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LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) - "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" has set one box office standard before it has even opened: for most different ways you can watch it on the big screen.
There are six different viewing options available to "Hobbit" fans: standard format, 3D, Imax, 3D Imax, high-frame-rate 3D and high-frame-rate Imax 3D.
That's way beyond grande, tall and vente.
"It's a record for us," Harry Medved, a spokesman for online ticket seller Fandango, told TheWrap. "We've never had so many viewing options on a single film before."
Much has been made of the ground-breaking and controversial 48 frame-per-second film rate technology that Peter Jackson utilized for his latest Middle Earth epic. But when Warner Bros. unveils its final "Hobbit" screen count on Wednesday, it's expected that only 450-500 of more than 4,000 theaters will offer the new technology.
Anecdotal reviews of the new 48fps format - used in lieu of the standard 24 frames-per-second format - have been mixed at best. While some have compared its improved clarity to the advent of high-definition TV, many screening viewers have complained that there's too much detail, and that the ultra-sharp focus is confusing and jarring. While some see the images as more life-like than anything before, others say they look like daytime TV shows and unreal.
There's no surcharge for the new technology per se, but since it's only available in 3D and Imax versions, those seeing it in the new format will already be paying a premium. And with the theaters delineating which format will be used, most moviegoers who do attend the 48fps screenings will have made the choice to do so.
The results of a new Fandango survey should be encouraging to Jackson, who said in a Facebook post that he believes the 48fps is the future of cinema.
Sixty-one percent of the more than 2,000 respondents -- all "Hobbit" ticket-buyers -- said that the new format made them more curious to see the film. Seventy-two percent said that they were glad to see the project spanning three installments.
And if you're planning a fan boy holiday party, you might not want to invite the "Twihard" crowd. While 73 percent of the "Hobbit' tickets buyers said they were also fans of the "Harry Potter" franchise, just 27 percent considered themselves fans of the "Twilight" franchise.
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hobbit-already-breaking-record-most-screen-options-201402255.html
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(Reuters) - HSBC Holdings Plc has agreed to pay $1.92 billion to settle a multi-year U.S. criminal probe into money-laundering lapses at the British lender, the largest penalty ever paid by a bank.
HSBC admitted to a breakdown of controls and apologized in a statement on Tuesday announcing it had reached a deferred-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, as was first reported by Reuters last week.
"We accept responsibility for our past mistakes. We have said we are profoundly sorry for them, and we do so again. The HSBC of today is a fundamentally different organization from the one that made those mistakes," said Chief Executive Stuart Gulliver.
"Over the last two years, under new senior leadership, we have been taking concrete steps to put right what went wrong and to participate actively with government authorities in bringing to light and addressing these matters."
The bank said it expected to also reach a settlement with British watchdog the Financial Services Authority.
U.S. and European banks have now agreed to settlements with U.S. regulators totaling some $5 billion in recent years on charges they violated U.S. sanctions and failed to police illicit transactions.
No bank or bank executives, however, have been indicted as prosecutors have instead utilized deferred prosecutions.
The deferred prosecution agreement, when detailed by U.S. Justice Department officials later on Tuesday, could yield new information about a failure at HSBC to police transactions linked to Mexico, sources familiar with the matter said. Details of those dealings were reported this summer in a sweeping U.S. Senate probe.
HSBC's settlement also includes agreements or consent orders with the Manhattan district attorney, the Federal Reserve and three U.S. Treasury Department units: the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Comptroller of the Currency and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.
HSBC said it would pay $1.921 billion, continue to cooperate fully with regulatory and law enforcement authorities and take further action to strengthen its compliance policies and procedures. U.S. prosecutors have agreed to defer or forgo prosecution.
The settlement is the third time in a decade that HSBC has been penalized for lax controls and ordered by U.S. authorities to better monitor suspicious transactions. Directives by regulators to improve oversight came in 2003 and again in 2010.
Last month, HSBC told investors it had set aside $1.5 billion to cover fines or penalties stemming from the inquiry and warned costs could be significantly higher.
Analyst Jim Antos of Mizuho Securities said the statement on Tuesday indicates an extra $420 million for the settlement costs, calling it a "trivial" figure in terms of the company's book value. "But in terms of real cash terms, that's a huge fine to pay," said Antos, who rates HSBC a "buy".
HSBC shares fell slightly in early London trading to 6.40 pounds. The bank's Hong Kong listed stock nudged up 0.3 percent to HK$79.70.
HSBC's settlement is the latest chapter in an embarrassing period for the bank, the result of a lengthy probe into Europe's biggest bank by U.S. law enforcement agencies as well as a U.S. Senate panel that in July issued a scathing review of HSBC.
ANTI-MONEY LAUNDERING CONTROLS
In its statement, HSBC said it had increased spending on anti-money laundering systems, exited business relationships, and clawed back bonuses for senior executives. It also cited the hiring last January of Stuart Levey, a former top U.S. Treasury Department official, as chief legal officer.
Under a five-year agreement with the Justice Department, HSBC agreed to have an independent monitor evaluate its progress in improving its compliance.
HSBC also said that as part of the overhaul of its controls it has launched a global review of its Know Your Customer files, which will cost an estimated $700 million over five years. The bank has also increased its spending on anti-money laundering by around nine times between 2009 and 2011, it said.
HSBC's settlement comes a day after rival British bank Standard Chartered Plc agreed to a $327 million settlement with U.S. law enforcement agencies for sanctions violations, a pact that follows a $340 million settlement the bank reached with the New York bank regulator in August.
Such settlements have become commonplace. In what had been the largest settlement until this week, ING Bank NV in June agreed to pay $619 million to settle U.S. government allegations it violated sanctions against countries including Cuba and Iran.
Other banks that have reached settlements over sanctions violations are Credit Suisse Group of Switzerland, Lloyds Banking Group and Barclays Plc in Britain and ABN Amro Holding NV, a Dutch bank acquired by Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc and a bank consortium in 2007. In the United States, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Wachovia Corp. and Citigroup Inc. have been cited for anti-money laundering lapses or sanctions violations.
HSBC's failings date to 2003, when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and New York state regulators ordered the bank to better monitor suspicious money flows.
In 2010, a consent order from the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) ordered HSBC to review suspicious transactions moving through the bank. At the time, the OCC called HSBC's compliance program "ineffective".
In 2008, the U.S. Attorney in Wheeling, West Virginia, began investigating HSBC and how a local doctor allegedly used the bank to launder Medicare fraud.
Ultimately, that prosecutor's office came to believe the case was "the tip of the iceberg" in terms of the suspicious transactions conducted through HSBC, according to documents reviewed by Reuters and reported earlier this year.
(Additional reporting by Lawrence White and Michael Flaherty in Hong Kong; Editing by Alex Richardson)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/hsbc-announce-1-8-billion-settlement-u-money-054334042--sector.html
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ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2012) ? Did different species of early humans interbreed and produce offspring of mixed ancestry?
Recent genetic studies suggest that Neanderthals may have bred with anatomically modern humans tens of thousands of years ago in the Middle East, contributing to the modern human gene pool. But the findings are not universally accepted, and the fossil record has not helped to clarify the role of interbreeding, which is also known as hybridization.
Now a University of Michigan-led study of interbreeding between two species of modern-day howler monkeys in Mexico is shedding light on why it's so difficult to confirm instances of hybridization among primates -- including early humans -- by relying on fossil remains.
The study, published online Dec. 7 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, is based on analyses of genetic and morphological data collected from live-captured monkeys over the past decade. Morphology is the branch of biology that deals with the form and structure of animals and plants.
The two primate species in the study, mantled howler monkeys and black howler monkeys, diverged about 3 million years ago and differ in many respects, including behavior, appearance and the number of chromosomes they possess. Each occupies a unique geographical distribution except for the state of Tabasco in southeastern Mexico, where they coexist and interbreed in what's known as a hybrid zone.
The researchers found that individuals of mixed ancestry who share most of their genome with one of the two species are physically indistinguishable from the pure individuals of that species.
"The implications of these results are that physical features are not always reliable for identifying individuals of hybrid ancestry. Therefore, it is possible that hybridization has been underestimated in the human fossil record," said Liliana Cort?s-Ortiz, an evolutionary biologist and primatologist and an assistant research scientist at the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Museum of Zoology.
First author of the paper is Mary Kelaita, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at San Antonio's Department of Anthropology. The howler monkey study was part of Kelaita's doctoral dissertation work at U-M's Department of Anthropology.
For years, anthropologists have attempted to infer hybridization among human ancestral species based on the fossil record, which represents only a snapshot in prehistory, and have concluded that hybridization is extremely rare, according to Kelaita and Cort?s-Ortiz. Given the utility of living primate models for understanding human evolution, the howler monkey study "suggests that the lack of strong evidence for hybridization in the fossil record does not negate the role it could have played in shaping early human lineage diversity," Kelaita said.
The authors conclude that the process of hybridization (defined as the production of offspring through the interbreeding between individuals of genetically distinct populations), the factors governing the expression of morphology in hybrid individuals, and the extent of reproductive isolation between species should be given further consideration in future research projects.
In their study, Kelaita and Cort?s-Ortiz analyzed different types of genetic markers, from both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, to trace the ancestry of each howler monkey they studied. The use of molecular markers made it possible to approximate the relative genetic contributions of the parental species to each hybrid.
A total of 128 hybrid individuals were detected. Kelaita and Cort?s-Ortiz found that most were likely the product of several generations of hybridization or of mating between hybrids and pure individuals.
Subsequently, they performed statistical analyses on body measurements and found a large amount of morphological variation in individuals of mixed ancestry. However, when individuals were classified according to the amount of their genome they shared with each parental species, it became clear that individuals of mixed ancestry that shared most of their genome with one of the species were physically indistinguishable from the pure individuals of that species. Even individuals that were more "intermediate" in their genetic composition were not completely intermediate in their appearance.
The study is the first to assess genetic ancestry of primate hybrids inhabiting a natural hybrid zone using molecular data to explain morphological variation.
Between 1998 and 2008, the researchers sampled 135 adult howler monkeys from Tabasco, Mexico, along with 76 others from Veracruz, Campeche, Chiapas and Quintana Roo states in Mexico and Peten in Guatemala. The field team collected blood, hair and morphometric measurements from the anesthetized animals before releasing them in the same locations. Sample collection from wild monkeys was carried out in accordance with U-M's University Committee on Use and Care of Animals protocol #09319, and in collaboration with researchers at the Universidad Veracruzana in Mexico.
The animals were weighed, and 16 body-part measurements were made: trunk, tail, leg, foot, arm and hand length; chest and abdominal girth; head circumference and breadth; head, mandible and ear length; interorbital breadth; internasal distance; and testicular volume.
Howler monkeys are among the largest of New World monkeys, with male mantled howlers weighing up to 22 pounds. Fourteen species of howler monkeys are currently recognized. They are native to Central and South American forests, in addition to southeastern Mexico.
The study was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, PROMEP-UVER Mexico, Universidad Veracruzana, and the U-M Office of the Vice President for Research, Museum of Zoology, Department of Anthropology and Rackham Graduate School.
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ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2012) ? The debilitating symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, appear to be increased by a lack of inflammation-reducing T cells, report scientists from the Methodist Neurological Institute in an upcoming print issue of the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. The researchers found that expression of the gene FoxP3 -- which helps control the production of anti-inflammatory T cells -- was an indicator of disease progression in 80 percent of the patients they studied. Low FoxP3 levels were likely in patients whose ALS would develop rapidly, and vice versa.
"This is the first demonstration that regulatory T cells may be slowing disease progression, since low FoxP3 indicates a rapidly progressing disease," said Assistant Professor of Neurology Jenny Henkel, Ph.D., the study's lead author. "Levels of FoxP3 may now be used as a prognostic indicator of future disease progression and survival."
ALS is a neurodegenerative disease that slowly and inexorably causes paralysis, then death. Loss of motor control may begin in the arms or legs, or with impaired speech, and ultimately compromise breathing. ALS is sometimes called Lou Gehrig's disease. About 5 in 100,000 people are affected, and there is no known cure.
The relationship between inflammation and ALS progression is well established in humans and animal models, and many genes influencing disease development have been identified.
"While inflammation exacerbates disease in ALS patients, this inflammation is suppressed in some patients," Henkel said. "The data in our article suggest that regulatory T cells can suppress this inflammation."
In their EMBO paper, Henkel, Professor of Neurology and Chair Stanley Appel, M.D., and their team provided supportive evidence that the genes FoxP3, TGF?, IL4, and Gata3 are involved in ALS development. But Henkel and Appel's work also suggests FoxP3 is the best indicator of disease progression when ALS symptoms first appear.
"While expression of FoxP3, TGF?, IL4, and Gata3 may serve as indicators for latter stages of the disease, our work suggests only FoxP3 was a prognostic indicator early in the disease," Henkel said. "After following a group of ALS patients for three and a half years, low FoxP3 levels predicted a rapidly progressing disease 80 percent of the time."
Foxp3 and Gata3 are transcription factors that influence production of regulatory T cells, and Th2 "helper" T cells. TGF? and IL-4 (interleukin 4) are anti-inflammatory cytokines.
Henkel, Appel, and their team studied three patient groups. In the first group, the researchers took blood samples from 54 ALS patients at different stages of the disease and from 33 healthy control volunteers. Flow cytometry and PCR were used to determine the character of white blood cells, specifically regulatory T cells, and to measure the expression levels of genes of interest. A second patient group (102 ALS, 28 healthy) was studied specifically to assess the predictive power of FoxP3 expression in ALS disease development. A third group consisting of deceased persons (affected and healthy) was studied for the purpose of establishing endpoints for T cell production and gene expression. Development of ALS was assessed using the Appel ALS score, a widely used standard that Appel developed.
The relationship between inflammation and ALS progression is complex. Inflammation is an important initial response to injury or microbial attack, Appel says, but prolonged inflammation can actually make the damage worse.
"While this inflammation is tolerable for the short term, when the inflammation persists, the pro-inflammatory cytokines and certain chemicals produced by glial cells called microglia will injure and eventually kill the surrounding neurons," Appel said. "Our research verifies that inflammation is accelerating disease progression, that regulatory T cells and Th2 cells may slow disease progression, and that modifying regulatory T cells appears to be a viable treatment option."
Henkel and Appel said researchers are closing in on specific targets for modifying the inflammation that drives progression of the disease, and that they are closer than ever to developing new treatments for this severely debilitating condition.
This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and the Texas Methodist Foundation. Henkel and Appel's EMBO coauthors were David Beers, Ph.D., Shixiang Wen, Karen Toennis, Joan Appel, Weihua Zhao, and Suzanne Powell, M.D., of The Methodist Hospital, and Dan Moore, Ph.D., of California Pacific Medical Center.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/UwGuTz211Ho/121207161458.htm
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What exactly is self improvement? It?s an extensive class, however it Eli Manning Jersey concerns the way you carry out our everyday lives. Everybody aims for further joy, however, some individuals have a problem discovering how to give that contentment to their recent lives. The following tips on self improvement will help you get nearer to your very own sensation of fulfillment.
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