Two real estate analytics firms ? CoreLogic and RealtyTrac ? released foreclosure data Thursday, showing a lopsided housing recovery that is largely driven by local market economics and state-specific foreclosure procedures.
In other words, it?s difficult to get an exact national gauge on what's happening in the foreclosure universe since the numbers are largely contingent on what happens with local employment, regulations and even the types of default procedures allowed in individual states.
A new CoreLogic ($25.86 0.3%) report shows foreclosures falling 19% year-over-year in February. But that?s just for the month of February. The research firm says 54,000 foreclosures were completed last month, down from 67,000 a year earlier and 58,000 in January.
So is this improvement? It is, but maybe not as much as expected when accounting for RealtyTrac?s analysis of the entire first quarter.
RealtyTrac looked at the first quarter of 2013 and declared the number of properties in some stage of foreclosure or bank-owned actually rose 9% from the first quarter of last year.
The good news is the foreclosure inventory is down to 1.2 million, according to CoreLogic. And that?s a notable 21% drop from 1.5 million a year earlier.
But judicial foreclosure states still lag behind.
The states with the highest foreclosure inventory rates include Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Illinois?all judicial foreclosure states. Nevada is the only nonjudicial foreclosure state to crack the top five in terms of its foreclosure inventory.
But when taking a look at the five states with the lowest foreclosure inventory rates, at least two ? Nebraska and North Dakota ? are also judicial foreclosure states. The remaining three, Wyoming, Alaska and Montana are not.
So what accounts for this split?
Nebraska and North Dakota overall maintain strong local economies. Based on Labor Department Statistics, the two judicial foreclosure states maintain the lowest unemployment rates in the nation. North Dakota?s rate is extremely low at 3.3%, while Nebraska?s comes in at 3.8%.
Wyoming and Montana also have unemployment rates well under 6%, with Wyoming?s rate hovering at 4.9% and Montana?s at 5.7%.
Coincidentally, the five states with the highest percentage of foreclosure inventory maintain unemployment rates well above the national rate of 7.7%. Nevada is a nonjudicial foreclosure state, so it seems they should be faring better and recovering faster than judicial foreclosure states.
But the state has another strike against it?namely an unemployment rate of 9.7% as of January.
Florida?s unemployment rate held at 7.8% in January, and New York, Illinois and New Jersey all have unemployment rates between 8.4% and 9.5%.
Overall, CoreLogic?s Thursday report was positive.
"We continue to see a declining trend in foreclosure activity, with major markets leading the way," said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic. "The drop in delinquencies and foreclosure starts will help support a resurgence in the home purchase market this year and next."
Judging by the data, local unemployment rates remain a strong headwind for local real estate markets, whether they're classified as judicial or nonjudicial.
Jay Brinkmann, the MBA?s chief economist and senior vice president of research and education, reiterated to HousingWire earlier this year that job development remains a long-term factor in how housing fares in the future.
"We are better than we were," Brinkmann said on the jobs front. "But we haven?t seen robust job growth," he said.
To solve the problem of perpetually interrupted playtime outdoors for its students, the Lasalle Franciscanas School commissioned the Elevated Sports Court. A caged facility conveniently out of the way of people arriving and departing through the entrance where the playground was originally located, it has been raised up by one storey.
Created by Guzm?n de Yarza Blache, a director at J1 Arquitectos, the Elevated Sports Court is located in Zaragoza, Spain. Held in place by concrete pilotis, it was created using prefabricated concrete structures as well as two layers of steel fencing. A corten steel planting box surrounds the entire Elevated Sports Court to allow ivy to grow up the outer fencing. Children have since endearingly nicknamed the structure, 'The Whale,' due to its bulbous shape.
Creamy, rich yolks blended with cheese and pimentos to bring stuffed eggs to a new level. (The Runaway Spoon)
By?Perre Coleman Magness,?The Runaway Spoon? Makes 24 stuffed eggs?
1 dozen eggs
2 ounces extra sharp cheddar cheese
1 (2-ounce) jar diced pimentos
1 cup mayonnaise
1/2 teaspoon paprika (plus more for decoration)
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
Salt and pepper to taste
Place the eggs in a single layer in a large pot and cover with cold water by one inch. Bring to a boil over medium high heat.? When the water is boiling, cook the eggs for 8 minutes. Meanwhile, fill a large bowl with water and ice. When the 8 minutes are up, use a slotted spoon to transfer the eggs to the ice water.? Leave the eggs for at least 20 minutes, but up to 30.
As the eggs are cooling, grate the cheese on the fine holes of a box grater and leave to come to room temperature. Rinse and drain the pimentos and pat dry on paper towels.
When the eggs have cooled, roll them on the counter to crack the shells all over. Peel the eggs and rinse under cool water to remove any shell bits. Pat the eggs dry, then cut in halves and gently remove the yolks to a bowl. Set the whites on a tray to be stuffed.
Break the eggs up with a fork, then add the grated cheese and mayonnaise (save a little cheese to sprinkle over the tops). Mash together with the fork, then add the paprika, garlic powder?and generous amounts of salt and black pepper to taste. Continue to mash the filling with the fork until smooth. Add the pimentos and stir to distribute them evenly throughout the filling.
Fill the egg white halves with the pimento cheese filling, distributing it evenly among the whites. Refrigerate the eggs for at least an hour, but up to 4, to firm the filling. You may cover them loosely with plastic wrap. Sprinkle with the reserved cheese and paprika.
Even graphene has weak spotsPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Rice, Tsinghua theorists find junctions in polycrystalline graphene sap strength of super material
HOUSTON (March 28, 2013) Graphene, the single-atom-thick form of carbon, has become famous for its extraordinary strength. But less-than-perfect sheets of the material show unexpected weakness, according to researchers at Rice University in Houston and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene, where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted. At these points, under tension, polycrystalline graphene has about half the strength of pristine samples of the material.
Calculations by the Rice team of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues in China were reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. They could be important to materials scientists using graphene in applications where its intrinsic strength is a key feature, like composite materials and stretchable or flexible electronics.
Graphene sheets grown in a lab, often via chemical vapor deposition, are almost never perfect arrays of hexagons, Yakobson said. Domains of graphene that start to grow on a substrate are not necessarily lined up with each other, and when these islands merge, they look like quilts, with patterns going in every direction.
The lines in polycrystalline sheets are called grain boundaries, and the atoms at these boundaries are occasionally forced to change the way they bond by the unbreakable rules of topology. Most common of the "defects" in graphene formation studied by Yakobson's group are adjacent five- and seven-atom rings that are a little weaker than the hexagons around them.
The team calculated that the particular seven-atom rings found at junctions of three islands are the weakest points, where cracks are most likely to form. These are the end points of grain boundaries between the islands and are ongoing trouble spots, the researchers found.
"In the past, people studying what happens at the grain boundary looked at it as an infinite line," Yakobson said. "It's simpler that way, computationally and conceptually, because they could just look at a single segment and have it represent the whole."
But in the real world, he said, "these lines form a network. Graphene is usually a quilt made from many pieces. I thought we should test the junctions."
They determined through molecular dynamics simulation and "good old mathematical analysis" that in a graphene quilt, the grain boundaries act like levers that amplify the tension (through a dislocation pileup) and concentrate it at the defect either where the three domains meet or where a grain boundary between two domains ends. "The details are complicated but, basically, the longer the lever, the greater the amplification on the weakest point," Yakobson said. "The force is concentrated there, and that's where it starts breaking."
"Force on these junctions starts the cracks, and they propagate like cracks in a windshield," said Vasilii Artyukhov, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and co-author of the paper. "In metals, cracks stop eventually because they become blunt as they propagate. But in brittle materials, that doesn't happen. And graphene is a brittle material, so a crack might go a really long way."
Yakobson said that conceptually, the calculations show what metallurgists recognize as the Hall-Petch Effect, a measure of the strength of crystalline materials with similar grain boundaries. "It's one of the pillars of large-scale material mechanics," he said. "For graphene, we call this a pseudo Hall-Petch, because the effect is very similar even though the mechanism is very different.
"Any defect, of course, does something to the material," Yakobson said. "But this finding is important because you cannot avoid the effect in polycrystalline graphene. It's also ironic, because polycrystals are often considered when larger domains are needed. We show that as it gets larger, it gets weaker.
"If you need a patch of graphene for mechanical performance, you'd better go for perfect monocrystals or graphene with rather small domains that reduce the stress concentration."
###
Co-authors of the paper are graduate student Zhigong Song and his adviser, Zhiping Xu, an associate professor of engineering mechanics at Tsinghua. Xu is a former researcher in Yakobson's group at Rice. Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported the work at Rice. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program and Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology of China supported the work at Tsinghua.
David Ruth
Mike Williams
713-348-6728 mikewilliams@rice.edu
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl400542n.
This news release can be found online at: http://news.rice.edu/2013/03/28/even-graphene-has-weak-spots/.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Graphic for download: http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0328_GRAPHENE-web.jpg
New work by theorists at Rice and Tsinghua universities shows defects in polycrystalline forms of graphene will sap its strength. The illustration from a simulation at left shows a junction of grain boundaries where three domains of graphene meet with a strained bond in the center. At right, the calculated stress buildup at the tip of a finite-length grain boundary. (Credit: Vasilii Artyukhov/Rice University)
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Even graphene has weak spotsPublic release date: 28-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Ruth david@rice.edu 713-348-6327 Rice University
Rice, Tsinghua theorists find junctions in polycrystalline graphene sap strength of super material
HOUSTON (March 28, 2013) Graphene, the single-atom-thick form of carbon, has become famous for its extraordinary strength. But less-than-perfect sheets of the material show unexpected weakness, according to researchers at Rice University in Houston and Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The kryptonite to this Superman of materials is in the form of a seven-atom ring that inevitably occurs at the junctions of grain boundaries in graphene, where the regular array of hexagonal units is interrupted. At these points, under tension, polycrystalline graphene has about half the strength of pristine samples of the material.
Calculations by the Rice team of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his colleagues in China were reported this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters. They could be important to materials scientists using graphene in applications where its intrinsic strength is a key feature, like composite materials and stretchable or flexible electronics.
Graphene sheets grown in a lab, often via chemical vapor deposition, are almost never perfect arrays of hexagons, Yakobson said. Domains of graphene that start to grow on a substrate are not necessarily lined up with each other, and when these islands merge, they look like quilts, with patterns going in every direction.
The lines in polycrystalline sheets are called grain boundaries, and the atoms at these boundaries are occasionally forced to change the way they bond by the unbreakable rules of topology. Most common of the "defects" in graphene formation studied by Yakobson's group are adjacent five- and seven-atom rings that are a little weaker than the hexagons around them.
The team calculated that the particular seven-atom rings found at junctions of three islands are the weakest points, where cracks are most likely to form. These are the end points of grain boundaries between the islands and are ongoing trouble spots, the researchers found.
"In the past, people studying what happens at the grain boundary looked at it as an infinite line," Yakobson said. "It's simpler that way, computationally and conceptually, because they could just look at a single segment and have it represent the whole."
But in the real world, he said, "these lines form a network. Graphene is usually a quilt made from many pieces. I thought we should test the junctions."
They determined through molecular dynamics simulation and "good old mathematical analysis" that in a graphene quilt, the grain boundaries act like levers that amplify the tension (through a dislocation pileup) and concentrate it at the defect either where the three domains meet or where a grain boundary between two domains ends. "The details are complicated but, basically, the longer the lever, the greater the amplification on the weakest point," Yakobson said. "The force is concentrated there, and that's where it starts breaking."
"Force on these junctions starts the cracks, and they propagate like cracks in a windshield," said Vasilii Artyukhov, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice and co-author of the paper. "In metals, cracks stop eventually because they become blunt as they propagate. But in brittle materials, that doesn't happen. And graphene is a brittle material, so a crack might go a really long way."
Yakobson said that conceptually, the calculations show what metallurgists recognize as the Hall-Petch Effect, a measure of the strength of crystalline materials with similar grain boundaries. "It's one of the pillars of large-scale material mechanics," he said. "For graphene, we call this a pseudo Hall-Petch, because the effect is very similar even though the mechanism is very different.
"Any defect, of course, does something to the material," Yakobson said. "But this finding is important because you cannot avoid the effect in polycrystalline graphene. It's also ironic, because polycrystals are often considered when larger domains are needed. We show that as it gets larger, it gets weaker.
"If you need a patch of graphene for mechanical performance, you'd better go for perfect monocrystals or graphene with rather small domains that reduce the stress concentration."
###
Co-authors of the paper are graduate student Zhigong Song and his adviser, Zhiping Xu, an associate professor of engineering mechanics at Tsinghua. Xu is a former researcher in Yakobson's group at Rice. Yakobson is Rice's Karl F. Hasselmann Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry.
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation supported the work at Rice. The National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program and Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology of China supported the work at Tsinghua.
David Ruth
Mike Williams
713-348-6728 mikewilliams@rice.edu
Read the abstract at: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nl400542n.
This news release can be found online at: http://news.rice.edu/2013/03/28/even-graphene-has-weak-spots/.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Graphic for download: http://news.rice.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/0328_GRAPHENE-web.jpg
New work by theorists at Rice and Tsinghua universities shows defects in polycrystalline forms of graphene will sap its strength. The illustration from a simulation at left shows a junction of grain boundaries where three domains of graphene meet with a strained bond in the center. At right, the calculated stress buildup at the tip of a finite-length grain boundary. (Credit: Vasilii Artyukhov/Rice University)
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
A bacterial transplant in mice has been shown to provide some of the benefits of gastric bypass surgery without putting the animals under the knife
By Nicola Jones and Nature magazine
Here the taxonomy of gut bacteria in mice that have received gastric bypass (red) is compared to that of mice kept at the same weight (blue) and of others that were not kept on a diet (green). Image: Science Translational Medicine/AAAS
Obese people considering gastric bypass surgery to help trim their fat might one day have another option: swallowing a new supply of gut bacteria. A study in mice suggests that weight loss after bypass surgery is caused not by the operation itself, but at least in part by a change in the amounts of various species of microbes in the gut.
A bypass operation separates off a small part of the stomach and connects that directly to the intestines. Recipients tend to feel less hungry, fill up more quickly and burn more calories at rest, and they often lose up to 75% of their excess fat. Counter-intuitively, this is thought to be caused by a change in metabolism, rather than by the reduced size of the stomach.
Gut microbes are thought to be part of this picture. People who have had bypasses are known to experience changes in the selection of microbes in their guts. Fat people have been shown to host a different selection of gut bacteria from people who are obese, and transferring the gut bacteria of fat mice into thin ones can cause the thin mice to pack on extra weight. But no one knew whether the microbes in bypass patients changed because they got thin, or if the patients got thin because the microbes changed.
Chop and change To investigate, Lee Kaplan, director of the Obesity, Metabolism and Nutrition Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and his colleagues gave about a dozen obese mice bypass surgery. As expected, the mice lost about 29% of their body weight, and kept it off despite a high-fat diet. New conditions in their bodies ? such as a change in bile acids ? allowed a different set of gut bacteria to thrive.
The researchers then took faecal samples from the mice that had been operated on, and put bacteria from them into the guts of mice specially bred without any gut flora. These mice, which were not obese, lost 5% of their weight without any changes to their diet. The results are reported in Science Translational Medicine.
The effect is impressively large, says Randy Seeley, an obesity researcher at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, particularly given that sterile mice almost always gain weight when given any kind of gut flora. The fact that the mice getting the second-hand bacteria did not lose as much weight as those that had surgery suggests that other factors are also at work; these could include hormonal changes.
The results are promising for obesity treatments, but there are still hurdles to overcome. ?You can?t just take a pill of the right bacteria and have them stick around,? says Seeley. If the gut?s environmental conditions don?t change, then the original microbes come back, he says. Kaplan says that the next steps are to isolate the four bacteria types that the study found to be at play and introduce them into obese mice or people. Antibiotic treatments might help the new bacteria to stick. ?I believe it?s possible,? says Kaplan.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on March 27, 2013.
Somersby Cider in the UK created a cheeky commercial that pokes fun of Apple product launches by imagining a world where buying hard cider is like getting a new iPhone. The Genius Bar would be a real bar and workers would talk about how many cores inside the apple, how many pits and how to use the "in to face" and dock the glass of hard cider. More »
Decreased water flow may be trade-off for more productive forestPublic release date: 25-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jane Hodgins jmhodgins@fs.fed.us 651-649-5281 USDA Forest Service - Northern Research Station
DURHAM, N.H., March 25, 2013 Bubbling brooks and streams are a scenic and much loved feature of forest ecosystems, but long-term data at the U.S. Forest Service's Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest suggests that more productive forests might carry considerably less water, according to a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Mark Green, a research hydrologist with the Forest Service's Northern Research Station and an assistant professor at Plymouth State University, is the lead author for the study titled "Decreased Water Flowing from a Forest Amended with Calcium Silicate."
Acid rain during the 20th century caused widespread depletion of available soil calcium, an essential plant nutrient, throughout much of the industrialized world. In 1999, scientists at the Forest Service's Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire restored soil calcium levels to pre-industrial levels in a small watershed in an effort to better understand the ecological consequences of the depletion of available soil calcium. Subsequent studies demonstrated that following the application of a finely ground and pelletized calcium silicate mineral called wollastonite, species such as red spruce and sugar maple experienced improved cold hardiness and less seedling mortality in areas where calcium was applied.
When Green reviewed the long-term data several years later, he found something surprising about the 1999 study: within 5 months of the application of wollastonite across a 30-acre watershed, there was a substantial increase in forest water use compared to a nearby watershed that was not treated with calcium.
"Our results in this study show that when we create a substantial increase in soil calcium, this forest responded by using more water, partly associated with increased growth. The result is that we see a change in forest hydrology," Green said. "We still have to determine whether the prior decrease in soil calcium due to acid rain caused a proportional decrease in evapotranspiration and thus greater streamflow, and if that means that when forests recover from acid deposition we'll see a decrease in water flowing in streams."
As the need for carbon sequestration, biofuels, and other forest products increases, the study suggests that there might be unintended consequences to enhancing ecosystems using fertilization.
"Long-term ecological research is important to understanding the health and sustainability of the nation's forests," said Michael T. Rains, Director of the Northern Research Station. "With a network of more than 80 experimental forests located across the country and decades of monitoring data from this network, the Forest Service is contributing invaluable information about forest conditions along a complex rural to urban land gradient as well as discovering other trends through a wide-range of ongoing critical research topics."
###
Co-authors include NRS researchers Amey Bailey, Scott Bailey, John Campbell, and Paul Schaberg, and John Battles of the University of California, Berkley, Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University, Timothy Fahey of Cornell University, Lucie Lepine of the University of New Hampshire, Gene Likens of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and University of Connecticut, and Scott Ollinger of the University of New Hampshire.
The Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest is a 7,200-acre valley located in the southern part of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. One of 80 experimental forests within the U.S. Forest Service's Research and Development arm, Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest has served as an outdoor laboratory for ecological study since 1955. Forest Service scientists as well as scientists from agencies and universities throughout the world have studied the quantity and chemistry of water going into the forest in precipitation and out of the forest in stream water at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.
The mission of the U.S. Forest Service is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. The agency has either a direct or indirect role in stewardship of about 80 percent of the 850 million forested acres within the U.S., of which 100 million acres are urban forests where most Americans live. The mission of the Forest Service's Northern Research Station is to improve people's lives and help sustain the natural resources in the Northeast and Midwest through leading-edge science and effective information delivery.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Decreased water flow may be trade-off for more productive forestPublic release date: 25-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jane Hodgins jmhodgins@fs.fed.us 651-649-5281 USDA Forest Service - Northern Research Station
DURHAM, N.H., March 25, 2013 Bubbling brooks and streams are a scenic and much loved feature of forest ecosystems, but long-term data at the U.S. Forest Service's Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest suggests that more productive forests might carry considerably less water, according to a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Mark Green, a research hydrologist with the Forest Service's Northern Research Station and an assistant professor at Plymouth State University, is the lead author for the study titled "Decreased Water Flowing from a Forest Amended with Calcium Silicate."
Acid rain during the 20th century caused widespread depletion of available soil calcium, an essential plant nutrient, throughout much of the industrialized world. In 1999, scientists at the Forest Service's Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in the White Mountains of New Hampshire restored soil calcium levels to pre-industrial levels in a small watershed in an effort to better understand the ecological consequences of the depletion of available soil calcium. Subsequent studies demonstrated that following the application of a finely ground and pelletized calcium silicate mineral called wollastonite, species such as red spruce and sugar maple experienced improved cold hardiness and less seedling mortality in areas where calcium was applied.
When Green reviewed the long-term data several years later, he found something surprising about the 1999 study: within 5 months of the application of wollastonite across a 30-acre watershed, there was a substantial increase in forest water use compared to a nearby watershed that was not treated with calcium.
"Our results in this study show that when we create a substantial increase in soil calcium, this forest responded by using more water, partly associated with increased growth. The result is that we see a change in forest hydrology," Green said. "We still have to determine whether the prior decrease in soil calcium due to acid rain caused a proportional decrease in evapotranspiration and thus greater streamflow, and if that means that when forests recover from acid deposition we'll see a decrease in water flowing in streams."
As the need for carbon sequestration, biofuels, and other forest products increases, the study suggests that there might be unintended consequences to enhancing ecosystems using fertilization.
"Long-term ecological research is important to understanding the health and sustainability of the nation's forests," said Michael T. Rains, Director of the Northern Research Station. "With a network of more than 80 experimental forests located across the country and decades of monitoring data from this network, the Forest Service is contributing invaluable information about forest conditions along a complex rural to urban land gradient as well as discovering other trends through a wide-range of ongoing critical research topics."
###
Co-authors include NRS researchers Amey Bailey, Scott Bailey, John Campbell, and Paul Schaberg, and John Battles of the University of California, Berkley, Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University, Timothy Fahey of Cornell University, Lucie Lepine of the University of New Hampshire, Gene Likens of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and University of Connecticut, and Scott Ollinger of the University of New Hampshire.
The Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest is a 7,200-acre valley located in the southern part of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. One of 80 experimental forests within the U.S. Forest Service's Research and Development arm, Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest has served as an outdoor laboratory for ecological study since 1955. Forest Service scientists as well as scientists from agencies and universities throughout the world have studied the quantity and chemistry of water going into the forest in precipitation and out of the forest in stream water at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest.
The mission of the U.S. Forest Service is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation's forests and grasslands to meet the needs of present and future generations. The agency has either a direct or indirect role in stewardship of about 80 percent of the 850 million forested acres within the U.S., of which 100 million acres are urban forests where most Americans live. The mission of the Forest Service's Northern Research Station is to improve people's lives and help sustain the natural resources in the Northeast and Midwest through leading-edge science and effective information delivery.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
SHANGHAI (Reuters) ? Faculty members at a top Chinese university have collaborated for years on technical research papers with a People?s Liberation Army (PLA) unit accused of being at the heart of China?s alleged cyber-war against Western commercial targets.
Several papers on computer network security and intrusion detection, easily accessed on the Internet, were co-authored by researchers at PLA Unit 61398, allegedly an operational unit actively engaged in cyber-espionage, and faculty at Shanghai Jiaotong University, a centre of academic excellence with ties to some of the world?s top universities and attended by the country?s political and business elite.
The apparent working relationship between the PLA unit and Shanghai Jiaotong is in contrast to common practice in most developed nations, where university professors in recent decades have been reluctant to cooperate with operational intelligence gathering units.
The issue of cyber-security is testing ties between the world?s two biggest economies, prompting U.S. President Barack Obama to raise concerns over computer hacking in a phone call with new Chinese President Xi Jinping. China denies it engages in state-sponsored hacking, saying it is a victim of cyber-attacks from the United States.
There is no evidence to suggest any Shanghai Jiaotong academics who co-authored papers with Unit 61398 worked with anyone directly engaged in cyber-espionage operations, as opposed to research.
?The issue is operational activity ? whether these research institutions have been involved in actual intelligence operations,? said James Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ?That?s something the U.S. does not do.?
?(In the U.S.) there?s a clear line between an academic researcher and people engaged in operational (intelligence gathering) activities.?
Shanghai Jiaotong declined to comment.
CO-AUTHORS
In reviewing the links between the PLA and Shanghai Jiaotong ? whose alumni include former President Jiang Zemin, the head of China?s top automaker and the former CEO of its most popular Internal portal ? Reuters found at least three papers on cyber- warfare on a document-sharing web site that were co-authored by university faculty members and PLA researchers.
The papers, on network security and attack detection, state on their title pages they were written by Unit 61398 researchers and professors at Shanghai Jiaotong?s School of Information Security Engineering (SISE).
In one 2007 paper on how to improve security by designing a collaborative network monitoring system, PLA researcher Chen Yi-qun worked with Xue Zhi, the vice-president of SISE and the school?s Communist Party branch secretary. According to his biography on the school?s website, Xue is credited with developing China?s leading infiltrative cyber-attack platform.
Calls and emails to Xue were not answered. Reuters was unable to find contact details for Chen.
Fan Lei, an associate professor at Shanghai Jiaotong whose main research areas are network security management and cryptography, also co-authored a paper with Chen. Fan told Reuters he has no links with Unit 61398 and his work with Chen in 2010 was because Chen was a SISE graduate student. Fan said he was unaware Chen was with the PLA when they collaborated. Both of the papers Chen co-wrote with SISE professors stated he was with the PLA unit.
Cyber-security experts say the publicly available papers and China?s National Information Security Engineering Centre are ostensibly about securing computer networks.
?The research seems to be defensive, but cyber-security research in general can be dual purpose,? said Adam Meyers, director of intelligence at CrowdStrike, a security technology company based in Irvine, California. Figuring out how best to defend networks, by definition, means thinking about the most effective means of attack, he noted.
Efforts to reach the PLA for comment on its collaboration with Shanghai Jiaotong were unsuccessful.
TECH PARK NEIGHBORS
Set amid manicured lawns, Shanghai Jiaotong University is one of China?s top four colleges, turning out brilliant technical engineers much in demand by both domestic companies and foreign multinationals. Its reputation has led to tie-ups with elite universities abroad.
Last month, Mandiant Corp, a private U.S.-based security firm, accused China?s military of cyber-espionage on U.S. and other English-speaking companies, identifying Unit 61398 and its location at a building on the outskirts of Shanghai. China said the report was baseless and lacked ?technical proof?.
?SISE at Shanghai Jiaotong has provided support? to PLA Unit 61398 ? known more formally as General Staff Department (GSD), Third Department, Second Bureau ? said Russell Hsiao, author of papers on China?s cyber-warfare capabilities for Project 2049 Institute, a Virginia-based think-tank, who drew his research from the technical papers and government reports.
He said another Shanghai Jiaotong department, the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, also did research work with another PLA unit. A Project 2049 report last year found the GSD?s Third Department had oversight of ?information security engineering bases? in Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin.
The GSD Third Department?s Shanghai base is in an industrial park housing mainly government research institutes and high-tech firms. The SISE building is in the same development, 40 kms from the university?s main Minhang campus. Across the street from SISE is the National Information Security Engineering Center, a building commissioned in 2003 by PLA Unit 61398. Also part of the base is the Ministry of Public Security?s Third Research Institute, which researches digital forensics and network security.
AUTO RESEARCH
Shanghai Jiaotong is not officially linked to China?s military. SISE says on its website its goal is to speed up the development of China?s information security sector and address the national shortage of information security professionals.
Shanghai Jiaotong set up a joint institute in China?s second city in 2006 with the University of Michigan ? seeking, it says on its web site, to ?develop innovative and highly reputable education and research programs in various engineering fields.? A spokesman for the U.S. college said it has no relationship with SISE. Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh also had a partnership with Shanghai Jiaotong?s School of Electronic, Information and Electrical Engineering, and Singapore Management University said it ended a tie-up with SISE last June.
Among the industries in the United States allegedly targeted by Unit 61398, as recently as last year according to Mandiant, is transportation, including the auto sector.
The University of Michigan collaborates closely with Detroit-based automakers on research projects, and is one of three colleges that comprise the University Research Corridor, which spent $300 million on R&D projects over the last five years. Nearly a third of that was funded by private industry, according to local consultant the Anderson Economic Group.
?There was no indication in 2010 that the joint institute was involved in any way and that also is the case today. We do, of course, watch the news reports on these issues carefully,? said Rick Fitzgerald, a University of Michigan spokesman, referring to a New York Times report in 2010 citing investigators? claims to have tracked cyber-attacks against Google Inc (GOOG.O) to Shanghai Jiaotong and an eastern Chinese vocational school. (Additional reporting by Jim Finkle and Joseph Menn in SAN FRANCISCO; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)
CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Instead of heading to church for Sunday service, members of the Rock Worship Center in Charlotte hit the streets.
Sunday, members called their efforts ?Serve His Day?. Volunteers walked through the Greir Heights Community and along West Boulevard picking up trash. ??? ? Organizers say despite the rain, the event was a huge success.
?I was a little nervous that people would not show up.? But I tell you -- they've exceeded my expectation.? I believe people want to give back,? said Pastor Frank Jacbos.
?I'm trying to teach the church this is another form of worship.? It's not only about being preached to -- but being able to take the word that we've preached and bring it to brothers and sisters.? That's what it's all about,? he said.
Organizers said they had about 200 people come out and help throughout the day.
The complexity of connecting tools in this new API economy is getting compounded by the inability to link this new breed of services so people can talk in context about the code. Application development cycles are shorter and developers are picking tools that make them more productive.
When the Verge broke news of Apple?s password reset vulnerability, they cited a step-by-step guide that detailed the process of exploiting the service. They declined to link to the source for security reasons, and rightfully so. However, now that Apple has closed the security hole the topic of how it worked and why is worth exploring.
While iMore doesn?t know what the original source was, we were able to reproduce the exploit independently. In the interest of helping people understand how they were put at risk, and allowing anybody designing their own systems to avoid similar security holes in the future, after a lot of consideration and carefully weighing the pros and cons, we have decided to detail and analyze the exploit.
Normally the password reset process has 6 steps: 1. On iforgot.apple.com, enter your Apple ID to begin the process. 2. Select an authentication method - ?Answer security questions? is the one we would use. 3. Enter your date of birth. 4. Answer two security questions. 5. Enter your new password. 6. Be taken to a success page saying your password has been reset.
What should happen in a process like this is that each step can only be performed once all of the steps before it have successfully been completed. The security hole was a result of this not being properly enforced in Apple?s password reset process.
In step 5, when you submit your new password, a form is sent to the iForgot servers with the password change request. The form being sent takes shape as a URL that sends along all of the information needed from this last page to change your password and looks something like this:
In the steps above, an attacker would be required to properly complete steps 1-3. The URL had the effect of allowing them to skip step 4, achieve step 5, and get confirmation in step 6 that they had successfully reset a user?s password. With a fix now in place, if you try this, you will get a message saying ?Your request could not be completed.? and you?ll have to restart the password reset process.
The necessary URL could be acquired by walking through a normal password reset on your own Apple ID, and watching the network traffic being sent when you submitted your new password in step 5. The URL could also be constructed manually by somebody if they looked at the HTML of the password reset page to see what information the page would be submitting in the form.
When Apple initially put a maintenance message on the iForgot page to prevent user?s from doing a password reset, it suffered from a nearly identically problem. While you could no longer enter your Apple ID and click Next to get to step 2, if you already knew the full URL with form info needed, you could put it into your browser and be taken right to the ?Select authentication method? page.
From here the rest of the password reset process worked as normal. Upon being made aware of this, Apple took the entire iForgot page offline.
It is still unclear if this exploit was ever used in the wild, but hopefully Apple?s response was fast enough to stop any would-be attackers. Apple also issued a statement to the Verge yesterday in response to the security hole, stating "Apple takes customer privacy very seriously. We are aware of this issue, and working on a fix.?, though we have yet to see any comment from them regarding how it happened or how many users may have been affected.
PHOENIX (Reuters) - Lawyers asked a federal judge on Friday to prevent Arizona from denying driver's licenses to young illegal immigrants granted temporary legal status by the government in the Southwestern state's latest court clash over the Obama administration's immigration policies.
Civil rights groups filed a lawsuit in District Court in Phoenix in November against Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and two state transport department officials on behalf of five immigrants from Mexico who qualify for deferred deportation status under President Barack Obama's program.
The suit challenges the legality of an executive order issued by Brewer in August that denied the young migrants licenses, arguing that the government's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program did not give them lawful status or entitle them to public benefits.
On Friday, Judge David Campbell heard brief arguments in which the plaintiffs sought an injunction ordering Arizona to issue the licenses pending the court's ruling. The state asked for the case to be dismissed.
At issue is whether the plaintiffs' deferred deportation status constitutes federal "authorization" to be in the United States, a requirement under Arizona law for immigrants to obtain drivers licenses.
"Every non-citizen with a work permit is considered to be authorized, with one exception - everyone but DACA," Jennifer Chang Newell, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney representing the plaintiffs, told the court.
Newell argued that Brewer's policy amounts to an attempt by the state of Arizona to determine immigration status, a power reserved only for the federal government.
The court battle is the latest for Brewer, a Republican who has become a major antagonist of Obama's Democratic administration and its immigration policies.
About 40 states and the District of Columbia have confirmed they are granting driver's licenses or plan to do so for undocumented youths who received a short-term reprieve from Obama under the program in June.
While Republicans in some U.S. states have opposed drivers licenses for illegal immigrants, only Arizona and Nebraska have said outright that young immigrants are not eligible.
'NO LAWFUL OR AUTHORIZED STATUS'
Under Obama's program, immigrants who came to the United States as children and meet certain other criteria can apply for a work permit for a renewable period of two years. They also can obtain Social Security numbers.
An estimated 1.7 million youths are potentially eligible for the program, of whom about 80,000 live in Arizona. As of mid-February, about 200,000 applicants nationwide been granted deferred action, according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
They are considered to be lawfully present in the United States during that period, although they do not have full legal status. Brewer maintains that the president's policy did not "confer upon them any lawful or authorized status and does not entitle them to any additional public benefits."
Attorney Doug Northrop, representing the state, told the court there is no federal definition of "authorized" presence, and that the plaintiffs do not have "lawful" status.
Arizona, he argued, is not determining migrants' status, but is simply ruling that they cannot have drivers licenses. The state "didn't create their own status. They just said (they) don't meet it," he told the judge.
Campbell said he would rule on the issue in the coming weeks.
In 2010, Brewer signed into law a controversial bill cracking down on illegal immigrants and setting up the clash with the Obama administration. The centerpiece of the Arizona law, which requires police to check the immigration status of every person they stop if they suspect they are in the country illegally, was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in June.
Obama is pushing Congress to pass a bill overhauling the U.S. immigration system, granting millions of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, as well as tightening security on the border with Mexico.
Democrats and Republicans in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives are close to completing work on a draft bill.
(Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Christopher Wilson)
It's hard to believe that last week was, well, only a week ago. A whole lot has happened in Engadgetland for a week that didn't involve a CES or MWC. A few hours after the last podcast, Samsung went ahead and launched a little phone. Our weekend was also fairly busy, spending time in San Francisco, you know, just hanging out and stuff. But don't worry, Tim's back, Brian's back and Peter's here from another jam-packed episode of the Engadget Podcast. We'd like to see you back, as well. Join us after the break, won't you?
Google is in the process of activating their gift card program in Canada, and codes are now redeemable via the web for a number of users. We gave it a shot ourselves, and as you can see Rene was able to access the page to redeem a card with no trickery involved.
If you're in Canada, and want to give it a try yourself, click here and see what happens. If you're not seeing it yet, we imagine you will soon. We've no word on just when the cards themselves will be on Canadian shelves, but it can't be that far out.
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Public release date: 28-Mar-2013
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The complexity of connecting tools in this new API economy is getting compounded by the inability to link this new breed of services so people can talk in context about the code. Application development cycles are shorter and developers are picking tools that make them more productive.
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