ASUS Transformer Prime pre-order shipments delayed at Best Buy, Amazon

ASUS' Eee Pad Transformer Prime has already suffered a few setbacks on its march to the US market and unfortunately, it looks as if another obstacle may be on the horizon. According to a handful of tips we've received this morning, Best Buy has been sending out emails to users who pre-ordered the new tablet for delivery this week, informing them that shipments have been "back-ordered," and delayed by one to two weeks. This means, of course, that some buyers may not receive the device until after Christmas. In its email, Best Buy gave its customers the option of canceling their orders outright, replacing it with a similar device, or searching the product at a brick and mortar location (a customer service rep told us that the Transformer Prime is not in stock). Some who ordered the slate on Amazon, meanwhile, have received emails informing them that their orders were "inadvertently canceled," and offering them the chance to pre-order it again today, along with a $10 gift card to make up for the inconvenience. We asked ASUS about the Transformer Prime's delivery status, and received the following response:
We started filling the pipelines this past week and will continue to do so on an almost daily basis this coming week, although any shipments to the partners after Wednesday will probably mean availability the following week based on logistics. But we expect the inventory pipeline to be full by the first of the year. The orders shipped this past week and starting this week will cover the pre-order allocations and then start allowing online or in-store availability.
We'll be following this story closely, so check this space for any further updates.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

ASUS Transformer Prime pre-order shipments delayed at Best Buy, Amazon originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Dec 2011 02:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/19/asus-transformer-prime-pre-order-shipments-delayed-at-best-buy/

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Colts finally win one, beating Titans 27-13 (AP)

INDIANAPOLIS ? The Indianapolis Colts are winless no longer.

Dan Orlovsky threw one touchdown pass and the key block on an 80-yard TD run, leading the Colts to their first win of the season, 27-13 over Tennessee on Sunday.

Indianapolis (1-13) avoided becoming the second team in NFL history to go 0-16.

The loss dealt a serious blow to the Titans' playoff hopes. Quarterback Matt Hasselbeck was picked off twice and Chris Johnson rushed for only 55 yards for Tennessee (7-7).

Orlovsky gave Indy a 10-6 lead with an 18-yard TD pass to Reggie Wayne in the third quarter, and Jacob Lacey made it 17-6 with a 32-yard interception return for a TD.

Jake Locker got the Titans within 20-13 with a 7-yard TD pass to Nate Washington with 3:43 to go.

But on the next play, with Donald Brown reversing field, Orlovsky threw a block that helped Brown get to the corner and he sprinted 80 yards to seal the win.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/sports/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111218/ap_on_sp_fo_ga_su/fbn_titans_colts

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Comprehensive euro zone deal "beyond reach": Fitch (Reuters)

ROME/BERLIN (Reuters) ? A comprehensive solution to the euro zone debt crisis is beyond the region's reach, rating agency Fitch said, warning that six of its economies including Italy and Spain could be hit with credit downgrades in the near future.

The warning late Friday, the second time in two weeks that the bloc has been threatened with multiple ratings markdowns, heightened pressure on leaders to get to grips with the turmoil.

Fitch also said it might also cut AAA-rated France within two years and urged the European Central Bank to take a more active firefighting role.

One ECB policymaker said Saturday that time was running out to come up with solutions to a crisis that could spark a global slump. Another said the bank would not expand the bond buying program it launched to keep a lid on vulnerable states' debt costs.

Underscoring tensions within the bloc, a week after a key EU summit failed to reassure financial markets the crisis was being tackled, Italy's Prime Minister Mario Monti urged EU policymakers Friday to beware of dividing the continent.

ECB ratesetter Erkki Liikanen said that, to prevent a flurry of ratings downgrades and a credit freeze, the continent's leaders needed to act fast to beef up the rescue funds designed to provide a safety net for debt-laden member countries.

"The worse scenario is that the negative cycle continues, uncertainty grows, which would lead to a global recession," Liikanen - a member of the bank's governing council -told Finnish public broadcaster YLE in an interview Saturday.

International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde had said no country was immune from the crisis and each needed to act to head off the risk of a global depression.

In a swipe against Germany, Italy's Monti said Europe's response "should be wrapped in a long-term sustainable approach, not just to feed short-term hunger for rigor in some countries."

Pushing for governments to eliminate their bloated budget deficits, Germany has led resistance to allowing the ECB to ramp up its bond purchases to a big enough scale to douse the crisis.

But Fitch added to the pressure for just such a move.

The agency said that, following the EU summit, it had concluded that "a 'comprehensive solution' to the eurozone crisis is technically and politically beyond reach."

"Of particular concern is the absence of a credible financial backstop," it said. "In Fitch's opinion this requires more active and explicit commitment from the ECB to mitigate the risk of self-fulfilling liquidity crises."

A second ECB policymaker, Juergen Stark, said expanding bond buys would not end the crisis, while swift implementation of the plan on closer fiscal union agreed at the summit was crucial.

"Don't ask too much of the central bank," Stark - who steps down from the executive board at year-end - was quoted as saying Saturday in pre-released extracts from a German magazine interview.

Graphics on euro zone crisis http://r.reuters.com/hyb65p

Interactive timeline http://link.reuters.com/rev89r

MULTIPLE DOWNGRADE THREAT

Fitch put Belgium, Spain, Slovenia, Italy, Ireland, and Cyprus on negative watch, which could mean a downgrade within three months.

"The systemic nature of the euro zone crisis is having a profoundly adverse effect on economic and financial stability across the region," it said.

Less than two weeks earlier, citing continuing disagreements among policymakers over how to tackle the crisis, rival agency Standard & Poor's put the ratings of 15 euro zone states, including Germany and France, on review for one- to two-notch downgrades.

The third main agency, Moody's, Friday cut Belgium's credit rating by two notches, saying the crisis raised funding risks for countries with high public debt burdens, and said a further downgrade was possible within two years.

Belgium's Finance Minister Steven Vanackere told Reuters on Saturday the cut was not a big surprise but had added pressure on the country to hit next year's budget deficit target of 2.

A first draft of a planned new 'fiscal compact' among euro zone countries and aspiring members, published Friday, showed that countries could be taken to the European Court of Justice if they did not meet agreed budget goals.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel - under pressure from the Bundesbank to force debt-saddled euro zone countries to reform and save their way out of crisis with austerity measures - has led a push for automatic sanctions for deficit "sinners."

This has fed concerns that excessive belt-tightening in southern countries could send their economies into a negative spiral with no prospect of growing out of crisis, while feeding resentment in the prosperous north.

In France, officials have sought to prepare the public for the likelihood that Paris will lose its top-notch rating for the first time since 1975, playing down the potential setback and focusing attention instead on questioning neighboring Britain's AAA rating. President Nicolas Sarkozy had vowed to keep the top rating, and it could become an issue in next year's election campaign.

EFSF FIREPOWER

Euro zone officials said potential downgrades, particularly from S&P, could raise the cost of borrowing for the region's existing EFSF bailout fund, but would not make a big difference to its operations.

EFSF chief Klaus Regling said Friday about 600 billion euros was available to fight the crisis.

"If Italy and Spain were to ask for support, their gross financing needs for 2012 are less than that and I don't think they would need to be taken off the market," he said.

Euro zone countries will hold talks next Monday on the draft text of the euro zone fiscal compact and on bilateral loans to the International Monetary Fund, officials in Brussels said. Slovak Finance Minister Ivan Miklos told Reuters they would commit 150 billion euros to boost the IMF's lending capacity.

The United States has refused to offer additional funding and it remains to be seen how much countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and India are willing to commit.

Commercial banks appear to be resisting pressure from governments to help debt-choked euro zone countries by using cheap money lent by the ECB to buy more sovereign bonds.

The chief executive of UniCredit, one of Italy's two biggest banks, said this week that using ECB money to buy government debt "wouldn't be logical."

Euro zone governments need to sell almost 80 billion euros of fresh debt in January alone, and the stand-off between policymakers and banks could turn the slow-burning debt crisis into a conflagration in the New Year.

(Additional reporting by Steve Scherer in Rome, Annika Breidthardt in Berlin, Gareth Gore, Natsuko Waki, Kirsten Donovan and Ana Nicolaci da Costa in London, Martin Santa in Bratislava, Ingrid Melander in Athens; Writing by John Stonestreet, Paul Carrel and Paul Taylor; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/eurobiz/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111217/bs_nm/us_eurozone

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Surgical Checklist Helps Lower Patient Death Rates, Study Shows

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A surgical checklist, similar to what pilots use before every flight, can lower patient death rates, a study at one hospital confirms -- though the drop was smaller than past research has found.

About 100,000 hospitals worldwide now use the surgical safety checklist developed by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The list has 19 items that the surgical team checks right before and after a patient's procedure. That includes making sure they have the right patient, that they're operating on the correct body site and are aware of the patient's allergies.

A 2009 study of eight hospitals in different countries found that in the year after the centers adopted the WHO checklist, the overall death rate among surgery patients dropped from 1.5 percent to 0.8 percent.

In the new study, researchers at University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands, found a significantly smaller effect at their hospital.

Surgery patients' death rate dipped from 3.1 percent to 2.8 percent in the year-and-a-half after the hospital took up the WHO checklist.

But a lot depended on surgical teams' actually completing the checklist, the researchers report in the Annals of Surgery.

Patients with fully completed checklists, they found, had about one-third of the death risk of those without checklists. But the lists were completed for only 39 percent of patients.

"Checklist compliance was clearly far from perfect in our hospital," write Dr. Wilton A. van Klein and his colleagues.

One reason for that was that more-critical patients needing emergency surgery were less likely to have a completed checklist. But that did not seem to explain the lower death risk among patients with fully completed checklists, according to the researchers.

"Mortality was strongly associated with checklist compliance," van Klein's team writes, "suggesting that large variations in the level of implementation for different groups of patients need to be reduced."

One possible reason for the smaller effects compared with the 2009 study is differences among hospitals, according to van Klein and his colleagues.

Their center is a university hospital that tends to get more critically ill patients than a community hospital would. And the overall death rate among surgery patients there was higher than the average seen in the 2009 study, which included a mix of university and community centers.

The current findings are more in line with a recent study of U.S. Veterans Health Administration (VHA) hospitals, van Klein's team writes.

The VHA, which is the largest integrated health system in the U.S., has taken steps to cut medical errors -- which includes checklists and special training sessions to stress teamwork among staff.

A study earlier this year found that the number of medical errors at VHA hospitals -- like operating on the wrong patient, or the wrong side of a patient's body -- dropped from 3.2 to 2.4 per month, between 2006 and 2009.

It's estimated that across the U.S., medical errors occur in about one in 75,000 surgeries every year.

And surgical checklists alone are unlikely to be enough without an overall focus on the "safety culture" at hospitals, van Klein's team writes.

What's more, safety is an issue not only around the time of surgery. Some of the biggest problems in hospitals are infections, medication errors and injuries to patients who fall, according to WHO.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/uoA69F Annals of Surgery, online November 24, 2011.

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/16/surgical-checklist-patient-deaths_n_1154853.html

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Canadiens fire coach Jacques Martin

FILE - In this Dec. 8, 2011 photo, Montreal Canadiens head coach Jacques Martin reacts during the third period of an NHL hockey game against the Vancouver Canucks, in Montreal. Martin has been fired as coach of the last-place Montreal Canadiens. The team said Saturday, Dec. 17, 2011 that assistant Randy Cunneyworth will be the interim head coach for the rest of the season. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Graham Hughes)

FILE - In this Dec. 8, 2011 photo, Montreal Canadiens head coach Jacques Martin reacts during the third period of an NHL hockey game against the Vancouver Canucks, in Montreal. Martin has been fired as coach of the last-place Montreal Canadiens. The team said Saturday, Dec. 17, 2011 that assistant Randy Cunneyworth will be the interim head coach for the rest of the season. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Graham Hughes)

(AP) ? Sloppy play, blown leads, a poor record at home.

It proved all too much for the last-place Montreal Canadiens, who fired coach Jacques Martin on Saturday and put assistant Randy Cunneyworth in charge for the rest of the season.

"The primary reason is the team wasn't performing as well as it should be in our minds," general manager Pierre Gauthier said at a Bell Centre news conference.

Assistant GM Larry Carriere was appointed assistant coach, his first coaching job after a long career in scouting and administration.

Martin, who preaches defense, was in his third season with the Canadiens. He is also one of the winningest coaches in NHL history.

He now gives way to Cunneyworth, a Toronto native whose lack of French was quickly noted. He is team's first unilingual English-speaking coach since Al MacNeil in 1971. On a team that symbolizes French-Canadian pride, he faces a daunting task in his bid to remove the interim tag.

"I have the utmost respect for the language here and I am very aware of how important it is to try and learn the language," Cunneyworth said after running his first practice. "Obviously I know a few words, and not all the good ones."

Montreal, which hosts New Jersey on Saturday night, is at the bottom of the Northeast Division with a 13-12-7 record. However, they are just two points out of second place in a division led by Boston.

The 59-year-old Martin has also coached the Florida Panthers and Ottawa Senators. Gauthier hired Martin in Ottawa. In 1996 in Ottawa, Martin inherited Cunneyworth as his hardworking captain.

"I would hope that my coaching style was similar to the way I played," Cunneyworth said. "I felt for the most part that I competed very hard."

Cunneyworth joined his former coach's staff as an assistant this summer after spending the previous season as head coach of Montreal's AHL affiliate in Hamilton.

"I have mixed emotions this time around," said Cunneyworth, who began and ended his career with Buffalo and also played for Pittsburgh, Winnipeg, Hartford and Chicago. "There is still the excitement but my thoughts are with Jacques. ... I have the utmost respect for Jacques and everything he does, the wealth of experience that I have learned over my times with him."

Martin was in his 17th season in the NHL. He reached his 600th NHL career victory last April, making him the ninth winningest coach in league history.

The Canadiens have been hurt by mistakes this season. They are 5-6-6 at home, often squandering third-period leads.

"Especially in the last few weeks, we didn't really know what was coming out of the box every night," Gauthier said. "And the way we were losing the leads and the way we were coaching the games wasn't very consistent, and that's what we hope to change."

There were hints of tension between Martin and Gauthier. After a poor start, Martin's closest ally, assistant Perry Pearn, was fired just before a game Oct. 26.

"We were on the same wavelength right to the end, but that doesn't mean that the team's performances were acceptable," Gauthier said.

The players were told of the coaching changes when they arrived for their morning skate.

"When we are where we are and expect to be a better team than we've been, you definitely are aware there might be changes," forward Michael Cammalleri said. "For it to be Jacques was somewhat surprising."

"We're in 11th place, that's what went wrong," he added. "I think Jacques was still trying to work on thing and improve the team. I don't think there was anyone not listening to him."

In the 50-year-old Cunneyworth, the Canadiens get a more tech-savvy coach, although one who is not expected to make major changes.

"I think the message will be to get back doing the things that the players are potentially capable of," Cunneyworth said. "We obviously have to figure out ways to get more out of our individual players. It's a responsibility of the coaching staff, but it's also a responsibility of the players themselves."

Cunneyworth was promoted to the NHL club along with assistant Randy Ladouceur after coaching in Hamilton last season.

"What system is in place doesn't matter if everyone buys in and plays the right way," defenseman Josh Gorges said. "If you only have half the guys doing what's asked of them, everything is in disarray and I think that's where we got to."

"We weren't playing together and doing the things we need to do to win," he added. "And consequently we lost games we shouldn't have lost and changes needed to be made."

Martin joined the Canadiens in 2009-10 and took them on an improbable run to the Eastern Conference finals where they lost to Philadelphia. Montreal made the playoffs the following year but was eliminated in the first round.

Martin also won the NHL coach of the year in 1998-99 and was part of Canada's gold-medal triumph at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.

"The bottom line is winning games," Canadiens defenseman Hal Gill said. "We weren't winning and changes happen. I don't think it was about losing the room or anything like that."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/347875155d53465d95cec892aeb06419/Article_2011-12-17-HKN-Canadiens-Martin-Fired/id-0d71201ada89488f840c9d0c78022675

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HBO GO Coming to Time Warner Cable (Mashable)

Time Warner Cable customers who subscribe to HBO or Cinemax will soon get to use HBO GO and MAX GO, the premium cable networks' instant-streaming services. TWC announced the deal Friday night, saying subscribers will be able to access movies, documentaries, original series and more on any computer, iPad or other mobile devices.

[More from Mashable: Apple Products? History in Film [INFOGRAPHIC]]

On HBO GO, viewers will have access to 1,400 titles such as Game of Thrones, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos Sex and the City and Deadwood. They'll also get to watch HBO original films, miniseries, sports, documentaries, specials and blockbuster theatricals. MAX GO offers 400 titles including movies, indies, cult favorites, the MAX After Dark series and primetime series.

Most new content uploads to both services as the content premieres on the networks. Viewers also will get the "Watchlist" that keeps track of bookmarked content for later viewing; bonus content including interviews, recaps and behind-the-scenes extras; and customizable views showing titles in slideshow, grid or list format.

[More from Mashable: ?Men in Black 3? Trailer Reveals Time Travel Plot]

Once the services launch, Time Warner Cable customers can access them at HBOGO.com or MAXGO.com using their TWC usernames and passwords.

SEE ALSO: 5 Major Trends That Changed Digital Entertainment in 2011

Earlier this year, HBO released HBO GO apps for Android and iOS. HBO GO launched in February 2010 and already is available to HBO subscribers of AT&T U-verse, Charter Communications, Comcast, Cox Communications, DirecTV, Dish Network, Google TV, Suddenlink Communications and Verizon FIOS.

This story originally published on Mashable here.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tech/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/mashable/20111216/tc_mashable/hbo_go_coming_to_time_warner_cable

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Newfound Comet Lovejoy Makes Fiery Death Dive Through Sun (SPACE.com)

A newfound comet dived through the sun's atmosphere today (Dec. 15), blazing up and most likely flaming out as scientists around the world watched.

Comet Lovejoy plunged through the sun's corona at about 7 p.m. EST today (midnight GMT on Dec. 16), coming within 87,000 miles (140,000 kilometers) of our star's surface. Temperatures in the corona can reach 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 million degrees Celsius), so Lovejoy was most likely completely destroyed, researchers said.

Scientists eager to record and study the comet's dramatic demise trained a variety of instruments on Lovejoy as it streaked toward the sun.

"We have here an exceptionally rare opportunity to observe the complete vaporization of a relatively large comet, and we have approximately 18 instruments on five different satellites that are trying to do just that," Karl Battams, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., wrote on the Sungrazing Comets website today, before Lovejoy's closest solar approach.

Battams runs the website, which is devoted to comets discovered by two different spacecraft: NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), which is operated jointly by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). [Death of a Comet: Photos of Sungrazing Comet Lovejoy]

Preparing for the end

Lovejoy has a core about 660 feet (200 meters) wide. It belongs to a class of comets known as Kreutz sungrazers, whose orbits bring them very close to the sun.

All Kreutz sungrazers are thought to be the remnants of a single giant comet that broke apart several centuries ago. They're named after the 19th-century German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz, who first showed that such comets are related.

Comets plunge into the sun on a regular basis, but they rarely give much advance notice of their suicidal intentions. That's why scientists were so excited about Lovejoy. Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy discovered the icy wanderer on Nov. 27, giving researchers plenty of time to map out their observation campaign.

And that campaign has been intense, involving five different spacecraft. In addition to SOHO and STEREO, scientists planned to use NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), Japan's Hinode satellite and ESA's Proba spacecraft to track Lovejoy's movements and demise, Battams wrote.

NASA also created a website providing updates about the comet's pass through the corona, as well as images of the event beamed down by SDO. It can be found here: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/lovejoy.php

For his part, Terry Lovejoy said he was happy to have made a contribution, and he marveled a bit at all the attention the comet has been getting.

"It's been tremendous," Lovejoy told SPACE.com. "Apparently it's all over Facebook, and I don't use Facebook. But there's a lot of interest. I think a lot of people like the name ? the Lovejoy name seems to strike a chord with people."

A dramatic death

Lovejoy is quite large for a sungrazing comet, and experts expected it to die an impressive death. The website Spaceweather.com, for example, predicted Lovejoy would blaze as brightly as Jupiter or Venus in the sky in its last moments.

Battams also expected a good show, saying the comet might even be visible from the ground around sunset today in the Northern Hemisphere. CAUTION: Never point binoculars or a telescope at or near the sun, and never look directly at the sun with the naked eye. Serious eye damage can result.

"I do think that it will put on a spectacular show for us and will be the brightest Kreutz-group comet that SOHO has ever observed," Battams wrote last week.

Though the early returns are just starting to come in, those forecasts appear to be on the money. Observations from various spacecraft do indeed show Lovejoy flaring up significantly as it neared our star.

Researchers will keep analyzing the images to better understand the comet's daring solar approach ? and to determine whether or not it survived its trial by fire.

SPACE.com assistant managing editor Clara Moskowitz (@ClaraMoskowitz) contributed to this story. You can follow SPACE.com senior writer Mike Wall on Twitter: @michaeldwall. Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/space/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/space/20111215/sc_space/newfoundcometlovejoymakesfierydeathdivethroughsun

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Texas drought takes cow numbers down by 600K (AP)

LUBBOCK, Texas ? The worst drought in Texas' history has led to the largest-ever one-year decline in the leading cattle-state's cow herd, raising the likelihood of increased beef prices as the number of animals decline and demand remains strong.

Since Jan. 1, the number of cows in Texas has dropped by about 600,000, a 12 percent decline from the roughly 5 million cows the state had at the beginning of the year, said David Anderson, who monitors beef markets for the Texas AgriLife Extension Service. That's likely the largest drop in the number of cows any state has ever seen, though Texas had a larger percentage decline from 1934 to 1935, when ranchers were reeling from the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, Anderson said.

Anderson said many cows were moved "somewhere there's grass," but lots of others were slaughtered. He said that in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana and Arkansas, about 200,000 more cattle were slaughtered this year, a 20 percent increase over last year.

That extra supply could help meet increased demand from China and other countries, but the loss of cows likely will mean fewer cattle in future years.

"Consumers are going to pay more because we're going to have less beef," Anderson said. "Fewer cows, calves, less beef production and increasing exports."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that beef prices will increase up to 5.5 in 2012, in part because the number of cattle has declined. That follows a 9 percent increase in beef prices in the past year.

Oklahoma, the nation's second-largest cattle producer, also saw about a 12 percent drop in cows, Oklahoma State University agriculture economist Derrell Peel said.

Anderson said beef production nationally will be down 4 percent next year.

In Texas, the problem is primarily due to the worst single-year drought in the state's history. From January through November the state got just 46 percent of its normal rainfall of about 26 inches.

The drought was the result of a La Nina weather pattern, which brings drier than normal conditions to the southwestern states. Forecasters have said La Nina is back, meaning another dry year for Texas, Oklahoma and other nearby states.

The lack of rain coupled with blistering summer heat caused pastures to wither, leaving rancher with the choice of buying feed for the cattle or selling them.

Betsy Ross, a 75-year-old rancher from the small central Texas community of Granger, said she sold all but 80 of the 225 grass-fed animals she had in January. With feed costs up 40 percent and her pasture parched, Ross said she didn't have any other option.

"It's not a profitable year, heavens no," she said. "If you can't keep them on grass when they're grass fed you're not going to make any money."

About 200 miles north in Sulphur Springs, Texas, part-time rancher Dwyatt Bell said producers in his part of the state sold off up to half their herds. Bell said high prices for cattle have helped offset increases expenses, but many ranchers still are struggling to stay afloat.

"It's been a rough year," he said.

Across Texas, the drought has caused an estimated $5.2 billion in losses to farmers and livestock producers, and that figure is expected to rise

Nationally, the number of cows has dropped by an estimated 617,000 this year, a 2 percent decline from the 30.9 million animals on Jan. 1. That number would be larger, but states in northern plains such as North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska, increased their cow herd.

Anderson said it's unclear whether high beef prices would hurt U.S. sales or limit exports. The U.S. is the world third largest consumer of beef per capita at 85.5 pounds per year. Uruguay is first at 137 pounds per capita.

"Exports have been the strongest part of beef demand all year and they're expected to remain so but higher prices should constrain their growth," he said.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/economy/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111216/ap_on_re_us/us_food_and_farm_texas_cattle

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Pythons and people take turns as predators and prey

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

People and giant snakes not only target each other for food ? they also compete for the same prey, according to a study co-authored by a Cornell University researcher.

More than a quarter of the men in a modern Filipino hunter-gatherer group have been attacked by giant pythons ? yet those same hunter-gatherers often target the pythons as their next meal. The study also finds that both the hunters and the pythons routinely eat local deer, wild pigs and monkeys. "Hunter-gatherers and other primates as prey, predators, and competitors of snakes," is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"People have speculated for a long time that serpents have had a significant relationship with primates throughout their shared evolutionary history," said Cornell herpetologist Harry Greene, who conducted the study with Thomas Headland, an anthropologist at the SIL International in Dallas. "At least 26 species of non-human primates are eaten by snakes ? and there are many primates that eat snakes. This pattern of complex relationships is broader than those hunter-gatherers, and our paper provides the strongest evidence yet for those relationships." Greene is also a Cornell professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

In the 1960s, Headland recorded ethnographic observations of the Agta Negritos, a modern hunter-gatherer group in the Philippines. An average Agta adult male weighs about 90 pounds, small enough to be eaten by the huge, native reticulated pythons that can grow to 28 feet. In one such attack, a father entered his dwelling to find a python had killed two of his children and was swallowing one of them headfirst. The father killed the snake with his bolo knife and found his third child, a six-month-old daughter, who was unharmed.

###

Cornell University: http://pressoffice.cornell.edu

Thanks to Cornell University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/116004/Pythons_and_people_take_turns_as_predators_and_prey

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Smule releases Magic Guitar for iPhone

Magic Guitar is Smule’s newest music app, similar to Magic Piano. To play the guitar, hold your iPhone like it’s the neck of a guitar, and tap or slide the beams of light that pass across the screen. Just as with Magic Piano, you can listen live to others...

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/tAe1NJeNj8c/story01.htm

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