Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/06/brooke-hogan-engaged-to-phil-costa/
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Tuesday, July 2, 2013
More pixels, less selection: Sony's first ultra HD player, service announced
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1 hour ago
Sony
Sony's rounded FMP-X1 ultra HD media player.
Sony has announced the details of a new home media device that brings ultra HD movies to your living room ? if you're already on board with Sony's devices and services, and if you're willing to pay a premium for a rather slim selection of movies.
Ultra HD, or 4K, refers to video that is twice as wide and tall, resolution-wise, as 1080p content: 3840-by-2160 pixels, to be precise ("4K" refers to the nearly 4,000 horizontal pixels). And there are woefully few devices that support it right now ? only a couple mega-high-end TV sets, two of which are from Sony.
And you'll have to have one of those two Sony TVs if you want to use their $700 FMP-X1 media player, first announced back in January; it's incompatible with everything else. You'll also be locked into Sony's pricey Video Unlimited service, at $7.99 each for 24-hour rentals of 4K content or $29.99 to buy as an online download.
The upside, of course, is that with a top-of-the-line 4K Sony TV and one of these players, you'll be enjoying movies in higher definition than anyone's ever seen them at home. That is, if there are any worth watching, and that's the next problem.
The 4K media player comes with 10 movies included, and they're not exactly all winners. From the latest Adam Sandler flick to the "Karate Kid" remake with Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith, it's a mixed bag, to put it kindly. Others are forthcoming, they say, but until then these are all you get.
But there's hope: "Taxi Driver" and "The Bridge on the River Kwai" are classics, and the high-definition scans of those 35mm film reels should make them those movies look incredible. These two, and other remastered classics to come, are probably the best (if not the only) reason to own a 4K TV and this player at the moment.
The FMP-X1 comes with a 2-terabyte hard drive built in, which is probably enough for about 50 movies (most will be between 20 and 40 gigabytes). That may be enough for some and too little for others, but you can always plug in an external drive if you need more space.
More information and specs on Sony's new player can be found at Sony's website, where early adopters and "Total Recall 2012" fans can pre-order it as well.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News Digital. His personal website is coldewey.cc.
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Monday, July 1, 2013
Obama announces African electricity initiative, reflects on Mandela
President Barack Obama addresses a crowd at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, Sunday. Obama makes the point that 60 percent of Africans are under 30-years-old while discussing the region's future.
By Andrew Rafferty, Staff Writer, NBC News
President Barack Obama on Sunday announced a sweeping?initiative?to help bring electrical power to some of Africa's poorest regions, while reflecting on the legacy of Nelson Mandela and urging the continent to continue the work of?South Africa's ailing former leader.
Speaking at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, the president announced a?$7 billion initiative?to bring electrical power to sub-Saharan Africa in an effort to help modernize the continent and better connect it with the rest of the world.
The program, called "Power Africa," will also include more than $9 billion in investment from private companies, according to the White House.??The iniative will focus on six African countries:?Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania.?
"We believe that nations must have the power to connect their people to the promise of the 21st century. Access to electricity is fundamental to opportunity in this age," Obama said.
"It's the connection that's needed to plug Africa into the grid of the global economy.? You've got to have power," he added, citing that two-thirds of the population in sub-Saharan Africa does not have regular access to household electricity.?
Obama's hopes to modernize the continent came the same day as he urged Africa's youth to remember the?sacrifices?of beloved leader Mandela, who is in "critical but stable" condition in a South African hospital, according to government officials.
Earlier Sunday, the president and his family visited Robben Island prison, the place where Mandela spent most of his 27 years in jail. The 94-year-old anti-apartheid champion has been in the hospital for weeks, and his health has become one of the main?story lines?of the president's week-long trip.
In his speech in Cape Town, Obama said that standing in Mandela's small cell helped his daughters appreciate the?sacrifices made by?the the leader and is an experience they will never forget.
"Nelson Mandela showed us that one man's courage can move the world," he said.
White House officials said the speech drew inspiration from remarks delivered by Robert F. Kennedy in June of 1966 at the same university. Kennedy's now famous "ripple of hope" speech was delivered soon after Mandela was?sentenced?to prison also called on African youth to fight against injustice.
"There is no question that Africa is on the move, but it's not moving fast enough...That's where you come in -- the young people of Africa.? Just like previous generations, you've got choices to make. You get to decide where the future lies," Obama said.
While in Cape Town, the president also visited an HIV/AIDS clinic where he commended the work of President George W. Bush in helping fight AIDS in Africa.?
"We have the possibility of achieving an AIDS-free generation...and making sure that everybody in our human family is able to enjoy their lives and raise families, and succeed in maintaining their health here in Africa and around the world," Obama said.
NBC's Shawna Thomas contributed to this report.
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Link between fear and sound perception discovered
June 30, 2013 ? Anyone who's ever heard a Beethoven sonata or a Beatles song knows how powerfully sound can affect our emotions. But it can work the other way as well -- our emotions can actually affect how we hear and process sound. When certain types of sounds become associated in our brains with strong emotions, hearing similar sounds can evoke those same feelings, even far removed from their original context. It's a phenomenon commonly seen in combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in whom harrowing memories of the battlefield can be triggered by something as common as the sound of thunder. But the brain mechanisms responsible for creating those troubling associations remain unknown. Now, a pair of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has discovered how fear can actually increase or decrease the ability to discriminate among sounds depending on context, providing new insight into the distorted perceptions of victims of PTSD.
Their study is published in Nature Neuroscience.
"Emotions are closely linked to perception and very often our emotional response really helps us deal with reality," says senior study author Maria N. Geffen, PhD, assistant professor of Otorhinolaryngology: Head and Neck Surgery and Neuroscience at Penn. "For example, a fear response helps you escape potentially dangerous situations and react quickly. But there are also situations where things can go wrong in the way the fear response develops. That's what happens in anxiety and also in PTSD -- the emotional response to the events is generalized to the point where the fear response starts getting developed to a very broad range of stimuli."
Geffen and the first author of the study, Mark Aizenberg, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in her laboratory, used emotional conditioning in mice to investigate how hearing acuity (the ability to distinguish between tones of different frequencies) can change following a traumatic event, known as emotional learning. In these experiments, which are based on classical (Pavlovian) conditioning, animals learn to distinguish between potentially dangerous and safe sounds -- called "emotional discrimination learning." This type of conditioning tends to result in relatively poor learning, but Aizenberg and Geffen designed a series of learning tasks intended to create progressively greater emotional discrimination in the mice, varying the difficulty of the task. What really interested them was how different levels of emotional discrimination would affect hearing acuity -- in other words, how emotional responses affect perception and discrimination of sounds. This study established the link between emotions and perception of the world -- something that has not been understood before.
The researchers found that, as expected, fine emotional learning tasks produced greater learning specificity than tests in which the tones were farther apart in frequency. As Geffen explains, "The animals presented with sounds that were very far apart generalize the fear that they developed to the danger tone over a whole range of frequencies, whereas the animals presented with the two sounds that were very similar exhibited specialization of their emotional response. Following the fine conditioning task, they figured out that it's a very narrow range of pitches that are potentially dangerous."
When pitch discrimination abilities were measured in the animals, the mice with more specific responses displayed much finer auditory acuity than the mice who were frightened by a broader range of frequencies. "There was a relationship between how much their emotional response generalized and how well they could tell different tones apart," says Geffen. "In the animals that specialized their emotional response, pitch discrimination actually became sharper. They could discriminate two tones that they previously could not tell apart."
Another interesting finding of this study is that the effects of emotional learning on hearing perception were mediated by a specific brain region, the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex has been known as an important area responsible for auditory plasticity. Surprisingly, Aizenberg and Geffen found that the auditory cortex did not play a role in emotional learning. Likely, the specificity of emotional learning is controlled by the amygdala and sub-cortical auditory areas. "We know the auditory cortex is involved, we know that the emotional response is important so the amygdala is involved, but how do the amygdala and cortex interact together?" says Geffen. "Our hypothesis is that the amygdala and cortex are modifying subcortical auditory processing areas. The sensory cortex is responsible for the changes in frequency discrimination, but it's not necessary for developing specialized or generalized emotional responses. So it's kind of a puzzle."
Solving that puzzle promises new insight into the causes and possible treatment of PTSD, and the question of why some individuals develop it and others subjected to the same events do not. "We think there's a strong link between mechanisms that control emotional learning, including fear generalization, and the brain mechanisms responsible for PTSD, where generalization of fear is abnormal," Geffen notes. Future research will focus on defining and studying that link.
Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/Wq0G_0EHIi4/130630145002.htm
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