is a whole life? How many moments make a life??
Source: http://thefeministkitchen.com/2012/12/29/on-coffee-death-and-making-moments-that-make-a-life/
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Senate renews warrantless surveillance act
2 hrs.
The U.S. Senate Friday voted?overwhelmingly in favor of keeping a?George W. Bush-era surveillance law that will allow continued warrantless surveillance of Americans for the next five years.
The Senate's 73-23 vote on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is an extension of the warrantless wiretapping law that grants legal immunity to telecommunications providers in order to continue to assist intelligence agencies with monitoring communications.
In addition to phone calls, text messages and emails may also be obtained by investigators for counterterrorism purposes, an easy assertion for law enforcement to make, Gizmodo reports.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet rights advocacy organization, claimed in a statement that the act "allows the government to get secret FISA court orders???orders that do not require probable cause like regular warrants???for any emails or phone calls going to and from overseas. The communications only have to deal with "foreign intelligence information," a broad term that can mean virtually anything. And one secret FISA order can be issued against groups or categories of people???potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of Americans at once."
"Incredibly, the Senate rejected all the proposed amendments that would have brought a modicum of transparency and oversight to the government's activities," the EFF said?Friday?after the vote.
The bill is now headed for President Obama's desk where he is expected to sign it. Although an identical bill elicited contentious debate in 2008, a different political climate made passage much easier now.
"This is the last opportunity for the next five years for the Congress to exercise a modest measure of real oversight over this intelligence surveillance law," Sen. Ron Wyden,?D-Oregon, told the press before the vote. "It is not real oversight when the United States Congress cannot get a yes or no answer to the question of whether an estimate currently exists as to whether law abiding Americans have had their phone calls and emails swept up under the FISA law."
Wyden had introduced an amendment to the bill that would have forced the National Security Agency?to disclose how many Americans had been affected by FISA. Since 2009 the agency has refused to share that information on the basis that it would violate the privacy of those affected.?
Copyright 2012?TechNewsDaily, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/senate-renews-warrantless-surveillance-act-1C7753034
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Saturday, December 29, 2012
Follow The Mobile Phone Trend Today | Katperu.com
Technologies used in each and every field associated with existence offers created this particular globe a worldwide town these days. Trips in between two nations that accustomed to consider times to obtain more than really are a issue associated with just a couple several hours right now due to superb transport amenities. Cell phones tend to be one among each one of these miracles associated with technology. Modern guy can?t picture existence without having cell phones. They?ve turn out to be part of each and every person?s existence. Be it the college heading kid or perhaps a simple auto-rickshaw puller, cell phones have discovered a location in most male?s wallet!
The actual price where cell phone providers possess advanced could not actually end up being considered a couple of years back again. A couple of years back again cell phone had been a tool designed to help to make or even obtain telephone calls more than an array of region. These days, this is as well as reason behind utilizing a mobile phone offers transformed hugely. It?s not nearly producing as well as getting telephone calls any longer. Cell phone businesses combined with the system businesses possess providers for example texting, MMS, e-mail, Access to the internet, short-range cellular marketing communications such as Wireless bluetooth, company programs, video gaming as well as pictures to provide. Texting that has turn out to be a fundamental element of each and every youngster?s existence these days is simply 1 support among all of the over.
Texting offers acquired enormous recognition through the years. It?s the most often utilized information software upon cell phones. The actual plan associated with free of charge texts within mass additional elevated the actual price where texts had been becoming delivered at first. Texts no more continued to be limited to trade associated with simple created communications however actually movies as well as pictures. A period arrived whenever communications delivered to a specific quantity had been proven upon tv some time later on. Using the recognition associated with texting surfaced the actual need to allow it to be much more fascinating. Ultimately, ready-made communications of kinds in most feasible ?languages? overloaded the actual marketplaces. These days, there?s a large assortment of ready-made brief communications for each event, event, occasion as well as cause. If the necessity end up being which of the birthday celebration text or even simple greatest wants to some good friend, there?s a information obtainable as pamphlets or even within the web for each feeling as well as event.
Cellular businesses possess created points actually simpler for that open public through presenting number of information providers such as Birthday celebration text, humor, diet plan text and much more that whenever triggered might provide the type of information required towards the client every single day for any 30 days. Consequently, one do not need to actually research the web or even the actual bookstore for any specific type of information! Just about all you must do is actually need and also the support is actually immediately.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Source: http://www.katperu.com/2012/12/follow-the-mobile-phone-trend-today/
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End-of-Year Tips for Boosting Financial Aid Offers - In - Your Guide ...
If you?re headed to college this fall, your family?s 2012 finances will play an important role in the financial aid offers you receive. As such, there are some important measures you should take before the end of the year to maximize your apparent financial need. Check out MyCollegeCalendar.org for more info.
Source: http://in.princetonreview.com/in/2012/12/end-of-year-tips-for-boosting-financial-aid-offers.html
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Factory of Life
Synthetic biologists reinvent nature with parts, circuits
By Alexandra Witze
Web edition: December 27, 2012
Print edition: January 12, 2013; Vol.183 #1 (p. 22)
Credit: Harry Campbell
Quietly, on the top floor of a nondescript commercial building overlooking Boston Harbor, the future is being born.
Rows of young scientists tap intently in front of computer monitors, their concentration unbroken even as the occasional plane from Logan Airport buzzes by. State-of-the-art lab equipment hums away in the background. This office, in Boston?s Marine Industrial Park, is what California?s Silicon Valley was four decades ago ? the vanguard of an industry that will change your life.
Just as researchers from Stanford provided the brains behind the semiconductor revolution, so are MIT and Harvard fueling the next big transformation. Students and faculty cross the Charles River not to build computer chips, but to re-engineer life itself.
Take Reshma Shetty, one of the young minds at work in the eighth-floor biological production facility. After receiving her doctorate at MIT in 2008, she, like many new graduates, decided she wanted to make her mark on the world. She got together with four colleagues, including her Ph.D. adviser Tom Knight, to establish a company that aims ?to make biology easy to engineer.?
Place an order with Ginkgo BioWorks and its researchers will make an organism to do whatever you want. Need to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? They can engineer the insides of a bacterium to do just that. Want clean, biologically based fuels to replace petroleum taken from the ground? Company scientists will design a microbe to poop those out.
Ginkgo is, in essence, a 21st century factory of life. The researchers working there specialize in synthetic biology, a field that seeks to build living things from the ground up. After envisioning what they want new organisms to do, Ginkgo biologists actually grow vials full of redesigned cells. ?We?re going from the place we used to be, in doing science and studying the natural world, to a place where we?re now going to be able to engineer and manipulate it,? says Shetty.
Synthetic biology was born a little more than a decade ago, an offshoot of traditional genetic engineering but distinct in its ambitions, precision and mind-set. Instead of randomly tweaking the genetic blueprints of living organisms and then working backward to identify a cell with a desirable trait, the new field offered the power of designing and building cells with novel functions. Its pioneers dreamed of making armies of organisms that could produce alternative fuels, churn out drugs to battle disease or fill every stomach on the planet by squeezing more food out of each crop acre.
Now, synthetic biologists have laid the groundwork for that radical new future, by building biology?s version of Silicon Valley. One research team has created a new and more complex set of biological building blocks that snap together like Legos, bringing large-scale production of engineered organisms closer to reality. Other scientists have hooked those parts up in a complex living analog of an electrical circuit and programmed it, much like programming a computer. Researchers are now writing code to make cells do things never before thought possible, like hunt down and kill cancer cells.
?This is not just ? oh, we?re going to go build something that?s able to make pieces of DNA better,? says Knight, one of the field?s top visionaries. ?This is ? we?re going to go create a technology infrastructure in the same way that the semiconductor infrastructure was developed.?
From scratch
In its early years, synthetic biology had a less practical, more daring public image. In part that was because of the involvement of J. Craig Venter, the motor?cycle-riding, globe-hopping, high-profile iconoclast of modern biology. In the 1990s he led a private effort to decipher the human genetic instruction manual, or genome, that competed with a publicly funded effort. More recently, he sailed his yacht around the world, scooping up water samples every 200 nautical miles to see what microbes were there.
LITTLE BIG PLAYERS
To carry out their synthetic feats, biologists typically turn to microbes that have short genetic instruction books and reproduce quickly. Organisms worthy of note include, clockwise from top left, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Salmonella, Mycoplasma genitalium and Escherichia coli.
Credit: Clockwise from top left: Masur/Wikimedia Commons; Janice Haney Carr/CDC; SPL/Science Source; Elapied/Wikimedia Commons
Venter also decided that he wanted to synthesize a living organism from scratch. Such a feat would involve stitching together a creature?s entire genome. DNA?s double helix is made of chains of paired molecules abbreviated as A, T, G and C; long stretches of these letters make up genes, the basic units of heredity. Genes contain the information needed to make proteins, which perform the lion?s share of work in a cell.
Commercial biotechnology companies can easily synthesize short strands of DNA, but putting those together into a full genome is an entirely different matter. So Venter turned to a set of bacteria known as Mycoplasma, which have some of the shortest known genomes (one species has just 580,000 pairs of genetic letters, compared with the 3 billion pairs in the human genome).
Venter?s team took commercially made strands of DNA, then joined them together in his lab using reactive enzymes. After many such steps, the scientists succeeded in fabricating the genome of one Mycoplasma species. The team then inserted the synthetic genome into a second species (which had had its own DNA removed), booting it up. The resulting organism, dubbed ?Synthia,? essentially cribbed lab-made DNA to run itself (SN: 6/19/10, p. 5).
Headlines predictably exploded. Life had been made from scratch ? sort of. Many synthetic biologists weren?t nearly as excited about Venter?s achievement as the media suggested. These critics point out that his group had simply built an organism to run off a program that already existed in nature; the team didn?t engineer Synthia to do anything new. The crucial difference in today?s synthetic biology, scientists say, is the ability to customize organisms from the start.
?We?re at the beginning of being able to design life in the way that we want,? says Pamela Silver, a biologist at Harvard Medical School and Harvard?s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
By design
Engineering new forms of life starts with setting up a biological assembly line, the living equivalent of a transportation innovation. Synthetic biologists aim to reinvent biology in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized automobile manufacturing. Instead of installing standardized spark plugs or carburetors as a car moves down the line, the scientists tuck brand-new biological parts into the body of a bacterium.
To do so, researchers first have to identify distinct, easily defined parts within a cell ? biological versions of wheels, hoods, dashboards, engines and so on. Such parts need to be useful in any design, like a power steering pump that works on both a Taurus and a Focus. The parts also need to be standardized so that those made at one factory work with those made at another.
Drew Endy, a synthetic biology pioneer at Stanford, likes to tell the story of William Sellers, who in 1864 argued for the standardization of nuts and bolts so that a wrench made in Wilkes-Barre would fit a nut made in Nashville. Until then mechanics had been working with custom-built hardware. In a lecture at Philadelphia?s Franklin Institute, Sellers called for the country to adopt his new screw design. The standardized, easily measurable shape of its threads would also apply to nuts and bolts, allowing industry to develop a cheap and profitable way to mass manufacture machine shop hardware. Industry agreed, and within just a few years the Sellers screw took off.
Similarly, scientists are now compiling their own list of biological parts like the Sellers screw. Most parts are stretches of genetic material, much shorter than a gene, that trigger some particular process to turn on or off. A part known as a promoter, for instance, starts the conversion of DNA information into its counterpart, the RNA molecule, while a terminator part stops the action. Many of the parts are proteins known as transcription factors, which hook onto DNA to help control how cells work and respond to their environment.
Scientists make parts by building a stretch of DNA or RNA known to perform a desired job, then adding a standardized string of letters at the beginning and the end to identify it as a part. They then insert the whole thing into a circular strand of DNA until they need it. In 2003, MIT biologists started keeping a formal inventory of these biological parts. Many are added by students who spend summers working on a synthetic biology competition, the International Genetically Engineered Machine contest, or iGEM. Today the list of parts tops 20,000.
BUILDING COMPLEXITY
Redesigning organisms to do people?s bidding requires biological parts that can mix and match to create genetic circuits. Like electrical circuits, these genetic versions perform a useful task or computation and can be combined into more complex systems.
Credit: T.S. Moon et al/Nature 2012, adapted by E. Feliciano
Even that roster is too small for some. In his office at Boston University, bioengineer James Collins practically bounces in his chair as he complains about the quality and quantity of most parts. ?We just don?t have enough parts to do what we?d like,? he says. ?If you survey the original parts out there, we usually use only a dozen or so.?
Collins wants more. Most synthetic transcription factors are designed after versions found in bacteria like Escherichia coli. Collins? team recently looked instead at yeast cells. Yeast are more complex than bacteria; if engineers could build more parts inspired by yeast, they could use those to create more advanced designs. Working with colleagues including MIT?s Timothy Lu, Collins developed a system to make new transcription factors, and made 19 new ones to start with. ?Instead of relying on this small number of things arrived at in nature, we now have a very nice platform that allows you to ramp up and create transcription factors by design, in large numbers,? Collins says. The work appeared last August in Cell.
Cells wired up
Once synthetic biologists have enough parts to work with, the next question is what to do with them. Here, bioengineers take their cue from electrical engineers. Individual biological parts are like the transistors, resistors and capacitors that electrical engineers connect together with wires to create a circuit through which current flows. Circuits can then be connected together on a semiconductor chip to perform computing tasks.
Biologists first reported making synthetic genetic circuits in 2000, when two E. coli papers appeared in the same issue of Nature. In one, a team led by Collins announced the first artificial toggle switch in bacteria; the scientists designed two promoters to interact and drive gene activity if prompted by one molecular signal, and to stop when prompted again.
In the second paper, Stanislas Leibler and Michael Elowitz, then at Princeton, described a synthetic timing switch, in which three genes inhibited one another in sequence, their activity cycling regularly.
These first papers were necessarily clumsy attempts to emulate what nature does effortlessly. But with genetic circuits that accomplished particular tasks, researchers could go one step further: They could connect those circuits with other components, just as electrical engineers do on a computer chip, and program the whole contraption to perform an even more elaborate job.
Across the Charles River from Ginkgo, on the second floor of a gleaming biotechnology building, sits one major hub where biological parts are being turned into sophisticated machinery. This is MIT?s synthetic biology center. Being MIT, it is full of engineers with novel and creative ways to think about programming ? even when that programming involves DNA-based circuits rather than electrical ones.
One such tinkerer is Christopher Voigt, whose round face and easygoing manner belie the fact that he commands living organisms to do his bidding. Voigt, a former computer programmer, got into synthetic biology because he saw it as the last frontier. ?Being able to write a language that programs E. coli to perform a set of operations is the most challenging problem,? he says.
At first, it wasn?t clear that the dream of programming life would be possible. For most of the 2000s, synthetic biology fought a reputation as being not much more than a bag of parlor tricks. Students working on iGEM teams designed cute proof-of-principle projects, like engineering E. coli to darken in ?bacterial photographs? or to smell like wintergreen or banana. It seemed that scientists were connecting and reconnecting biological parts, but not in any kind of profound or truly useful way.
That paradigm is now beginning to shift, Voigt says, as researchers develop more reliable parts and, crucially, many more ways in which to wire them together. Instead of using the same few parts and circuits over and over again, programmers like him now have far more sophisticated designs. ?We?re getting to an inflection point,? he says. ?Finally.?
Many electrical engineers, including Ginkgo BioWorks? Tom Knight, have moved to the field of synthetic biology.
Credit: Francis Lee
Last year, for instance, Voigt?s research group reported re-creating the main pathway through which bacteria convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia. By replacing natural parts with synthetic ones, the scientists essentially adapted the genetic programming guiding the job. The system involved 94 biological parts ? a scale of engineering unheard of until recently, Voigt says.
Going one step further to original design, Voigt and his colleagues recently built the largest synthetic genetic circuit to date, described in Nature in November. It involves four sensors, each of which can detect a particular input from the environment. One sensor may detect oxygen levels in a cell, for example, while a second sniffs for glucose. Combining those inputs and others prompts the cell to decide whether to take a particular action.
Voigt and his colleagues hope to use these types of circuits in industrial fermentation vats, so that bacteria inside the vats can sense multiple ways in which the environment changes and adjust activity accordingly. ?Some of the very basic circuits are already used in biotechnology, to turn on the production of protein as much as you possibly can,? says Voigt. ?But if you?re trying to make materials or chemicals like natural products, that requires a lot more sophistication in terms of timing when things happen.?
Put enough circuits together and program them in the right way, and synthetic biology may soon become a lot more personal. Just as the earliest clunky computers eventually gave way to the iPhone in your back pocket, designer cells might one day become an everyday part of your life. They might even course through your veins ? if Ron Weiss has his way.
Weiss works just down the hallway from Voigt at MIT. He began his graduate student career in typical fashion, using computer programs to simulate biological changes in a developing embryo. But then something clicked in his brain. ?I remember the day when I thought, let me flip this around,? he says. ?Let?s look at what I know in computing and understand how I can program biology.? Then his advisers told him he was too close to getting his Ph.D. to start going down such crazy paths.
Weiss wasn?t going to drop his doctoral quest, but he walked over to Knight?s office and asked to join the budding synthetic biology research group there instead. After many 16-hour days teaching himself how to string together DNA, Weiss changed his focus from engineering to synthetic biology.
Now, in a sort of biological hit job, Weiss? team has engineered assassin cells to track down and annihilate cancerous cells. The scientists, including Yaakov Benenson formerly of Harvard and now at ETH Z?rich, programmed a synthetic circuit that can sense levels of chemicals often found in cancer cells. The circuit also includes a kill switch, a synthetic version of a gene carrying information that can make other cells commit suicide.
Cells carrying this circuit search for cells that are turning cancerous. Once there, the assassin cells flip the kill switch and cause the cancerous ones to off themselves.
In a 2011 Science paper, Weiss? team showed that this killer circuit could work in human cells in a lab dish. But there?s a long way to go before it could treat cancer in people. Scientists need to find a way to deliver the assassin payload into the body. ?We need something like a virus that would go into cells and then compute whether each cell is cancerous or not,? Weiss says. His team is now working to harness a virus that could be used to test the idea in mice. If it works, doctors might eventually be able to inject assassin circuitry into a person suffering from cancer.
Weiss also has his eye on fighting several other important diseases. Diabetes, for instance, can require a person to regularly inject insulin, but Weiss thinks that engineered cells might be able to do that job from within the body. In early theoretical work, his team showed how synthetic gene circuits could steer stem cells to develop into insulin-producing cells. Adding synthetic switches could nudge the insulin production process in one direction or another as needed, the team reported last July in PLOS Computational Biology. The cells could reproduce over and over again, and then die when no longer needed.
Picking up the pace
A medical breakthrough was, in fact, one of synthetic biology?s first major industrial successes: a bioengineered version of artemisinin, a malaria-fighting drug that once had to be laboriously and expensively harvested from the wormwood tree of east Asia. In 2006, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Amyris Biotechnologies in Emeryville, Calif., reported that they had engineered baker?s yeast to churn out a crucial precursor to the drug. The scientists teamed up with the pharmaceutical company Sanofi to scale up the process and make the drug in its laboratories. Sanofi is in the early stages of shipping the first commercial artemisinin made using synthetic biology.
Researchers haven?t been as successful with another of synthetic biology?s lofty original goals ? to help solve the energy crisis. One early and much-touted promise was that scientists could insert synthetic genes into an organism?s DNA to make it secrete biodiesel or other petroleum alternatives. Some companies, including Ginkgo, are still working on this challenge. But many of the highest profile projects, like those that engineered algae to pump out bio?fuels, simply haven?t panned out. In most cases, fuel made by synthetically altered organisms can?t compete economically with regular petroleum products.
Most synthetic biologists see this setback as a bump in the road rather than a major derailment for the field. Harvard?s Silver, for instance, has shifted from working on synthetic biology approaches for clean-burning hydrogen fuel to new ways to re-engineer photosynthesis within plants.
Once a molecular biologist, Silver shifted to synthetic biology in the early 2000s so that she could tackle scientific questions no one else could. ?The idea of building with biology struck me as very exciting,? she says. Today she oversees one of the largest and most productive synthetic biology research teams, a warren of lab benches and graduate students on Harvard Med?s campus in Boston. Among other efforts, she has developed synthetic genetic counting devices, to keep track of exposures to things like radiation within a cell.
For Silver, synthetic biology is all about accelerating the pace of practical advances. ?Biology needs to move faster so that people cheer when something great happens,? she says.
Though it may still lag behind some scientists? ambitions, there?s no question the field is progressing rapidly. Time and again, researchers have invented new methods for assembling synthetic parts and genetic circuits cheaper, faster and more easily than before.
In 2009, scientists working for Venter came up with a new way of stitching together different biological parts by using DNA strands with overlapping letter sequences on their ends. Biologists can easily add the matching sequences to any parts they want to link, then stir in some enzymes and, voil?, assembly. The method, invented by Daniel Gibson, has caught on quickly because it lets scientists patch together more than a dozen DNA strands at once. Just a year after its invention, Gibson assembly inspired a devotional YouTube video from an iGEM student team. Today it is used in nearly every synthetic biology lab.
And at Harvard, biologist George Church devised a technique that makes multiple changes to an organism?s genome at a time. MAGE (for multiplex automated genomic engineering) is like a genetics editor on speed; it zips through, finding and tweaking DNA automatically so that researchers can add various synthetic components at once and test what they do. In 2011, Church and colleagues founded a company, Warp Drive Bio in Cambridge, to use a version of this superfast technique to hunt for potential new drugs in natural compounds.
The market for synthetic biology products is still quite small, and one of Church?s earlier start-ups failed after trying to do too much too fast. But he and other visionaries are convinced that synthetic biology will be big. Huge, in fact ? as huge as the Internet.
And they should know. Several scientists pushing the field forward today are former electrical engineers who helped develop key components of what became the Internet, such as its ARPANET predecessor.
?The Internet disrupted the world ? it was unleashing a completely different aspect of nature,? says MIT?s Randy Rettberg, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems who now runs the iGEM competition. So, too, will synthetic biology, by telling biological matter precisely how to behave. ?First we had the industrial revolution, then we had the network revolution,? says Rettberg, ?and now we have the matter revolution.?
Rettberg thinks that synthetic biology?s full impact, like that of the Internet, will take decades to emerge. ?We?re only about 10 years into it; it took about 25 years from ARPANET until you had the beginning of the World Wide Web,? he says. ?And although the Internet took a very long time, its impact was dramatically bigger than everybody but the visionaries imagined.?
It?s hard not to get caught up in Rettberg?s enthusiasm as he bustles about the iGEM offices in Cambridge, proudly introducing students who help box up test tubes full of biological parts and mail them out to competitors. This is a man who charted out the final phase of his scientific career on graph paper to see if he had enough time left to learn something completely new. Then he taught himself synthetic biology.
As did Rettberg?s longtime friend Knight, also a former electrical engineer. Knight now spends most of his time at Ginkgo?s offices, where his business card reads simply ?DNA Hacker.? As automated machines whir in lab space across the hall, testing what freshly engineered organisms can do, Knight dreams up new designs for Ginkgo to try. Just as he once dreamed up what would become some of the first single-user computer work?stations.
?I knew this was the exciting thing to go do,? he says. ?What does it take to make the next Intel? I am actually interested in making that work.?Solving hunger
Synthetic biology may help farmers feed more people. For millennia, crops have been bred with an eye toward improved harvests. Later, genetic manipulations upped plant yields and made crops more resilient against drought and other hazards. Now, scientists are looking at tweaking photosynthesis. ?You don?t need to increase the biomass of plants by that much to solve the food problems across the world,? says Harvard?s Pamela Silver. One idea is that new enzymes could boost the amount of energy that plants can extract from the sun. Another suggests there might be a totally different way to pull usable carbon from the atmosphere. In the April 2012 Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Silver and colleagues reported engineering a bacterium to churn out up to 200 percent of its initial cellular mass as sugar. The work could be used to develop plants that produce more food per harvest.
Making energy
An early hope for synthetic biology was that it could wean society off fossil fuels. Engineering microbes to churn out hydrocarbons would presumably be a lot cleaner and more climate-friendly than extracting and burning coal and oil. Since 2000, the U.S. Department of Energy has poured millions of dollars into funding synthetic biology biofuels research, such as new types of algae to secrete biodiesel or other engineered fuels that don?t have to be pumped from the ground. So far, progress has been limited.
Treating patients
One of the most obvious goals of synthetic biology is to make people healthier. Engineering new drugs, or designing cells that can target disease inside the body, has been a goal of the field from the start. An early success involved creating a bioengineered version of a drug to fight malaria. Researchers managed to engineer a species of yeast to produce large amounts of a chemical precursor to the anti?malarial drug artemisinin, typically harvested from the wormwood tree of east Asia. The pharmaceutical company Sanofi is now working to bring the process to market. In another take on better health, engineered human cells could locate and eliminate cancerous cells by tricking the evil?doers into committing suicide. Though the technique has been demonstrated in a lab dish, it is still far from tackling cancer in real human patients.
Reviews give green light, encourage caution
Engineering life is not the sort of thing you can do quietly.
Ever since biologists first started piecing together genetic components, ethicists have pondered the implications. Could an artificial form of life turn out to have unexpected consequences, like invading the environment or otherwise running amok? And what about bioterrorists who might want to get their hands on synthetic bugs and put them to nefarious uses?
A March 2012 report from Friends of the Earth, the International Center for Technology Assessment, and the ETC Group ??nongovernment organizations that have worked against genetically modified organisms, among other causes ??calls synthetic biology ?an extreme form of genetic engineering? that is ?developing rapidly with little oversight or regulation despite carrying vast uncertainty.? Not since the 1990s? birth of nanotechnology, the engineering of the very small, has a new technology elicited such ire.
Nearly every major safety review of synthetic biology, though, has given the field a cautious green light. A 2010 government review, requested by President Obama after Craig Venter booted up a cell with a synthetic genome, suggested there was no need to create a new government body to oversee synthetic biology research. Rather, the report?s authors promoted the idea of ?prudent vigilance? ??paying attention to what?s happening in the field without regulating it out of existence from the start. ?With these unprecedented achievements comes an obligation to consider carefully both the promise and potential perils that they could realize,? the report said.
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., has also started a scorecard for tracking public discussions about synthetic biology. An update last July found that many U.S. federal agencies had begun taking steps to learn more about the field, as recommended by the presidential report. Still, the center says, more work is needed. ?Alexandra Witze
Cleaning up
Microbes are already used at oil spill sites, eating petroleum components and converting them into less hazardous by-products. Designing synthetic versions that can do the job quicker, and perhaps break down more stubborn pollutants such as pesticides and radioactive waste, would be a logical next step. Researchers at Spain?s National Center for Biotechnology have designed circuits capable of redirecting microbes to feast on industrial chemicals instead of sugar.
Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/347263/title/Factory_of_Life
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Astronaut's song marks a space milestone
Call him the space guitar hero: An astronaut living in orbit has penned a musical ode to Earth in what he's billing as the first original song recorded on the International Space Station.
The song, called "Jewel in the Night," is a holiday-themed tune recorded by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield just days after arriving at the space station last week, just in time for Christmas.
Hadfield and two crewmates docked at the space station on Dec. 21. He recorded the tune two days later, and then posted it online on Christmas Eve via YouTube, Twitter and soundcloud.com.
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"Here's some of the first original music written for and performed on the international space station," Hadfield wrote on Twitter, where he is chronicling his spaceflight under the name @Cmdr_Hadfield. [Hear the Song: 'Jewel in the Night' Video]
Hadfield performed "Jewel in the Night" on a Larriv?e Parlor acoustic guitar (made in Vancouver) that has been aboard the space station for years. The tune has a folk song feel and starts off:
So bright, jewel in the night, there in my window below.
So bright, dark as the night, with all of our cities aglow.
It's long been our way to honor this day, and offer goodwill to men.
And though, wherever we go, it's come round to Christmas again.
Hadfield, 53, is a veteran astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency and currently serves as a flight engineer with the station's current Expedition 34 crew. He will be the first Canadian space station commander when he takes charge of the outpost's Expedition 35 phase next year.
Music has a special place in Hadfield's heart and is among his passions. Before launch, he had a special guitar pick made to resemble his Expedition 35 mission patch.
"I play guitar in a couple bands and sing. I've fronted bands here in Houston for 20 years, and it's just a natural extension for me to play music no matter where I am, whether it's at Star City or Tsukuba, Japan, or on board the space station; I played guitar on board Mir when I was there back in 1995," Hadfield said in a preflight NASA interview. "I thought, since I'm there long enough, why not write music about the experience of traveling in space."
Hadfield said that early pioneers, sailors and miners all created songs about the exploration of new frontiers on Earth. So it is only natural for the tradition to continue as humanity expands into the cosmos.
Since arriving at the International Space Station this month, Hadfield has posted several photos of the guitar he is using and himself playing music in space. On Christmas Day, he strummed the guitar as his five Expedition 34 crewmates (two Americans and three Russians) serenaded Mission Control flight controllers with traditional Christmas carols.
"I'm not by any means the world's best musician, but I love it and I?ve had lots of people to play music with," said Hadfield, who will return to Earth in May 2013. "To be able to do that on space station is fairly new in the human experience and I want to make the most of it."
You can follow SPACE.com Managing Editor Tariq Malik on Twitter@tariqjmalik. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter@Spacedotcomand onFacebook.
? 2012 Space.com. All rights reserved. More from Space.com.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/50312832/ns/technology_and_science-space/
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Friday, December 28, 2012
Top 5 Devices for Streaming Cable Television | Business 2 Community
In the past few years, there has been a massive influx of people migrating away from the longtime standard of conforming to the network programming schedules and instead making their own schedules. And not through some sort of fancy device to record and watch later, but through the new sensation known as internet video streaming.
Internet streaming essentially allows for people to watch any video, relatively instantly, at any time. Much like the way sites like Youtube work, a user will visit a site, search up their favorite show, click play, and enjoy.
However, there are of course two camps that are involved with internet streaming; paid for and free. Sites like Hulu.com among others offer both free and paid for programming which, is as it sounds, offers shows to watch for free with limited commercial interruption, or offer more premium shows for a cost.
In the paid realm of streaming, like what is offered on Amazon or iTunes, the content is all properly licensed and offers the best audio and video quality, but charges money per show or movie. Site like these also offer just about every single television show and movie that ever gets released in theaters, released on DVD, or shown on television. They have literally just about every show ever made.
So after taking the plunge and deciding to get into internet streaming instead of standard television viewing, the big question is how to view your shows and movies over the internet. Fortunately there are some very easy and cheap ways to do so, some of which utilize the television you already own. The only thing extra you need to get is to make sure you have an internet service that is fast enough to handle the required download speeds.
So to make matters easier, here is a list of the top 5 household devices that can be used for internet video streaming.
1.?iPad and iPad mini
The iPad, recently released as generation 4, and its newest little brother, the iPad mini, are currently the two most flexible devices when it comes to streaming videos. They both offer amazing resolutions and fast connections speeds that allow for very enjoyable viewing. But the most significant detail about the iPads is that they are mobile. They can be taken anywhere in the house and, with the proper cellular data package, anywhere where there is coverage and be able to watch all of your Hulu, Hulu Plus, Amazon, Netflix, and iTunes content.? ? ? ?
2. Mac Mini and Apple TV
The Apple Mac Mini and Apple TV are the best devices to be connected to your current television setup for two very important reasons. The first is the size and connectivity; both products are very small, sleek, and unobtrusive, and have fantastic connection ports with either HDMI on some models or Apple?s Thunderbolt connection on others, both boasting the best screen resolution in the business. The second reason is because of the price and access to Apple iTunes content. The prices for each are much below the cost for a machine with the same specs from a competitor. As a full-fledged computer of the mini or the video only of the Apple TV, both are home theater masters when it comes to accessing online content from Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix.
3.?Roku 2 XS
The Roku 2 XS box is the much anticipated update to the very surprisingly good and successful original Roku box. The Roku is a set-top box that connects to your television and grants access to content from Netflix and Amazon. It offers full HDMI video out and is the smallest of all set-top boxes. While the content offered is not as expansive as that offered by Apple TV, it is quite comparable, for roughly the same price. This is a good option for those who have not yet invested anything into the iTunes market.
4.?Xbox 360 and PS3
In addition to being the currently best gaming consoles on the market, the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 offer connectivity to content from Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu Plus as well as exclusive content available on each of their respective networks. Despite being one of the more expensive ?set-top? boxes, they do offer more utility in the form of classic video game platforms. However, these are only recommended for those who can dedicate the appropriate time to enjoy the game playing functions seeing how they are 2 to 3 times as expensive as a standalone video streaming box.
5.?Other personal computer
Almost any personal computer of any make or model can be used to stream internet videos. However, depending on the hardware configuration, it may or may not be possible to enjoy them on the main television in your home. Instead, most computers are stuck with only being able to watch on the monitor that is attached to them. But regardless of what your computer is connected to, any computer with a fast enough internet connection can connect to any streaming network like Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, etc. and watch all that they have to offer.
Television lover and guru of all things Cable, <a href=?https://plus.google.com/u/7/100284266444454185551/about/p/pub?> Jack Pike</a> spends his time blogging for <a href=?https://www.timewarnercableoffers.com/?>Time Warner Cable Offers</a> when not enjoying the tube?. View?full?profile
Source: http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/top-5-devices-for-streaming-cable-television-0364587
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Audiogalaxy music app will shut down entirely January 31st, as its team joins Dropbox
When music streaming app Audiogalaxy announced its acquisition by Dropbox earlier this month and closed signups we feared the worst, and now it's been confirmed: the service is shutting down entirely on January 31st, 2013. It had previously announced subscribers would have access to their mixes until the end of this month, but after another month they'll have to move to a service like Google Play Music, or possibly self hosting with Subsonic or something similar. The original blog post mentioned a desire to bring "great new experiences" to Dropbox's 100 million plus users so we may see some of those features again, soon. As for the service itself, Founder Michael Merhej relaunched it just over two years ago after version 1.0 -- a web-based music file sharing service that eclipsed its competitors during its run from 1998 to 2002 -- was squeezed out by RIAA pressure, so we figure anything is possible in the future.
Filed under: Software
Source: Audiogalaxy (Facebook)
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/28/audiogalaxy-music-app-will-shut-down-services-entirely-january-3/
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