Since its inception in 2003, Fitness Singles has been the fastest-growing online dating community for sports and fitness enthusiasts. With Fitness Singles’ user-centric interface and emphasis on a broad range of fitness categories, the agreement with Active.com was a natural progression and ensures Fitness Singles’ continued leadership in online relationships for active singles. “This agreement is great news for active singles who focus on health and fitness,” said Christopher Mattioli, President of Fitness Singles. “Whether you’re into bodybuilding (http://www.fitness-singles.com/unregistered-results_fitness.asp?fitness=Bodybuilding), running (http://www.fitness-singles.com/unregistered-results_fitness.asp?fitness=Running), cycling (http://www.fitness-singles.com/unregistered-results_fitness.asp?fitness=Cycling), weight training, yoga, working out, hiking, playing sports, or any number of other activities, Fitness Singles is where active singles get together.” “In the past five years, we’ve become the Number One dating site for fitness oriented, single adults,” he continued. “With our relaionship with Active.com, we are making it even easier for more singles to find like-minded partners, no matter what their interests.”
Fitness Singles (http://www.fitness-singles.com) and Active.com, an online community of The Active Network, have teamed up to serve single adults who engage in active and fitness-oriented lifestyles. With the arrangement, The Active Network is helping their members connect to a large database of like-minded, active singles by way of Fitness Singles.
Scientists at a small biotechnology company say they have used cloning to create human embryos from the skin cells of two men.The work represents a step toward the promise of creating personalized embryonic stem cells that could be used for medical treatments. Although the embryos grew only to a very early stage, the work could also theoretically be seen as a step toward creating babies that are genetic copies of other people.Scientists at the company, Stemagen, which is based in San Diego, said Thursday that they were the first to use human adult cells to create cloned embryos that advanced to the stage known as a blastocyst, from which embryonic stem cells typically are extracted.However, the researchers did not derive embryonic stem cells. That left some experts skeptical.“It’s an important step toward the ultimate goal of making patient-specific stem cell lines via nuclear transfer,” said Dr. George Q. Daley, a stem cell researcher at Harvard and Children’s Hospital Boston, using another term for cloning. But he said skepticism would be erased only when stem cell lines were derived.Dr. Samuel H. Wood, the chief executive of Stemagen, said the company first wanted to prove it could clone an adult human cell and was now turning to deriving cell lines. “We’ve at least shown the opening to the cave that has the holy grail,” he said.A paper on the work was published online on Thursday by the journal Stem Cells.It is not clear whether the embryos would have been viable if implanted into a womb. Stemagen did not test whether the embryos had the correct number of chromosomes. But Dr. Wood, who also is a fertility doctor, said, “We’ve seen reproductive blastocysts that look like this or worse and they implant.”He said Stemagen, which he started with a wealthy friend in 2005, was not interested in creating cloned babies, something that is illegal in places and morally repugnant to many people. Rather it wants to make stem cell lines for research and medical treatments.Scientists envision that stem cells created from a clone of a patient could be turned into tissues like brain cells to treat Parkinson’s disease and pancreatic cells to treat diabetes.But creating stem cell lines through this process, often called therapeutic cloning, has proven difficult.A company called Advanced Cell Technology created human embryos in 2001 but they died well short of the roughly 100-cell blastocyst stage. In 2004, South Korean researchers led by Woo Suk Hwang reported they had made both cloned embryos and stem cells, but those claims were found to be fraudulent.Dr. Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology, said he was not convinced the blastocysts made by Stemagen were normal, based on the pictures of them in the paper.But Dr. Daley of Harvard said he found the data “pretty convincing.” He said that since scientists had reported making cloned monkey embryos last November, it was only a matter of time before it could be done for humans.Cloning is done by removing the nucleus from an egg and replacing it with genetic material from another cell. The egg is then induced into starting to divide as if it had been fertilized by sperm.The Stemagen scientists, led by Andrew French, an animal cloner recruited from Australia, used skin cells from Dr. Wood and another Stemagen employee as the DNA source. They used 29 eggs donated by young women at the fertility clinic that Dr. Wood manages.Five blastocysts were developed. One was shown to be a clone by genetic testing, the scientists reported, and two others also showed good evidence of being clones.Dr. Wood said the key to success might have been choosing egg donors who were known to be fertile and healthy because they had previously been successful donors at his fertility clinic.The women were also donating at the same time to couples wanting babies. Some eggs went to the couples and the others to the research, with the consent of both the donors and the couples. The donors were paid for the eggs that went to the in vitro fertilization but not to the research, Dr. Wood said.Therapeutic cloning has been hampered by lack of access to healthy eggs, in part because it is often considered unethical to pay women for such donations. Dr. Daley of Harvard said Stemagen’s “egg sharing” approach appeared to be a reasonable way to obtain eggs.Scientists in Japan and Wisconsin recently reported being able to make cells that resemble embryonic stem cells without cloning, thereby avoiding the controversial destruction of embryos and the need for eggs. But that new technique has safety risks so some experts say therapeutic cloning is still needed.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/us/18embryos.html?ref=us
With Sun Microsystems’ US$1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL announced Wednesday, Sun gets ownership of a major player in the open-source software industry while MySQL gets the backing of a multibillion-dollar, established systems company.Called the largest open-source software deal ever, the merger makes Sun the owner of a critical part of the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) open-source software stack. Sun already has been offering up its own software to open source, even basing its development tools strategy on the open source NetBeans platform.”MySQL is an important part of the LAMP stack, [and] has grown to be enterprise-ready technology used by large organizations, and Sun is now a major player in the LAMP stack,” said Raven Zachary, analyst with The 451 Group. MySQL customers get the benefit of a larger support organization,Zachary said. Sun, meanwhile, will push MySQL as enterprise-ready technology and as an alternative to proprietary databases like Oracle, he said. “I think Sun has really been struggling in building a software revenue stream around its open-source projects, and I think for them to take on MySQL, now they have a very successful revenue stream around an open-source software [stack] that was lacking before,” said Zachary.
“We’re in a recession - at a minimum,” Donald Trump told Cramer in a recent interview. The host of NBC’s The Apprentice has been critical of Ben Bernanke and Federal Reserve for some time, saying that the central bank’s conservative rate cuts haven’t been enough.
According to the announcement, around $US800 million cash will be paid in exchange for MySQL stock and some $US200 million in options will be taken on by Sun. Millions of websites are built using the LAMP stack - and MySQL is the M in that acronym, with the others being Linux, Apache and PHP/Perl.MySQL chief executive Marten Mickos will join the Sun executive leadership team after the deal is finalised.The move will bring Sun up against Oracle, the world’s largest database company, but will certainly improve Sun’s standing with the open source community.The idea of buying an open source database has been floating around at Sun for some time; nearly three years ago, then chief executive Scott McNealy was reported by News.com as raising the idea during a meeting of financial analysts.The same report also said that Jonathan Schwartz, then president, and the current chief executive, told an interviewer that Sun was looking at database software as one way of extending its footprint into the open source realm.Sun already supports the other well-known open source database, PostgreSQL on its Solaris operating system. And many companies run Oracle on Solaris.This means that every big IT company has a major open source offering - Microsoft is the only odd man out.In his blog, Schwartz wrote : “Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the internet. No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS. ”With this acquisition, we will have done just that - positioned Sun at the center (sic) of the web, as the definitive provider of high performance platforms for the web economy.”
