Best videos of 2012: First motion MRI of unborn twins

Joanna Carver, reporter

These twins imaged in the womb are ranked at number 6 in our best videos of 2012 countdown.

If you want to get a sense of what it might be like to share a womb with a sibling, this video may give you a glimpse. For the first time, unborn twins have been captured using cinematic MRI, a technique that images slices of the body several times to create a video with astonishing detail.

According to Marisa Taylor-Clarke of Imperial College London, who recorded the images, this is "raw" footage, unlike typical videos of the womb, which require computer processing afterwards. She uses the technique to study twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a potentially fatal condition where one twin's growth is stunted when its sibling receives more of the blood supply.

For more about the video check out the original article, "Unborn twins caught on video MRI for the first time". If you enjoyed this post, see the first video of a couple having sex in an MRI scanner.

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Venture Scouts, Girl Guides conferred prestigious awards

SINGAPORE: Eighteen Venture Scouts and seven Girl Guides in Singapore have been conferred the highest honour in the movement.

President Tony Tan Keng Yam presented the President's Scout Award and the President's Guide Award for 2012 at the Istana on Friday.

The awards are the highest honour given to Singapore's most all-rounded Venture Scouts and Girl Guides.

The awards come as recognition of the recipients' excellent performance, dedication to the movement, and service to the community.

- CNA/ck

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Facebook's $1 messages: one more way to get your credit card

Facebook, which began the year with a reputation for caring more about its users than about making a buck, is ending the year with the rollout of yet another way to try to squeeze more money from its members.

This latest money-making effort comes with a revamp of its popular Messages service -- that part of Facebook through which you can message/e-mail your "friends" and, in fact, those who aren't your friends. What's changing -- and a spokesman describes it to CNET as a "small experiment" -- is that Facebook will start charging some people for messages they want to send to people they're not friends with.

The $1 cost seems steep just to shoot someone a message, but no matter. Facebook will surely drop the price if no one uses it. But the bigger point: This latest "test" shows that Facebook, eager to prove to Wall Street that it's building a cash-generating empire, is looking for more ways to add revenue streams not tied to advertising and, importantly, is trying to get more user credit cards on file.

Unlike some other titans of consumer tech -- namely, Apple and Amazon -- Facebook has a vast wealth of data about all of us but relatively few credit cards. Most of the credit card numbers it has -- a number it won't disclose -- it's accumulated from people who play games and pay up for virtual items. But that's far from enough for Facebook's ambitions.

The company has recently added other features that require credit card, and so far Facebook has given no indication for how those are going. In October, for instance, it started letting people pay $7 to promote a post. And earlier this month, it opened up Facebook Gifts to all U.S. users and added a range of new retail partners so that users can send friends everything from wine to clothes from BabyGap -- provided, of course, they enter a credit card. Anyone who's tried it might notice that Facebook doesn't take PayPal. Then, the next time you decide to buy a gift, your information card information pops up and is ready to go.

This is the way Facebook wants it, particularly if it rolls outs more services and offers that people can pay for through their phones. The more credit cards Facebook has on file, the more likely mobile users will send gifts or whatever else Facebook has in store as part of its business plan.

Facebook's messaging effort hardly seems like a slam dunk. To be fair, Facebook seems to be tip toeing into this, probably aware that some people might get annoyed if strangers are suddenly blasting them with messages. The pay-to-message experiment comes as part broader changes to Facebook's messaging system, which today is rolling out to every user worldwide. It's all a bit confusing in that Facebook sort of way.

Before these changes, users could send messages to strangers unless those people set restricted privacy settings, something Facebook says most people don't do. Under the new system, users can message anyone regardless of their privacy settings; the messages end up in a folder labeled "other," which is designed to catch spam. That's where the money comes in. To bypass the recipients "other" folder, users can pay $1 to make sure their messages end up in a person's main inbox. (This is not currently available for Pages, only individual Facebook members).

There is no way to opt out of this newly updated Messages system. The only way not to get messages from strangers is to block them after the fact. While those who don't want to message strangers may find the $1 messaging service odd, there are others who may find the option handy.

Facebook argues it would be useful if you were, for example, planning a surprise party for a friend through Facebook. Four of the five people you are inviting to this party are friends with you as well, but one is not. You could make sure the fifth person gets the invite in their Inbox, instead of the "other" folder, by paying the $1. Additionally, there are people -- recruiters, job seekers, public relations folks or (ahem) journalists -- who use Facebook to network.

Facebook won't say how many people use the messaging now or how many people send messages to users who aren't their friends, but even if a small portion of Facebook's billion-plus members decide this is a worthwhile tool, there's plenty of potential -- both for cash and credit.

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Hollies Get Prickly for a Reason

With shiny evergreen leaves and bright red berries, holly trees are a naturally festive decoration seen throughout the Christmas season.

They're famously sharp. But not all holly leaves are prickly, even on the same tree. And scientists now think they know how the plants are able to make sharper leaves, seemingly at will. (Watch a video about how Christmas trees are made.)

A new study published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society suggests leaf variations on a single tree are the combined result of animals browsing on them and the trees' swift molecular response to that sort of environmental pressure.

Carlos Herrera of the National Research Council of Spain led the study in southeastern Spain. He and his team investigated the European holly tree, Ilex aquifolium. Hollies, like other plants, can make different types of leaves at the same time. This is called heterophylly. Out of the 40 holly trees they studied, 39 trees displayed different kinds of leaves, both prickly and smooth.

Five holly leaves from the same tree.

Photographs by Emmanuel Lattes, Alamy

Some trees looked like they had been browsed upon by wild goats and deer. On those trees, the lower 8 feet (2.5 meters) had more prickly leaves, while higher up the leaves tended to be smooth. Scientists wanted to figure out how the holly trees could make the change in leaf shape so quickly.

All of the leaves on a tree are genetic twins and share exactly the same DNA sequence. By looking in the DNA for traces of a chemical process called methylation, which modifies DNA but doesn't alter the organism's genetic sequence, the team could determine whether leaf variation was a response to environmental or genetic changes. They found a relationship between recent browsing by animals, the growth of prickly leaves, and methylation.

"In holly, what we found is that the DNA of prickly leaves was significantly less methylated than prickless leaves, and from this we inferred that methylation changes are ultimately responsible for leaf shape changes," Herrera said. "The novelty of our study is that we show that these well-known changes in leaf type are associated with differences in DNA methylation patterns, that is, epigenetic changes that do not depend on variation in the sequence of DNA."

"Heterophylly is an obvious feature of a well-known species, and this has been ascribed to browsing. However, until now, no one has been able to come up with a mechanism for how this occurs," said Mike Fay, chief editor of the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society and head of genetics at the Kew Royal Botanic Gardens. "With this new study, we are now one major step forward towards understanding how."

Epigenetic changes take place independently of variation in the genetic DNA sequence. (Read more about epigenetics in National Geographic magazine's "A Thing or Two About Twins.")

"This has clear and important implications for plant conservation," Herrera said. In natural populations that have their genetic variation depleted by habitat loss, the ability to respond quickly, without waiting for slower DNA changes, could help organisms survive accelerated environmental change. The plants' adaptability, he says, is an "optimistic note" amidst so many conservation concerns. (Related: "Wild Holly, Mistletoe, Spread With Warmer Winters.")

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NRA to Speak on Stopping Newtown Repeat

For the past week, leadership at the National Rifle Association has largely stayed away from the media, but this morning the group may weigh in on how to keep a deadly shooting massacre like last week's at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school from happening again.

The NRA will hold a news conference in Washington, D.C., just before 11 a.m.

Its leadership has held off on interviews this week after refusing to appear on Sunday morning public affairs shows this past weekend.

The group came under pressure after Adam Lanza, 20, killed 20 children and six adults before shooting himself at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown last Friday.

"Out of respect for the families, and as a matter of common decency, we have given time for mourning, prayer and a full investigation of the facts before commenting," the group said in a press release Tuesday. "The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again."

NRA News anchor Ginny Simone said Thursday that in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, membership surged "with an average of 8,000 new members a day."

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said the NRA is partially to blame for the tragedy.

"We're not trying to take away your right to advance the interests of gun owners, hunters, people who want to protect themselves," Bloomberg told "Nightline" anchor Cynthia McFadden in an interview Thursday. "But that's not an absolute right to encourage behavior which causes things like Connecticut. In fact, Connecticut is because of some of their actions."

Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/AP Photo

President Obama Launches Gun-Violence Task Force Watch Video

President Obama on Gun Control: Ready to Act? Watch Video

Joe Biden to Lead Task Force to Prevent Gun Violence Watch Video

The guns used in the attack were legally purchased and owned by the shooter's mother, Nancy Lanza, who Adam Lanza shot to death before his assault on the school.

In the aftermath of the shooting, many, including Bloomberg, have called for stricter regulations on the type of weapons used in this and other instances of mass gun violence this year.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has said she intends to introduce a bill banning assault weapons on the first day of next year's Congress -- a step the president said he supports.

President Obama announced Wednesday that Vice President Joe Biden will head a task force of leaders from across the country that will evaluate the best solutions to reduce gun violence in the United States.

Obama said he will "use all the powers of this office to help advance efforts aimed at preventing more tragedies like this."

Mayors Against Illegal Guns, of which Mayor Bloomberg is co-chair, released a letter to President Obama signed by more than 750 mayors calling on him to produce a plan to "make it harder for dangerous people to possess guns."

The letter asked for mandatory background checks for gun buyers, a ban on high-capacity rifles and ammunition magazines, and a designation of gun trafficking as a federal crime.

ABC News' George Stephanopoulos looked at whether strict gun control laws like those that have worked for the United Kingdom and Japan could work for the U.S. on "Good Morning America" Thursday.

Others have argued that, rather than banning guns, the government should be arming teachers and administrators in schools so that they can defend students in the event of another school shooting.

While Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed a measure that would have let guns into schools on Tuesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell praised the idea.

Speaking on the NRA's daily news program Tuesday, Dave Koppel of the Independence Institute said the teachers at Sandy Hook should have had weapons.

"We'd certainly be talking about fewer innocent people and children dead," Koppel said.

While a national debate over the necessary solutions to prevent a tragedy of this nature from ever happening again wages on, Connecticut residents will have to wait "several months" before the final Connecticut State Police report on the Newtown shootings is complete.

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Best videos of 2012: Experience a trip into a wormhole

Joanna Carver, reporter

This wild wormhole ride comes in at number 7 in our best videos of 2012 countdown.

Pondering what the trip of a lifetime would be? This animation by Andrew Hamilton from the University of Colorado at Boulder shows what the eye-boggling journey through a wormhole would look like.

First, you fall into the event horizon of a black hole. Once inside, you'll see the entire history of the universe in a flash of radiation. People would be vaporised by this point, so you'll have to be superhuman to make your way back out. You emerge from the black hole and tumble into a wormhole, where the flow of space around you reverses and you head back the way you came. Finally, you find yourself in a white hole - a time-reversed black hole - and speed forward faster than light.

Another radiation flash shows you the entire future of the universe, then another shows you the entire past of the new universe you're now entering. The animation then lets you turn around and see the universe you've just left.

For more about the visualisation, check out the original post: "What a trip through a wormhole would look like". You may also like to read our related feature, "Intergalactic subway: All aboard the wormhole express" or experience Hamilton's animation of a trip through a black hole.

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Singapore shares end 0.5% higher

SINGAPORE -- Singapore share prices ended 0.5% higher on Thursday, shrugging off negative cues from Wall Street.

The blue-chip Straits Times Index (STI) rose 16.95 points to end at 3,175.52, supported by the announcement of fresh easing measures by the Bank of Japan.

While the market opened lower amid fresh concerns over whether a US fiscal cliff deal will emerge before year-end, support came from the BOJ's moves to increase the size of its asset purchase programme and its plans to review its inflation target.

In the broader market, 2.03 billion shares changed hands, with gainers and losers nearly evenly matched. There were 198 gainers and 196 losers.

Among the gainers, Olam rose 1.3% to S$1.56. In two straight days of buying in the open market, Singapore's Temasek Holdings has raised its stake in the commodities trader to 18% from 16%.

- CNA/ir

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Facebook in 2012: 5 ways its IPO changed the social giant

Now that was a year Mark Zuckerberg will never forget -- even if he didn't celebrate each moment on Facebook, as he wants the rest of the world to do. Sure, he turned 28 and married longtime girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, in a backyard ceremony at the couple's home in Palo Alto, Calif. But that's the stuff of ordinary men. Make no mistake: 2012 will go down as the year in which Zuckerberg came out from under his hoodie and tried to prove himself as leader of one of the titans of consumer tech.

Is he succeeding? So far, sure, and more so as the year went on. While plenty of people like to complain about Facebook -- it's a time soak, a privacy nightmare -- plenty of others, as in hundreds of millions, clearly love it. Which is why Wall Street was in a tizzy when Facebook finally went public, an event that forever changed Facebook, making it far and away the most important development at Facebook this year.

1. Facebook's faceplant

Not since the Internet mania of the 1990s had we seen such hype and expectation over an IPO. And why not? This was Facebook, after all, a new kind of media company that had amassed hundreds of millions of passionate users and was already turning a profit on $4 billion in revenue by the time it filed to go public. This one was going to make armchair investors everywhere rich, and fast.

We all know what happened: The hype -- and the $100 billion-plus valuation Wall Street bankers awarded Facebook -- was all too much. Way too much. Sure, Facebook pulled off the biggest Internet IPO in history, which was great for Facebook, but then its shares began their speedy descent. Lawsuits were filed around the handling the IPO. Some even called for Zuckerberg's head, although Zuckerberg structured the company in way that makes firing him impossible. And the whole mess quashed hopes of a return to 1999-style Internet mania.

The upshot: Facebook's botched IPO sent fears across startup land and even now venture capitalists are cutting fewer checks to Zuckerberg wannabes since the possibility of a big IPO exit -- at least for consumer Internet companies -- is grim for now. (To be fair, IPO duds Groupon and Zynga also played a big role on this front). Despite all this, Facebook's stock, while still far from its IPO price of $38 a share, ended the year on a tear as Zuckerberg and team began to show they were serious about making money, especially from mobile.

2. Zuckerberg buys Instagram
Almost everything we hear about from Facebook these days has to do with mobile, and how the company has been restructured to emphasis "mobile first." And nothing shows just how concerned Zuckerberg was about the great mobile migration then when he singlehandedly struck a deal with Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom to buy his two-year-old startup in a stock-and-cash deal worth $1 billion. Istagram had amassed 33 million users, and Zuckerberg knew that it was both a threat and the future. So he pounced -- just a month before Facebook's May IPO.

The critics pounced. Why spend $1 billion for a money losing startup without a business model? But Zuckerberg didn't care. And when Facebook amended its IPO filing with the SEC -- just over a week before the IPO -- to emphasize how the shift of its users to mobile devices was threatening its long-term ad revenue, it all all started to make sense. Zuckerberg needed more mobile juice, at any cost. By the time the Instagram deal finally closed in October, the price came in at $715 million due to Facebook's sagging stock. Instagram is still on fire. It reached 100 million users in September, and, by one account, people are spending more time on it than on Twitter.

Then -- and this arguably deserves its own entry among top stories for 2012 -- management blundered badly in mid-December when it unveiled Instagram's new terms of service, which said that the company could sell your photos or use them in advertisements. You have to wonder who signed off on this one. Unsurprisingly, the backlash was swift. Instagram co-founder and chief executive Kevin Systrom apologized, backpedaled and said the company is "working on updated language."

3. Speaking of a billion...
This was the year when, with great fanfare, Facebook crossed the billion member mark. No consumer Internet company -- heck, no company, period -- has ever done that. Not bad for what began as a side project in Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room eight years earlier. It's worth pointing out that these are "monthly active users," measured as people who log on to Facebook at least once a month. Still, that's one seventh of the entire world population. And Facebook's daily active user number is hardly shabby. That metric averaged 584 million in September, a 28 percent jump from the period year. As for mobile? Monthly active mobile users soared 61 percent to 604 million.

Zuckerberg and his team aren't satisfied with one billion, of course. Around five billion people are expected to be online by the end of the decade -- largely via phones -- and Facebook wants all of them conducting their Internet lives through Facebook. Growth has slowed in the U.S, but the company has its sights on all pockets of the globe, as evidenced by its reworked instant messenger app released in early December.

4. I'm talking to you, Wall Street
The rap against Zuckerberg, at least from Wall Street, had been that he didn't care about the money side of the business. In September, he sat for his first live interview (at the TechCrunch Distrupt conference) since the IPO and worked hard to disabuse the world that notion, arguing that Facebook can be a great place for users and can make a ton of money. This will go down as the day Zuckberg took control of the narrative and his messaging to Wall Street. This was also when he began preaching that mobile wasn't a problem for Facebook, but an opportunity -- a talking point that clearly went out to all Facebook execs, who now love talking about mobile, mobile and more mobile.

In September, Zuckerberg started talking about the huge mobile opportunity

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET)

Soon after that, Zuckerberg showed it was more than talk. Facebook started inserting ads -- called "Sponsored Stories" -- on its mobile apps in March, its first effort to make money from mobile. And the results started to show up this fall. When Facebook reported its third-quarter earnings, it said that mobile ads made up 14 percent of its total ad revenue -- largely putting to an end to the biggest worry among Wall Street since Facebook went public.

5. Buy your friend a drink
It's hard to pinpoint one money-making tactic that Facebook launched in 2012 as most important. The company did go all out in this regard. A few examples: It launched Facebook Exchange, an ad-bidding system that lets advertisers better target users on Facebook by tracking what else they do across the Web; it started letting users pay $7 to promote a post to ensure it'll land in a lot of News Feeds; it began charging business for Facebook Offers, a way for merchants to send Groupon-like deals to your News Feed.

But here's one that's unlike the others: The launch of Facebook Gifts, which lets you easily buy a Facebook friend a gift -- from an
iTunes gift card, to an item from Baby Gap or even a bottle of wine that gets shipped to your home. This is a huge move. It helps Facebook get credit card numbers on files -- important for future products -- and marks Facebook's march into commerce. Arguably, Facebook Gifts isn't yet about the money -- it's more about keeping people using Facebook -- but that'll change quickly.

And when that happens, that will certainly give Zuckerberg and his team something they can all drink to.

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Detecting Rabid Bats Before They Bite

A picture is worth a thousand words—or in the case of bats, a rabies diagnosis. A new study reveals that rabid bats have cooler faces compared to uninfected colony-mates. And researchers are hopeful that thermal scans of bat faces could improve rabies surveillance in wild colonies, preventing outbreaks that introduce infections into other animals—including humans.

Bats are a major reservoir for the rabies virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. Previous research shows that bats can transmit their strains to other animals, potentially putting people at risk. (Popular Videos: Bats share the screen with creepy co-stars.)

Rabies, typically transmitted in saliva, targets the brain and is almost always fatal in animals and people if left untreated. No current tests detect rabies in live animals—only brain tissue analysis is accurate.

Searching for a way to detect the virus in bats before the animals died, rabies specialist James Ellison and his colleagues at the CDC turned to a captive colony of big brown bats (Eptesicus fuscus). Previous studies had found temperature increases in the noses of rabid raccoons, so the team expected to see similar results with bats.

Researchers established normal temperature ranges for E. fuscus—the bat species most commonly sent for rabies testing—then injected 24 individuals with the virus. The 21-day study monitored facial temperatures with infrared cameras, and 13 of the 21 bats that developed rabies showed temperature drops of more than 4ºC.

"I was surprised to find the bats' faces were cooler because rabies causes inflammation—and that creates heat," said Ellison. "No one has done this before with bats," he added, and so researchers aren't sure what's causing the temperature changes they've discovered in the mammals. (Related: "Bats Have Superfast Muscles—A Mammal First.")

Although thermal scans didn't catch every instance of rabies in the colony, this method may be a way to detect the virus in bats before symptoms appear. The team plans to fine-tune their measurements of facial temperatures, and then Ellison hopes to try surveillance in the field.

This study was published online November 9 in Zoonoses and Public Health.

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Virginia Tech Survivor Fights Back Against Guns

Colin Goddard knows what it's like to be in a classroom when an armed man bursts through the door and starts randomly shooting people. Goddard was a student at Virginia Tech when a gunman shot him and killed 32 people in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

"It was the most terrifying nine minutes of my life," Goddard told Terry Moran of "Nightline" Wednesday.
"One moment you're conjugating French verbs, the next you're shot."

Four of Seung-Hui Cho's bullets hit Goddard April 16, 2007. Three of the bullets are still in him and serve as a constant reminder in his work with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Goddard does more than just lobby and appear in public-service announcements. He says he goes undercover to show how easy it is to buy guns without any background check. It's the subject of his documentary called "Living for 32," after the 32 people who died at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

"There is not one thing that will stop all shootings," Goddard said. "
There's not one policy that will save us all, but a background check is something that will make it more difficult for dangerous people to get their hands on a gun."

School Shooting Survivor Documents Gun Law Fight Watch Video

Virginia Tech Documentary Debuts at Sundance Watch Video

In "Living for 32," Goddard says he was able to buy, for example, an Egyptian Maadi AK-47, a TEC-9 and a MAC-11 machine pistol at gun shows across the United States.

"I bought the same gun that was used to shoot me," he said. "I bought it all, all without a background check and it was all legal. My question is, 'Why is that legal?'"

Only licensed dealers are required by law to perform background checks on the people to whom they sell guns while private sellers can make gun-show sales with no background checks.

This is known as the "gun-show loophole" and Goddard has made it his mission to close it.

In one instance, Goddard was able to buy the Maadi Egyptian for $660 and was told by the dealer "there's no tax and no paperwork."

The dealer requested to see Goddard's Ohio driver's license. When Goddard couldn't provide it, he was still able to purchase the gun by providing an Ohio address instead.

"I didn't think I was going to be able to do it at first," he said. "And then once I did it once, then twice, then three times. I was like, 'Wow, this is really easy.'

"Toward the end I wasn't even thinking about it. I tried to do it as quickly as I could, say as few words as I could."

Polls show that a majority of Americans favor closing the loophole.

Goddard says closing the loophole won't end all gun violence, but that the government can do better.

The Brady Campaign recently launched a YouTube series, "We Are Better than This," in the wake of last week's shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The videos feature celebrities and, perhaps more significantly, families of mass-shooting victims.

In the first three videos, Goddard appears, as do Lonnie and Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Redfield Ghawi, died in the Aurora, Colo., mass shooting in July.

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