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Expect fierce rivalry at Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore

SINGAPORE: Expect some fierce rivalry at this year's Standard Chartered Marathon Singapore on December 2.

Both the men's and women's champions are back to defend their titles but their reign could be under threat.

Charles Kanyao, the surprise winner in the men's category last year with his time of two hours and 14 minutes, admitted he has to up the ante to retain the crown.

"This year, there are good runners but I will survive... and pull ahead," said Kanyao.

The Kenyan also pointed out Singapore's weather is another factor in this year's race.

Wanting to upstage him is fellow compatriot Luke Kibet, the 2008 and 2009 winner.

Kibet has a personal best of two hours, 11 minutes and 25 seconds.

Another contender in the men's category is the 2010 champion, Kenneth Mungara of Kenya.

In the women's race, Kenyan Irene Jerotich is gunning for the treble.

"I am well prepared. I did all my training program and I did not have any problem. I did everything which was required for me to do so I think I am in good form and I am ready to face on Sunday," said Jerotich, who has won the race for the last two years.

Among those who could spoil her celebrations is Ethiopia's Shitaye Gemechu who has a personal best of two hours and 26 minutes.

A total of 53,000 runners are competing this year compared to the 65,000 in 2011.

The lower figure is a deliberate attempt by the organisers to control the numbers to avoid congestion along certain segments of the route and also provide a more pleasant experience for all competing.

- CNA/fa

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Backblaze pays people to milk Black Friday's deals

Some of the hard drives Backblaze rounded up on Black Friday.

(Credit:
Backblaze)

Retailers have engineered
Black Friday to whip consumers into a buying frenzy, but it turns out it can be good for startups looking for a good deal, too.

Backblaze, the online backup company that headed off a hard-drive price-hike crisis by enlisting friends and family as deputy procurement officers, found itself scouring the ads for good deals again during the holiday buying season. The result: another round of "drive farming" by people willing to help the company.

This time, though, the drive farming was open to the first 200 people who signed up to participate, and Backblaze paid each person who participated $5 per drive.

"Using a combination of crowdsourced drive farmers and experienced Backblaze employees, we've gathered over 300 drives, with more on the way," the company said.

Backblaze isn't big enough to benefit from discounts available with direct purchase agreements that benefit customers buying at least 10,000 drives a quarter. The drive farming approach has become a tool to try to keep costs down so Backblaze can maintain its flat-rate unlimited backup plan.

Specifically, the company got people to buy Seagate 3TB Backup Plus external drives for $100 from Costco Online -- "not from a Costco Store; leave those for the local folks," the company said. People shipped them to Backblaze's alias, "H.D. Farmer."

The idea for the project struck on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. "We saw a flier for the Costco $99 drive deal and started thinking and talking and debating what we could we do," the company said in a blog post. "The entire campaign came together in about 2 hours -- rules, sign-up process, blog post, promotion, everything."

The Costco coupon that got Backblaze to pay people to buy it hard drives on Black Friday.

(Credit:
Backblaze)

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Pictures: Inside the World's Most Powerful Laser

Photograph courtesy Damien Jemison, LLNL

Looking like a portal to a science fiction movie, preamplifiers line a corridor at the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF).

Preamplifiers work by increasing the energy of laser beams—up to ten billion times—before these beams reach the facility's target chamber.

The project's lasers are tackling "one of physics' grand challenges"—igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory, according to the NIF website. Nuclear fusion—the merging of the nuclei of two atoms of, say, hydrogen—can result in a tremendous amount of excess energy. Nuclear fission, by contrast, involves the splitting of atoms.

This July, California-based NIF made history by combining 192 laser beams into a record-breaking laser shot that packed over 500 trillion watts of peak power-a thousand times more power than the entire United States uses at any given instant.

"This was a quantum leap for laser technology around the world," NIF director Ed Moses said in September. But some critics of the $5 billion project wonder why the laser has yet to ignite a fusion chain reaction after three-and-a-half years in operation. Supporters counter that such groundbreaking science simply can't be rushed.

(Related: "Fusion Power a Step Closer After Giant Laser Blast.")

—Brian Handwerk

Published November 29, 2012

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2 Towns Hint at Powerball Winners

The $587 million question on the identity of the winners in the historic Powerball jackpot is still a mystery, but residents in Missouri and Maryland say they already know who the two lucky winners are.

Employees and customers at Marlboro Village Exxon in Upper Marlboro, Md., said a tall, black, bald man held the winning ticket purchased in Arizona, according to ABC News affiliate WJLA-TV.

Meanwhile, speculation began running wild in the small town of Dearborn, Mo., when a factory worker named Mark Hill updated his Facebook account late Thursday, writing, "We are truly blessed, we are lucky winners of the Powerball."

Within hours, his family began celebrating, telling ABC News Hill is one of the two big winners.

"Just shocked. I mean, I thought we were all going to have heart attacks," Hill's mother, Shirley, said Thursday.

Hill's mother says her son and his wife, Cindy, have three grown sons and an adopted daughter from China, but the family has been struggling financially.

Hill works in a hot dog and deli packaging factory, but it was unclear whether he showed up for work Thursday night.

"I'm very happy for him. He's worked hard in his life; well, not anymore," Hill's son Jason said. "Well, I hope we all stay very grounded, stay humble and don't forget who we are."

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Missouri Lottery official Susan Goedde confirmed to ABC News Thursday that one of the winning tickets was purchased at a Trex Mart in Dearborn, about 30 miles north of Kansas City.

Lottery officials won't confirm whether Hill is the winner but family members offered another clue: Some of the winning numbers turned out to be the jersey numbers of some all-star Kansas City Royals baseball players, Hill's favorite team.

Hall of Fame third basemen George Brett wore 5; Willie Wilson 6; Bo Jackson 16.

The winning numbers were 5, 23, 16, 22 and 29; Powerball was 6.

Hill did not respond to ABC News' requests for comment.

In Maryland, surveillance cameras at the Upper Marlboro gas station captured the apparent winner walking into the store Thursday afternoon, digging into his chest pocket for his lottery tickets. After a few seconds of scanning the wad of tickets, the man began jumping up and down, pumping his arms.

The man gave the tickets to store clerk Nagassi Ghebre, who says the six Powerball numbers was on the ticket, which the apparent winner said he bought in Arizona.

"And then he said, 'I got to get out of here,'" employee Freddie Lopez told WJLA.

But before leaving, the possible winner felt the need to check again to see whether he really had the ticket that millions of Americans dreamed of having.

"He says, 'Is this the right number? I don't know.' And I said, 'Yeah that's the numbers. You got them all,'" customer Paul Gaug told WJLA.

Employees and customers said the main stuck around for a few more seconds shouting, "I won," before leaving.

"He came back a minute later and said, 'I forgot to get my gas. What am I thinking?'" Lopez said.

The man drove out of the gas station in a black car and on a full tank of gas with a cash payout of $192.5 million coming his way.

"He said he lives in Maryland. I'm pretty sure," Gaug said.

The possible jackpot winner was wearing bright neon clothing and store employees told WJLA that he appeared to be a highway or construction worker.

Arizona lottery officials told WJLA that if the man does have the winning ticket, it needs to be redeemed within 180 days of the drawing in Arizona.

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A treasure trove of natural history opens

Kat Austen, CultureLab editor

(Images: Natural History Museum)

Where can you see the pigeons that feature in Chapter One of the On the Origin of Species, next to a first edition of the book? Or the iguanodon teeth that sparked the discovery of dinosaurs? Opening this Friday, the new Treasures Gallery at London’s Natural History Museum displays some of the most influential and fascinating artefacts from the museum's collections in a single room.

In an age of shortening attention spans and information overload, the museum has condensed its collection into a one-stop mega-shop for natural history. But while some may balk at the notion of a boiled-down collection of greatest hits, the new gallery is well-named. The pieces within it - the first Neanderthal skull ever discovered, for example, or one of the emperor penguin eggs collected during Captain Scott’s 1910 expedition to Antarctica - are indeed treasures, and the stories behind them are captivating.

Take the foot-long tooth specimen sitting in a display case between a plate from Audubon’s The Birds of America - the most expensive book in the world - and the first meteorite seen to land in Britain. This dwarf elephant tooth from Cyprus was discovered by palaeontologist Dorothea Bate in 1901 and provided the first evidence of elephants on the island. Bate’s discovery supported the theory that elephants swam over from mainland Europe and then, constrained by the scarcity of food, evolved to be far smaller than their ancestors - roughly the size of a pig.

Bate, we learn, was a self-taught enthusiast. She talked her way into a job at the museum at the tender age of 19, having pursued her interest in fossils by battling up mountains near her home in Carmarthenshire, UK. She went on to pioneer the field of archaeozoology, looking at the impact of humans on their environment.

Where zeal for nature drove Bate to discover, other exhibits show it as a source of creative inspiration. Sparkling within a well-lit case are three glass models of marine invertebrates, deftly sculpted by the Blaschka family of Dresden, Germany. This father-and-son team, who are responsible for the glass flowers in Harvard’s Museum of Natural History, were so fascinated with sea creatures that they not only owned an aquarium populated with specimens from Naples’s marine zoology centre, but were in correspondence with biologist Ernst Haeckel, whose diagrams of microscopic organisms informed their work.

The curiosities on show are frequently backed by this type of engaging human story. A portrait of the museum’s founder Richard Owen sits next to the iguanodon teeth. The teeth were discovered by Mary Ann Mantell alongside a road in Sussex. Her husband Gideon, an amateur naturalist, saw a similarity between the fossil find and the much smaller teeth of the modern iguana. From this observation, he posited that long ago giant reptiles roamed the Earth.

A touchscreen betwixt the two exhibits tells a remarkably honest history of how Owen, an established biologist, wrested the mantle of dinosaur discovery from the Mantells, though Gideon - the son of a shoemaker - fought to overcome both his class and amateur status so that his theory would be accepted by the scientific elite.

The human side of science in days gone by is nowhere more obvious, however, than in the display of pigeon specimens gathered by Charles Darwin during his experiments on breeding (see photo above). Seeing his meticulous labelling and notes on the dead birds and skeletons conveys both his intense dedication and methodical approach, which we now know enabled him to formulate his world-changing theory. “It gives you an insight into Darwin as a curator, working with the collection, as a researcher, the kind of approach that he was taking,” says Jo Cooper, curator of the museum’s bird collection.

Ironically, it is a fossil of the earliest known bird that brings these stories into the present day of scientific research. The archaeopteryx fossil is the most valuable in the museum’s collection, and is held as the world standard for this type of fossil. A CT scan of the skull cavity in 2004 showed the similarities between the archaeopteryx’s brain and that of a modern bird. The fossil may yet hold more gems about the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds. “We’re still researching it really intensively”, says curator Tate Greenhalgh.

The Treasures Gallery does what it says on the tin, and more. Far from providing a whistle-stop tour of groundbreaking discoveries and theories in natural history, these artefacts and the stories behind them draw you in - and will spur your curiosity to delve ever more deeply.

The Treasures Gallery is a permanent collection opening tomorrow at the Natural History Museum, London.

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Cricket: New Zealand level Sri Lanka Test series with rare win

COLOMBO: New Zealand registered their first Test win in Sri Lanka for 14 years on Thursday, finally removing the defiant Angelo Mathews to level the series 1-1 in Colombo.

The Kiwis bowled Sri Lanka out for a second innings total of 195 in the last session of the fifth and final day at the P. Sara Oval to win the second and final Test by 167 runs.

All-rounder Mathews offered dogged resistance, top-scoring with a fighting 84 that included one six and 11 fours before he was the last man dismissed after facing 228 balls.

New Zealand, who had lost five successive Tests before the match, put in an improved all-round show in Colombo, posting 412 in the first innings and their bowlers, especially the pacemen, delivered in both innings.

"It is always good to come overseas and win. The bowlers were brilliant and they set it up," said New Zealand captain Ross Taylor, who was named man of the match for his 142 in the first innings.

"I guess we got a lot of stick last week for our performances, but we stuck to our task and fought hard. We took our catches and fielded pretty well."

The tourists tightened their grip on the match on Wednesday when they reduced the hosts to 47-4, but had to work hard for their win on a fifth-day wicket that held few terrors for batsmen.

New Zealand took just one wicket in the morning session and two in the post-lunch period before completing the job with the second new ball after tea.

Fast bowlers Trent Boult and Tim Southee each finished with three wickets, while paceman Doug Bracewell took two and debutant leg-spinner Todd Astle one.

"Credit to the New Zealand team as they played really well and we were always behind. This series has been good and tough at the same time," said Sri Lanka skipper Mahela Jayawardene.

"They scored well in the first innings and we didn't do that. Their bowlers kept asking questions and kept the pressure up. We need to improve against the new ball when we go to Australia (next month)."

Astle provided the crucial breakthrough in the afternoon when he had Prasanna Jayawardene (29) caught behind from a delivery that turned and bounced for his first Test wicket.

Jayawardene was involved in a defiant 56-run stand for the sixth wicket with Mathews.

Boult, who took four wickets in the first innings, had lower-order batsman Suraj Randiv caught by Martin Guptill at second slip and ended the innings with the wicket of Mathews, caught by the same fielder in the slips.

Mathews and wicket-keeper Jayawardene took no risks during their stand after Sri Lanka lost the big wicket of Thilan Samaraweera in the opening hour -- run out after a mix-up with Mathews.

Samaraweera, who top-scored in the first innings with 76, had added just six to his overnight one.

Sri Lankan left-arm spinner Rangana Herath was named man of the series for taking 20 wickets.

The hosts won the opening Test by 10 wickets in Galle.

- AFP/de

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Curiosity: Behind the amazing success (and disaster) of a mobile gaming hit

Curiosity lets people tap little "cubelets" to make them disappear. Writing messages is one motivation to keep on tapping at the 64 billion cubelets.

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

For storied video game designer Peter Molyneux, November 6 was supposed to be the calm before the storm. But it became the storm itself when his newest project, Curiosity, arrived a day early and exploded in popularity.

Molyneux's new gaming startup, 22Cans, planned to launch Curiosity on November 7. Twenty-two hours ahead of time, though, Apple's App Store published the "experiment," which is something like letting thousands of people pop the same sheet of bubble wrap at the same time.

So began a roller-coaster ride that combined a humiliating server failure with an intriguing new take on global-scale video games in the smartphone era. But now, with the server problems licked, Curiosity 2.0 due soon, and 22Cans' grander plans taking shape, Molyneux is starting to sound less mortified and more optimistic.

"It's literally the biggest tragedy I've ever had in my career," Molyneux said in an interview. "It's also been the biggest joy."

That's a big change from two weeks ago, when word of Curiosity got out and the game went viral. 22Cans' servers were overwhelmed, preventing many from reaching the game's giant virtual online cube and wiping out players' stores of carefully collected virtual coins.

But instead of dealing with the crisis at 22Cans headquarters in Guildford, England, Molyneux was trying to get back from a conference in Israel. He spent four and a half agonizing hours trying to get through Tel Aviv's notoriously rigorous airport security more than 2,000 miles away. (For a blow-by-blow look at the drama, check the timeline of Curiosity's difficult debut.)

"Israel has got the most insane security, and through none of it are you allowed to use your mobile phone," Molyneux said. "Knowing Curiosity was alive, I was occasionally pretending to drop something to look at my phone."

The desperation of the moment still was evident in his voice as he described how his hopes of communicating were dashed once again on the plane.

"As luck would have it, the person sitting next to me on the plane was an aircraft inspector. He said, 'You can't use that,'" Molyneux recounted. When the inspector left his seat for a moment, Molyneux mashed his phone against the window to try to get a signal. He said was thinking, "I don't care if the plane crashes and kills a thousand people. I've got to find out what's happening."

Curiosity was simply too popular too soon, almost immediately overtaking 22Cans' plan to gradually increase server capacity.

"I'll be honest. This is my fault. I never in my wildest dreams expected millions of people to download Curiosity in the first few days. It's an experiment. You just tap on it. I could see in my mind's eye, even with my most optimistic nature, we'd see at first a thousand people, maybe after a month, a hundred thousand," Molyneux said. "That hundred thousand figure was reached within three hours of launching Curiosity."

Peter Molyneux explains 22Cans' upcoming game, Godus.

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

To cope with the load, 22cans' Curiosity team of six programmers stripped out lots of features -- the Facebook log-in, the ability to check where on the cube your contacts were tapping, detailed statistics. With the upcoming release of Curiosity 2.0, the company will restore these features and hopes to fulfill its original ambition. It will make Curiosity a real-time collective experience rather than individual actions that only synchronize with others' actions in fits and starts. And it will open the door to more experiments.

Video game renown
Perhaps Molyneux' track record has something to do with it. He's a notable figure in the video game world -- notable enough for membership in the Order of the British Empire for distinguished service.

In the 1980s, "I was selling floppy disks to schools," Molyneux said, but he found they sold better with free games on them. He then moved into writing those games himself, though his first, Entrepreneur, was an abject failure that sold only two copies. His fortunes turned later that decade when his "god game" Populous sold 5 million copies, luring players who wanted to lead a civilization in competition with another deity.

The first layer of Curiosity's cube was black; tapping it millions of blocks away revealed the layer beneath.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

After that came hits such as Dungeon Keeper, a role reversal in which the player defends his territory against incursion from heroes, and Project Milo, in which a player uses a Kinect controller to interact with a boy and guide him around a virtual world.

Central to many video games is the idea of motivation. Players stay engaged with opportunities to solve puzzles, vanquish enemies, build empires, and escape into alternative realms where they have more control over the future.

Molyneux has experimented with morality as a motivation, too. Where some games such as the Grand Theft Auto series explore the rewards of criminality, Molyneux's Fable series from Microsoft offers moral choices in which choosing the "good" path can help the player's fortunes.

Curiosity accommodates some very different motives: The urge to reveal hidden photos and text. The desire to tidy up. The instinct to collaborate on a group project the same way thousands of ants build an anthill one grain of sand at a time. The compulsion to write crude graffiti -- or to obliterate it. And, closest to Molyneux's heart, the desire to find out the secret message he's hidden deep within the cube.

What is Curiosity?
Curiosity is many things. It's the first of 22 experiments that 22Cans plans to launch on the road to building new games adapted for the era of the Net-connected mobile device. It's a marketing vehicle to promote 22Cans' Kickstarter-funded god game, Godus. And at its most basic level, it's a game whose bare-bones simplicity actually has room for surprising complexity.

People like to uncover the interesting parts of photos once they're discovered on the face of the cube. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Curiosity, an app for iOS and
Android, is as primitive and repetitive as popping plastic bubble-wrap. But apparently it's just as addictive, because it's kept hundreds of thousands of people engaged.

The game shows a single cube floating in a virtual room. This cube is constructed from more than 64 billion tiny cubelets that become visible if zoom in close. If you tap a cubelet, it disappears with a tinkling noise into tiny shards.

So what makes this better than virtual bubble wrap?

First of all, there are the gold coins. Destroying a cubelet gets you a single coin at first, but multipliers kick in as you tap ever more cubelets without missing and tapping a blank patch. You get double the coins after a run of 12 cubelets, triple at 26, quadruple at 42, and so on.

It's a pretty crude reward system, but you can cash in your coins for assorted tools that let you destroy more cubes per tap. Some tools are disabled for now, to be unlocked in the future, so perhaps there's a reason to save up.

Molyneux is intrigued by the possibilities. For example, what will happen when the end gets close?

"If you watch a marathon, all the runners will run in a pack, slipstreaming behind each other. Then there will come a point where somebody makes a break for it and runs in front," and he expects a similar realization in Curiosity when people realize it's changing from a cooperative project to a competition.

"That's why we have this notion of saving up," he adds. "Are you a hoarder? Will you spend [your coins] in a blaze of glory on the last few levels? Or are you a cooperator, spending now to get through early levels? It's a deeply interesting experiment in group mentality."

More experiments will center on Curiosity's virtual money -- but later with a connection to real-world money through in-app purchases.

"It's going to form a part of the experiment at some point in the cube. Monetization needs to be fair. We need to get our servers reliable before we monetize in any way," he said. "To test that motivation is fascinating."

Art and graffiti
And other motives are at work, too. Some people like to rapidly tap with multiple fingers, leaving tracks of obliterated cubes behind with a strategy that's good for long runs of coins. Others like to tidy up, perhaps motivated by the bonus awarded if a player clears the screen of all cubelets.

Artwork such as this heart often doesn't last long as others tap away the cubelets.

(Credit:
screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Second, there's the chance for global graffiti. Many people use the face of the cube as a tabula rasa, tapping away cubelets to construct pixelated words, patterns, or artwork. At the same time, others undo what's been created.

"One person is turning everything risque into little works of art. A lot of kids draw penises. He goes round and changes them into dog's faces and palm trees," Molyneux said.

Someone even painstakingly tapped out a marriage proposal, Molyneux said. "A lot of people want to express themselves on the cube," once they realize they're "connected to the entire world."

Third, there are the pictures. Some layers have photographs or other imagery that people want to reveal. Underneath one of the early layers were close-up photos of eyes, and people tapped away the cubes to reveal those eyes first before turning to the more mundane regions around them.

Molyneux was intrigued to see that on one layer, showing words excerpted from Charles Dickens, people tapped away enough to understand the word, but moved on to the next before instead of tapping to fully reveal the world.

The secret
Last, there's the secret.

Somewhere inside the cube is one cubelet that, when tapped, will reveal to a single person a Web address with a message that only Molyneux and one other person know. And Molyneux is terribly excited about it.

"I wake up thinking about it," he said. "I am known for saying exciting things and getting people excited, maybe overexcited, and that's been interpreted as overpromising. Maybe this time I'm understating the promise."

The secret isn't necessarily in the last, centermost cubelet, Molyneux said. If it looks like people are losing interest, 22Cans will "bring forward the end date," but right now he expects that "we have many hundreds of layers to go through yet."

The impetus for Curiosity was a TED talk by J.J. Abrams about the power of a secret, Molyneux said.

"When he was a kid, his grandfather gave him a locked box. He said, 'Don't open the box, just wonder what's in the box. It motivated him to be a brilliant writer," Molyneux said. "If that motivated him, maybe it's enough for me to say, 'Inside the center of this cube, for one person, there is something amazing, wonderful, and life-changing. It isn't just a dead cat or philosophical saying or video of 22cans saying 'Hurrah!" It is something truly meaningful."

And that curiosity apparently motivates people. 22Cans can show messages across the cube, and one is the phrase, "What's inside the cube?"

"What happens to the tap rate if we remind people? We notice the length of time people tap goes up," Molyneux said. Not only that, it keeps them coming back to the cube even though most people abandon new apps quickly. "That keeps them coming back."

Promoting Godus
Molyneux knows what to do with the limelight. He's promoting Curiosity, of course, and a succeeding experiment that will be "more like a game than Curiosity." And last week, peeling away one Curiosity cube layer revealed another 22Cans ambition: a new god game called Godus. The company is funding Godus with Kickstarter, and it's raised $270,000 since then.
Godus

A mockup of the terrain of 22Cans' Godus game due to arrive in September 2013. It's a god game, and players will be able to flick tornadoes across the landscape with a mouse movement or touch-screen swipe.

(Credit:
22Cans)

It's a new god game that draws on Populous, Dungeon Master, Black and White, and Fable. "We're going to steal the best bits and throw away the worst bits," he said in a video about Godus. That means the mutable landscape of Populous, the subterranean treasures of Dungeon Keeper, and the direct intervention of the hand of god in Black and White, he said. It'll run on Windows PCs, iOS devices, and maybe Macs, and it'll work in adrenaline-charged multiplayer or more relaxed single player modes.

But don't expect Godus to be a direct descendent of Curiosity's massive multiplayer approach, since linking each player's worlds into a single universe will be technically difficult and expensive. "Having all these worlds connected is a huge thing and it's going to require lots of servers, so big stretch goal, I'm afraid," Molyneux said in a video about Godus.

It's clear, though, that Molyneux is hooked on the idea of a game that spans the world through smartphones. "It's a new psychology. Never before have we been able to join people together in a single experience," Molyneux said.

He revels in what it's shown so far.

"On Curiosity, people have proposed to each other. There are obituaries on the cube. There are people from all cultures. There are political statements on the cube, art on the cube, crudity on the cube, censorship on the cube. All these come about because of stupidly simple thing of people tapping. If I can learn from that, then I could be part of making an experience that 100 million people could touch in one day," Molyneux said.

"We'd better get the servers right."

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Caterpillar Fungus Has Anti-Inflammatory Properties

In the Tibetan mountains, a fungus attaches itself to a moth larva burrowed in the soil. It infects and slowly consumes its host from within, taking over its brain and making the young caterpillar move to a position from which the fungus can grow and spore again.

Sounds like something out of science fiction, right? But for ailing Chinese consumers and nomadic Tibetan harvesters, the parasite called cordyceps means hope—and big money. Chinese markets sell the "golden worm," or "Tibetan mushroom"—thought to cure ailments from cancer to asthma to erectile dysfunction—for up to $50,000 (U.S.) per pound. Patients, following traditional medicinal practices, brew the fungal-infected caterpillar in tea or chew it raw.

Now the folk medicine is getting scientific backing. A new study published in the journal RNA finds that cordycepin, a chemical derived from the caterpillar fungus, has anti-inflammatory properties.

"Inflammation is normally a beneficial response to a wound or infection, but in diseases like asthma it happens too fast and to too high of an extent," said study co-author Cornelia H. de Moor of the University of Nottingham. "When cordycepin is present, it inhibits that response strongly."

And it does so in a way not previously seen: at the mRNA stage, where it inhibits polyadenylation. That means it stops swelling at the genetic cellular level—a novel anti-inflammatory approach that could lead to new drugs for cancer, asthma, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and cardiovascular-disease patients who don't respond well to current medications.

From Worm to Pill

But such new drugs may be a long way off. The science of parasitic fungi is still in its early stages, and no medicine currently available utilizes cordycepin as an anti-inflammatory. The only way a patient could gain its benefits would by consuming wild-harvested mushrooms.

De Moor cautions against this practice. "I can't recommend taking wild-harvested medications," she says. "Each sample could have a completely different dose, and there are mushrooms where [taking] a single bite will kill you."

Today 96 percent of the world's caterpillar-fungus harvest comes from the high Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayan range. Fungi from this region are of the subspecies Ophiocordyceps sinensis, locally known as yartsa gunbu ("summer grass, winter worm"). While highly valued in Chinese traditional medicine, these fungi have relatively low levels of cordycepin. What's more, they grow only at elevations of 10,000 to 16,500 feet and cannot be farmed. All of which makes yartsa gunbu costly for Chinese consumers: A single fungal-infected caterpillar can fetch $30.

Brave New Worm

Luckily for researchers, and for potential consumers, another rare species of caterpillar fungus, Cordyceps militaris, is capable of being farmed—and even cultivated to yield much higher levels of cordycepin.

De Moor says that's not likely to discourage Tibetan harvesters, many of whom make a year's salary in just weeks by finding and selling yartsa gunbu. Scientific proof of cordycepin's efficacy will only increase demand for the fungus, which could prove dangerous. "With cultivation we have a level of quality control that's missing in the wild," says de Moor.

"There is definitely some truth somewhere in certain herbal medicinal traditions, if you look hard enough," says de Moor. "But ancient healers probably wouldn't notice a 10 percent mortality rate resulting from herbal remedies. In the scientific world, that's completely unacceptable." If you want to be safe, she adds, "wait for the medicine."

Ancient Chinese medical traditions—which also use ground tiger bones as a cure for insomnia, elephant ivory for religious icons, and rhinoceros horns to dispel fevers—are controversial but popular. Such remedies remain in demand regardless of scientific advancement—and endangered animals continue to be killed in order to meet that demand. While pills using cordycepin from farmed fungus might someday replace yartsa gunbu harvesting, tigers, elephants, and rhinos are disappearing much quicker than worms.

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Two Winners in Record Powerball Jackpot

Winning tickets for the record Powerball jackpot worth more than $587 million were purchased in Arizona and Missouri.

Missouri Lottery official Susan Goedde confirmed to ABC News this morning that one of the winning tickets was purchased in the state, but they would not announce which town until later this morning.

Arizona lottery officials said they had no information on that state's winner or winners but would announce where it was sold during a news conference later in the day.

The winning numbers for the jackpot were 5, 23, 16, 22 and 29. The Powerball was 6.

The jackpot swelled to $587.5 million, according to Lottery official Sue Dooley. The two winners will split the jackpot each getting $293.75 million. The cash payout is $192.5 million each.

An additional 8,924,123 players won smaller prizes, according to Powerball's website.

"There were 58 winners of $1 million and there were eight winners of $2 million. So a total of $74 million," said Chuck Strutt, Director of the Multi-State Lottery Association.

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This is the 27th win for Missouri, ranking it second in the nation for lottery winners after Indiana, which has 38 wins. Arizona has had 10 Powerball jackpot wins in its history.

Players bought tickets at the rate of 131,000 every minute up until an hour before the deadline of 11 p.m. ET, according to lottery officials.

The jackpot had already rolled over 16 consecutive times without a winner. That fact, plus the doubling in price of a Powerball ticket, accounted for the unprecedented richness of the pot.

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"Back in January, we moved Powerball from being a $1 game to $2," said Mary Neubauer, a spokeswoman at the game's headquarters in Iowa. "We thought at the time that this would mean bigger and faster-growing jackpots."

That proved true. The total, she said, began taking "huge jumps -- another $100 million since Saturday." It then jumped another $50 million.

The biggest Powerball pot on record until now -- $365 million -- was won in 2006 by eight Lincoln, Neb., co-workers.
As the latest pot swelled, lottery officials said they began getting phone calls from all around the world.

"When it gets this big," said Neubauer, "we get inquiries from Canada and Europe from people wanting to know if they can buy a ticket. They ask if they can FedEx us the money."

The answer she has to give them, she said, is: "Sorry, no. You have to buy a ticket in a member state from a licensed retail location."

About 80 percent of players don't choose their own Powerball number, opting instead for a computer-generated one.
Asked if there's anything a player can do to improve his or her odds of winning, Neubauer said there isn't -- apart from buying a ticket, of course.

Lottery officials put the odds of winning this Powerball pot at one in 175 million, meaning you'd have been 25 times more likely to win an Academy Award.

Skip Garibaldi, a professor of mathematics at Emory University in Atlanta, provided additional perspective: You are three times more likely to die from a falling coconut, he said; seven times more likely to die from fireworks, "and way more likely to die from flesh-eating bacteria" (115 fatalities a year) than you are to win the Powerball lottery.

Segueing, then, from death to life, Garibaldi noted that even the best physicians, equipped with the most up-to-date equipment, can't predict the timing of a child's birth with much accuracy.

"But let's suppose," he said, "that your doctor managed to predict the day, the hour, the minute and the second your baby would be born."

The doctor's uncanny prediction would be "at least 100 times" more likely than your winning.

Even though he knows the odds all too well, Garibaldi said he usually plays the lottery.

When it gets this big, I'll buy a couple of tickets," he said. "It's kind of exciting. You get this feeling of anticipation. You get to think about the fantasy."

So, did he buy two tickets this time?

"I couldn't," he told ABC News. "I'm in California" -- one of eight states that doesn't offer Powerball.

In case you were wondering, this Saturday's Powerball jackpot is starting at $40 million.

ABC News Radio contributed to this report.

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