AFP - Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer on Tuesday unveiled his company's line of Windows smartphones in an offensive against Apple's iPhone and Google's Android system.
   
Around 30 types of "Windows phones" with various designs will be available by the end of the year in more than 20 countries.
   
Seven phone-makers, including Sony, Samsung and Toshiba, and 16 operators including Orange, Vodafone and T-Mobile, are involved in the launch.
   
The phones, which combine the ability to make calls, surf the Internet and view videos, carry Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system.
   
"We have done a lot of work on the user interface, we simplified the user interface," Ballmer told a news conference at Microsoft's new French headquarters near Paris in Issy-les-Moulineaux.
   
"We have taken the Internet Explorer browser technologies, and we rebuilt them for the first time for these Windows phones. So you can get the same experience on these phones that you will get on your windows PC," he said.
   
The new mobile operating system was launched simultaneously in France and New York on Tuesday.
   
With Tuesday's launch Microsoft hopes to reassert itself on the smartphone market, where it has lost ground. The sector is considered especially promising, with 29 percent jump in sales expected this year.
   
But in the second quarter only 9.0 percent of all smartphones sold were equipped with Microsoft's operating system, against 12 percent a year earlier, according to the Gartner research group.
   
At the same time, Apple's iPhone has seen its share jump from 2.8 to 13.3 percent.
   
Google, which launched its Android system in early 2008 and is provided free to phone-makers, managed to secure a share of almost 2.0 percent in a few months and could gain further ground in the fourth quarter this year.

AFP - Microsoft on Monday blocked access to thousands of Hotmail accounts in response to hackers plundering password information and posting it online.
   
Cyber-crooks evidently used "phishing" tactics to dupe users of Microsoft's free Web-based email service into revealing account and access information, according to the US technology giant.
   
"We are aware that some Windows Live Hotmail customers' credentials were acquired illegally by a phishing scheme and exposed on a website," Microsoft said in response to an AFP inquiry.
   
"We have taken measures to block access to all of the accounts that were exposed and have resources in place to help those users reclaim their accounts."
   
Microsoft said it learned of the problem during the weekend after Hotmail account information of "several thousand" users, many of them reportedly in Europe, was posted at a website.
   
Phishing is an Internet bane and involves using what hackers refer to as "social engineering" to trick people into revealing information online or downloading malicious software onto computers.
   
Phishing tactics include sending people tainted email attachments that promise enticing content such as sexy photos of celebrities and luring people to bogus log-in pages that are convincing replicas of legitimate websites.
   
"This was not a breach of internal Microsoft data," the Redmond, Washington-based technology firm said.
   
"Phishing is an industry-wide problem ... exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments and links from both known and unknown sources, and install and regularly update anti-virus software."
   
Microsoft is also advising Hotmail users to change their account passwords every 90 days.

AFP - The fountain of youth may exist after all, as a study showed Thursday that scientists have discovered means to extend the lifespan of mice and primates.
   
The key to eternal - or at least prolonged - youth lies in genetic manipulation that mimics the health benefits of reducing calorie intake, suggesting that aging and age-related diseases can be treated.
   
Scientists from the Institute of Healthy Ageing at University College London (UCL) extended the lifespan of mice by up to a fifth and reduced the number of age-related diseases affecting the animals after they genetically manipulated them to block production of the S6 Kinase 1 (S6K1) protein.
   
Scientists have shown since the 1930s that reducing the calorie intake by 30 percent for rats, mice and -- in a more recent finding -- primates can extend their lifespan by 40 percent and have health benefits.
   
By blocking S6K1, which is involved in the body's response to changes in food intake, similar benefits were obtained without reducing food intake, according to the study published in the US journal Science.
   
The results corroborated those of other recent studies.
   
"Blocking the action of the S6K1 protein helps prevent a number of age-related conditions in female mice," explained UCL professor Dominic Withers, the study's lead author.
   
"The mice lived longer and were leaner, more active and generally healthier than the control group. We added 'life to their years' as well as 'years to their lives.'"
   
The genetically altered female mice lived 20 percent longer -- living a total of 950 days -- or over 160 days more than their normal counterparts.
   
At age 600 days, the equivalent of middle age in humans, the altered female mice were leaner, had stronger bones, were protected from type 2 diabetes, performed better at motor tasks and demonstrated better senses and cognition, according to the study.
   
Their T-cells, a key component of the immune system also seemed more "youthful," the researchers said, which points to a slowing of the declining immunity that usually accompanies aging.
   
Male mice showed little difference in lifespan although they also demonstrated some of the health benefits, including less resistance to insulin and healthier T-cells. Researchers said reasons for the differences between the two sexes were unclear.
   
"We are suddenly much closer to treatments for aging than we thought," said David Gems of UCL's Institute of Healthy Aging, one of the authors of the study, which was primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust.
   
"We have moved from initial findings in worm models to having 'druggable' targets in mice. The next logical step is to see if drugs like metformin can slow the aging process in humans."
   
Other studies have also found that blocking S6K1 were channeled through increased activity of a second molecule, AMPK, which regulates energy levels within cells.
   
AMPK, also known as a master "fuel gauge," is activated when cellular energy levels fall, as takes place when calorie intake is reduced.
   
Drugs, such as the widely-used metformin, that activate AMPK are already being used in human patients to treat type 2 diabetes.
   
Recent studies by Russian scientists suggested that metformin can extend mice's lifespan.
   
Another drug, rapamycin, was found to extend the lifespan of mice, according to a study published in the British journal Nature.
   
As rapamycin is already used in humans as an immunosuppresant -- to prevent a patient from rejecting an organ after transplant -- it could not be administered as an anti-ageing drug in its current form.
   
But rapamycin blocks S6K1 activity and could thus extend lifespan through its impact on S6K1.
   
Seizing on the potential, US firm Sirtris Pharmaceuticals uses resveratrol, a powerful anti-oxidant found in red wine, as well as other fruits than raisin.
   
Sirtris scientists -- including co-founder David Sinclair, also a researcher at Harvard Medical School -- have found that resveratrol activates the production of sirtuin proteins, which also unleash the same physiological effects as reducing calorie intake.
   
Sirtris has produced highly concentrated doses of resveratrol and is currently leading clinical trials with diabetes patients and others suffering from liver and colon cancer.
   
 

REUTERS - A teenage British girl died after receiving a cervical cancer vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline, but a link between the death and the drug has not yet been established, health officials said on Monday.

The 14-year-old fell ill after she was given the Cervarix vaccination against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV) at her school in Coventry, central England, as part of a national immunization program. She later died in a hospital.

"The incident happened shortly after the girl had received her HPV vaccine in the school," Dr. Caron Grainger, joint director for Public Health for NHS (National Health Service) Coventry and Coventry City Council, said in a statement.

"No link can be made between the death and the vaccine until all the facts are known and a post mortem takes place," Grainger said. "We are conducting an urgent and full investigation into the events surrounding this tragedy."

Glaxo said it was working with the Department of Health and MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) to better understand the case.

"At this stage the exact cause of this tragic death is unknown," Glaxo medical director Dr. Pim Kon said in a statement.

"As a precautionary measure, the batch of vaccine involved has been quarantined until the situation is fully understood," Kon added.

News of the death comes on the eve of a possible decision by U.S. health regulators on whether to approve Cervarix for sale in the United States. However, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration often lets its expected action dates pass without a decision, or announces a delay.

A small number of other girls at the school reported mild symptoms such as dizziness and nausea but were not admitted to a hospital, health officials said.

GlaxoSmithKline, based in Brentford, Middlesex, said more than 1.4 million doses of Cervarix had been given as part of the national immunization program.

It said adverse reactions reported so far had related to signs and symptoms of recognized side effects, or were due to the injection and not the vaccine itself.

Cervarix is administered in three separate shots over six months.

Should it gain U.S. approval it would compete with Merck & Co's Gardasil, which has been in the market in the United States since 2006 and had sales of $268 million in the second quarter.

REUTERS - Three separate missions examining the moon have found clear evidence of water there, apparently concentrated at the poles and possibly formed by the solar wind.

The reports, to be published in the journal Science on Friday, show the water may be actively moving around, forming and reforming as particles mixed up in the dust on the surface of the moon.

Carle Pieters of Brown University in Rhode Island and colleagues reviewed data from India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission—

India’s first mission to the moon—and found spectrographic evidence of water. The water seems thicker closer to the poles, they reported.

“When we say ‘water on the moon,’ we are not talking about lakes, oceans or even puddles. Water on the moon means molecules of water and hydroxyl (hydrogen and oxygen) that interact with molecules of rock and dust specifically in the top millimeters of the moon’s surface,” Pieters said in a statement.

Jessica Sunshine of the University of Maryland and colleagues used infrared mapping from the Deep Impact spacecraft to show water all over the moon, while Roger Clark of the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues used a spectrometer—which breaks down light waves to analyze elements and chemicals reflecting them—from the Cassini spacecraft to identify water.

“These reports of lunar surface water coincide with intense interest in water at the poles of the Moon,” Paul Lucey of the University of Hawaii, who was not involved in the research, wrote in a commentary.

“There may be much ‘wetter’ regions to be discovered far from the sites that have been sampled to date,” Lucey added.

“It is also possible that rare water-bearing minerals previously observed in lunar samples, but argued to be terrestrial contamination, might be indigenous. Perhaps the most valuable result of these new observations is that they prompt a critical reexamination of the notion that the Moon is dry. It is not.”

Next month, NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite or LCROSS mission will try to detect water by deliberately crashing a large spacecraft onto the moon.

As around 100 world leaders gather at the United Nations for a one-day summit on global warming on Tuesday, hopes are high that stalled negotiations on limiting greenhouse gas emissions will get a jump-start in New York.   

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for global leaders to meet ahead of the UN’s high-stakes Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December, where a successor to the landmark Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012, will be inaugurated.

“I hope world leaders will leave the summit ready to give their negotiating teams the green light and specific guidance needed to accelerate progress on the road to Copenhagen,” Ban said in a statement. 

Hope for action in Beijing, Washington

Foot-dragging on the part of China and the United States, the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters, has been one of the main obstacles to a meaningful agreement on climate change. But delegates are hoping that the UN summit is about to change all that.

Signalling a break with the policies of the previous administration, Obama pledged that the US had “put climate change at the top of our diplomatic agenda”.

“We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act. And we will meet our responsibility to future generations,” he told the assembly. 

Chinese President Hu Jintao, whose country has repeatedly refused to introduce emissions caps, said Beijing would instead peg cuts in carbon dioxide emissions to gross domestic product (GDP).

"We will endeavour to cut carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by a notable margin by 2020 from the 2005 level," Hu told the summit.

The European Union has already agreed to lower greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Elvire Fabry, a research fellow at Notre Europe, tells FRANCE 24 that the bloc has indicated a willingness to increase this to 30 percent if a deal can be struck in Copenhagen. 

“That means, basically, if the United States and China come on board,” she explains.  

But Fabry says Washington’s history of stalled action on the environment may make Obama's new goals difficult to meet. “The issue with the United States is that, because [it] never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, [it] is lagging behind,” Fabry says. 

For now, she says, it will be difficult for Washington to commit to the types of concrete targets that the EU is asking for. The US is currently looking at cutting emissions by only 4 to 5 percent of 2000 levels.

A rich-poor divide on climate change

Another major sticking point will be finding climate change regulations that both wealthy nations and the developing world can agree on. Developing nations are all too aware that their economic progress could be hampered by environmental restrictions – restrictions aimed at fixing problems that were caused by the richer nations’ unfettered development in past decades. China has been a vocal proponent of this view, arguing that the developing world should not pay for the first world’s past progress.

Anticipating such arguments, Obama told Tuesday’s assembly: “We also cannot allow the old divisions that have characterised the climate debate for so many years to block our progress.”

“Yes, the developed nations that caused much of the damage to our climate over the last century still have a responsibility to lead,” Obama said, going on to enumerate some of the projects now under consideration. “…But those rapidly growing developing nations that will produce nearly all the growth in global carbon emissions in the decades ahead must do their part as well,” he said.

While Hu’s remarks at the UN included new pledges to act on emissions control, he also reiterated the view that the larger burden to take concrete steps falls on the developed world.

"Developed countries should fulfill the task of emission reduction set in the Kyoto Protocol, continue to undertake substantial mid-term quantified emission reduction targets and support developing countries in countering climate change," he said.

Australia is seeking to hammer out a compromise that addresses the developing world’s concerns.

“A one-size-fits-all is not going to get the agreement we need,” climate change minister Penny Wong told Australia’s ABC broadcaster last week. Without some sort of sliding scale, she says, “We simply won’t get the broad participation from major developing economies that the climate needs.”

So how high are the hopes for real action on the environment at the upcoming summits?

Elise Buckle, manager of the energy and climate division of the World Wildlife Fund, says the text currently under debate, which now stands at some 200 pages, will have to be whittled down to 20 that will form the basis of an agreement at Copenhagen. “It’s going to be very challenging,” she says.
 
Karine Gavand, who runs the climate change campaign for Greenpeace in Paris, tells FRANCE 24 that her group “hopes for a sign of political will on the part of world leaders at the UN summit – followed by a financial commitment [at the G20 summit] in Pittsburgh”.

Climate week

Three months ahead of a climate summit in Copenhagen, one hundred heads of state and government are in New York this week to attend an international meeting to discuss climate change. They aim to sketch out an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mobilisation online is intense .

In this video, available on the site of the ‘Climate Group’ association, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that the New York meeting must lay down the foundations for the negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

Although it remains difficult to reach an agreement, rapid action is required; as highlighted by the site of the online campaign, ‘tck tck tck’. An unpronounceable name which evokes the sound of a ticking clock. NGOs are also recalling that the poorest people are the first victims of climate change.

The UN has launched the site, ‘seal the deal 2009’. The organisation encourages Net users to sign a petition to push governments to reach an agreement and make concessions. And this video recalls that a global answer must be found to a problem that concerns the whole of humanity.

Greenpeace has posted online this interactive globe which allows users to visualise the regions already affected by climate change.

A series of video testimonies by victims of the disruption have also been made available to Net users. This Ugandan woman recounts how difficult daily life has become with the disturbed climate; periods of intense drought following periods of rain and flooding.

Iran: opposition movement
 
Over three months after the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian opposition movement is not giving up. On Friday protesters once more rallied on the occasion of the annual Palestinian solidarity day. A look back at a mobilisation widely broadcast online.

Many videos filmed by protesters on Friday were quickly posted on the share sites. On some of these we hear the crowds chanting the name of the opposition leader, Mirhossein Mousavi.

On others, like here, it is Russia which is targeted by the people’s anger. Moscow is accused by the opposition of training Iranian security forces.

Gatherings which also permitted protesters to pay tribute to opponents who died during clashes following the residential election. This amateur video shows the mother of Sohrab Arabi, a ‘martyr’, taking part in the protest, surrounded by men chanting anti-government slogans.

And many Net users are denouncing the violent repression by circulating images like here on twitpic. Several bloggers are broadcasting videos like this one in which we can clearly make out police officers violently attacking protesters.

Despite the repression and the fresh arrests of opponents, Net users remain mobilised. The aim is to denounce the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, like in this video, but also the practices of his regime. Several Twitter users call those in power to render this Government site, which tracks down protesters, inaccessible.

Winston the pigeon

Proof that a pigeon can transfer a significant amount of data more quickly than a high-speed internet connection. This was the challenge set by a South African company, specialising in new technologies. It compared the time it took for a carrier pigeon to carry 4 gigas of data between two offices 80 km apart and the time it took to collect this data via the web. And the winner was Winston the pigeon, who needed approximately 2h30 to complete the task!
   
SocialOrgs.com

The site SocialOrgs proposes online personalised coaching to companies who lack Net visibility to allow them to make efficient use of social networks. The aim being to acquire popularity and contacts on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. New studies confirm that use of social networks is set to exceed that of search engines.
 
Video of the day

How can we explain children’s temptation? In this video, which creates an online buzz, a young woman offers a marshmallow to several children. They can eat it immediately, but she explains that if they wait a while she will give them a second. And here are their reactions...

Google has launched a service that changes the way Internet users look at news, in the hope of reversing falling newspaper and news media revenues.

With Fast Flip, viewers "flip" through pages in the same way they would browse through hard copy magazines or newspapers.

It shows only the first page of a story and users who want to read more have to click through to the website of the host publication.

Fast Flip allows readers to browse stories by topic, by publication or by "most viewed," "most popular" or even "recommended".

The idea, according to the California-based Internet search and advertising giant, is to increase the number of adverts viewers see -- and, crucially, to farm back the "pay-per-click" revenue to the media organisations participating in the scheme.

In theory, viewers would see more ads, and each time they click on them the revenue generated by Google is shared with the news organisations.

At the moment, Google is working with 30 such partners including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Popular Mechanics, Cosmopolitan, Elle and Marie Claire, among others.

The BBC is the only European site participating in the Beta version.

A win-win solution?

Anne-Gabrielle Dauba, head of communications for Google France, says the company is looking to create a "win-win" environment for its media partners and Web users.

She said: "We could do nothing without our partners. We don't produce or edit any content ourselves. We want Fast Flip to become a win-win situation for us, our partners and also Internet users."

Google is often blamed for taking advertising revenue away from news sources it aggregates through its Google News service, which organises headlines, story intros and links from the most popular news websites.

It has also drawn fire from a number of newspaper owners for linking to their articles without payment.

Ms Dauba defended Google News, pointing at the experience of French daily Le Monde, which she claimed has benefitted from a 10% increase in traffic because of its partnership with Google.

But not everyone sees it that way.

In 2007 a Belgian court ordered Google to remove content from a number of Belgian newspapers from its site, saying it had not asked permission to republish headlines.

 
Lately, Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch has said he plans to start charging Internet users to read his papers online to combat falling revenue and the perception that everything online is and should be free.