Don't blow this out of proportion, . Cases of false tweets and news reports wreaking havoc on the markets are rare. In 2011, for instance, Apple shares dipped just 1 percent (and quickly rebounded) after a false report said that Apple founder Steve Jobs had died. And when a Twitter account impersonating prominent short-seller David Einhorn tried to "induce fluctuations" in Herbalife's stock in February, the company's value underwent "no noticeable change." Still, the AP episode "highlights the potential pitfalls of relying on social networks for tradable information," especially on the heels of the Securities and Exchange Commission's announcement that companies can use social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook, "to share market-moving company announcements."

The solution is better security, . The First Amendment "prevents the government from controlling what users say on Twitter," but regulators can make social media firms beef up their protocols. False information "has the potential to be damaging to more than the financial world." Just imagine: "If the hacked AP tweet had been more believable and not as easy to discredit — say, 'U.S. Navy moving into strategic positions around North Korea' — a global emergency could have ensued." The technology sector may disdain regulation, but "other kinds of information, such as financial and health-care data, are already strictly regulated by law." It's up to the consumer to decide what to trust on Twitter, but messages shouldn't be so easy to fake.

"Other than self-restraint, which is in short supply these days, nothing much can be done to prevent any of this," . Social media sites will seek new means to "spread information, for better and worse, farther and faster than the Spanish flu." And unless regulators crack down on high-frequency traders, they "will go on using algorithms that turn milliseconds of information advantage into huge profits" — even if that information is wrong.

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Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette, who has a underperform rating on the company's stock, said he believes initial shipment and sales volumes for the BlackBerry Q10 - a device that comes with a physical keyboard - have not been strong.

Faucette said sales of the BlackBerry Z10 - a full touchscreen device also powered by the new BB10 operating system - are slowing down as well.

"We believe the production levels of 1.5 million to 2 million units per month are well in excess of the sell-through," Faucette said in a note to clients on Tuesday, adding that the company is likely going to be forced to cut production levels.

The Pacific Crest report comes less than a week after Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said sales of the Q10 were strong in both Canada and Britain - the two countries in which the device has been launched.

BlackBerry's volatile shares were down 5 percent at $14.80 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq, while its Toronto-listed stock was down 5.5 percent at C$14.88.

($1=$1.00 Canadian)

(Reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Peter Galloway)

Previously in charge of Buffalo's American Hockey League affiliate, the Rochester Americans, Rolston becomes the 16th head coach for the Sabres after guiding the team to a 15-11-5 record in 31 games since replacing Ruff.

The 46-year-old also spent seven seasons as head coach with USA Hockey's national team development program and led the U.S. under-18 team to gold medals at the International Ice Hockey Federation world championships in 2005, 2009 and 2011.

Buffalo finished fourth-last in the Eastern Conference with a 21-21-6 record, missing the playoffs for the second straight year and fourth time in six seasons.

(Reporting by Mark Lamport-Stokes in Los Angeles; Editing by Frank Pingue)

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The photos published on Thursday showed Motorolas upcoming X Phone wrapped in a protective case intended to keep the handsets design a secret, but gadget blog Tinthe.tnapparently managed to get its hands on photosthat are now believed to have shown the X Phone without any type of cover.

[More from BGR: ]

As seen in the photos above, the X Phone is shaping up to be a very sleek handset with a large display that nearly reaches the edges of the device.

A subsequent report from 9to5Google claims to reveal specs of the phone, which include an HD display measuring about 4.7 inches diagonally, 32GB of internal storage, 2GB of RAM and a nearly stock version of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. The phone will reportedly ship with protective skins available in as many as 25 different colors.

Reports regarding when the X Phone might be unveiled continue to conflict, but its debut may come later this month at .

Updated to clarify that Tinhte.tns photos of the X Phone were first published in March.

This article was

Utah's biggestruns east of Salt Lake City, at the base of the steep Wasatch Mountains. About 75 percent of the state's population lives near the 240-mile-long (385 kilometers) Wasatch Fault, according to the Utah Geological Survey. Its last big earthquake hit in 1600, 147 years before Mormon settlers arrived.

To the west, in urban , a 4-mile-wide (6 km) zone of fault segments called the West Valley Fault Zone stretches north-northwest for 9 miles (14 km)beneath the valley.

Trenches along a portion of the West Valley fault zone, near Salt Lake City's airport, reveal that both the West Valley and Wasatch faults seem to rupture simultaneously during earthquakes, scientists will report today at the meeting.

While dating techniques can't confirm that the earthquakes were synchronous, instead of within a few days, month or years, modeling suggests they strike at the same time, said Christopher DuRoss, study co-author and a geologist at the Utah Geological Survey.

"Based on models of how the crust would behave, we expect the West Valley Fault Zone would rupture instantaneously with the Salt Lake City segment," DuRoss told OurAmazingPlanet.

Two faults, more shaking

If both fault zones ruptured during an earthquake, it would mean more shaking for Salt Lake City, which sits atop soft lake sediments, the kind that experience liquefaction during severe earthquakes. In the 2011 Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake, liquefaction destroyed the city's downtown core. In Salt Lake City, planners are also concerned about the risk of flooding from waves in theand landslides in mountain canyons during a major earthquake.

Residents of Salt Lake will get a better picture of their risk when the Utah Geological Survey and U.S. Geological Survey release updated hazard maps in 2014, which are based on today's presentation and other recent work, DuRoss said. []

The Wasatch Fault is divided into 10 segments, which act mostly independently, researchers think. The 25-mile-long (40 km) Salt Lake City segment is thought to be one of the most hazardous, with the probability of a large quake (magnitude 7.0) put at 16.5 percent in the next 100 years, according to the Utah Geological Survey. However, that earthquake forecast is now out-of-date, thanks to new research, and will be updated next year by the Working Group on Utah Earthquake Probabilities, DuRoss said.

Trenches find big quakes

DuRoss and study co-author Michael Hylland looked at the link between the Wasatch Fault and the West Valley Fault Zone with trenches dug near the Salt Lake City airport, where the shrinking Great Salt Lake has exposed West Valley fault traces. For the Wasatch fault, the team dug new trenches near the University of Utah.

Disturbed sediment layers indicate fouron the West Valley fault broke ground in the past 15,700, 13,000, 12,300 and 5,500 years ago, said Hylland, also a geologist at the Utah Geological Survey.dating ties the broken ground to earthquake records in trenches along the Salt Lake City section of the Wasatch Fault.

More complete sediment records exist for the Salt Lake City section of the Wasatch Fault, with nine prehistoric temblors found, Hylland said.The last big earthquake on the Salt Lake City segment was 1,400 years ago. The quakes hit every 1,300 to 1,500 years, researchers think.

"From what we can see, it looks like the frequency is about the same" on the two fault zones, Hylland told OurAmazingPlanet. "What it really comes down to is 'how active is the Salt Lake City segment?'" Hylland said. "That's the real driver of the hazard for Salt Lake Valley."

The separate faults likely merge into a single fault deep beneath the valley, Hylland said. The West Valley faults angles to the east, and the Wasatch Fault dips to the west.

Movement on both faults is up-down. They are both normal faults, sliding one block of the Earth's crust away from another block during an earthquake.

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SAN JOSE (Reuters) - The Venezuelan government's suggestion that an American citizen it has detained is a spy is "ridiculous," U.S. President Barack Obama said in a television interview recorded on Saturday during a visit to Costa Rica.

Venezuela said late last month it had detained an American called Timothy Hallet Tracy, accusing him of financing opposition student demonstrations after April's disputed presidential election and saying he had clearly been trained as an intelligence agent.

Venezuela said Tracy, 35, from Michigan, had received money from a foreign non-profit organization and had redirected those funds toward student organizations, seeking to provoke "civil war".

Relatives and friends of Tracy have described him to U.S. media as a documentary filmmaker who was in Venezuela to make a film about the presidential election.

"This U.S. citizen who apparently has been detained, we will handle (it) like ... every situation where we get a U.S. citizen who gets into some sort of legal tangle in a foreign country," Obama told Noticias Telemundo in an interview set to be aired on Sunday.

"The notion that this individual is some spy is ridiculous," Obama added as he wrapped up a three-day trip to Mexico and Costa Rica. "We've seen some of this rhetoric occasionally come out of Venezuela."

U.S. officials say the matter is being handled privately, rather than government-to-government, and they are unaware of details of the case. They are, however, seeking consular access to Tracy.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, elected in April by a narrow margin, has accused former U.S. officials of fomenting plans to assassinate him and also said Washington is supporting efforts to destabilize Venezuela.

The U.S. government has denied that, and Venezuelan opposition have derided the torrent of accusations as a smokescreen to distract Venezuelans from difficult domestic issues.

Obama said in a separate interview with Univision News, aired on Friday, that the United States was watching "crackdowns on the opposition" in Venezuela, when asked if he considered newly elected Maduro to be the country's legitimate president.

The United States angered Maduro when it last month held back recognition of his narrow victory over Capriles.

"What we want for Venezuela is ... Venezuelans ... able to choose their own leadership in fair and free elections a democratic process that is credible," Obama told Noticias Telemundo. "We have not tried to interfere in any way with what happens there."

"What we've said is, you know, let's make sure that the rules are being followed, that people are not being thrown into jail or intimidated, that the press is allowed to report fairly on what happens, that the ruling party doesn't resort to intimidation in terms of skewing results."

(With reporting by Andrew Cawthorne in Caracas; Writing by Simon Gardner; Editing by Eric Walsh)

By now, cars were supposed to be running on fuel made from plant waste or algae or powered by hydrogen or cheap batteries that burned nothing at all. Electricity would be generated with solar panels and wind turbines. When the sun didn't shine or the wind didn't blow, power would flow out of batteries the size of tractor-trailers.

Fossil fuels? They were going to be expensive and scarce, relics of an earlier, dirtier age.

But in the race to conquer energy technology, Old Energy is winning.

Oil companies big and small have used technology to find a bounty of oil and natural gas so large that worries about running out have melted away. New imaging technologies let drillers find oil and gas trapped miles underground and undersea. Oil rigs "walk" from one drill site to the next. And engineers in Houston use remote-controlled equipment to drill for gas in Pennsylvania.

The result is an abundance that has put the United States on track to become the world's largest producer of oil and gas in a few years. Just Thursday, the U.S. reported that oil imports have fallen to a 17-year low.

The gushers aren't limited to Texas, North Dakota and the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Overseas, enormous reserves have been found in East and West Africa, Australia, South America and the Mediterranean.

"Suddenly, out of nowhere, the world seems to be awash in hydrocarbons," says Michael Greenstone, an environmental economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The consequences are enormous. A looming energy crisis has turned into a boom. These additional fossil fuels are intensifying the threat to the earth's climate. And for renewable energy sources, the sunny forecast of last decade has turned overcast.

This is the story of how technological advances drove a revolution no one in the energy industry expected. One that is just beginning.

___

EXPLORING ENERGY FRONTIERS

The new century brought deep concerns the world's oil reserves were increasingly concentrated in the Middle East and beginning to run out. Energy prices rose to record highs. Climate scientists showed that reliance on fossil fuels was causing troubling changes to the environment.

"The general belief was that the end of the oil era was at hand," says Daniel Yergin, an energy historian and author of "The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World."

As a result, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and governments were pouring money into new companies developing alternative forms of energy that promised to supply the world's needs without polluting.

Even oil and gas companies got in the game. BP had adopted the slogan "beyond petroleum" in 2000 and threw millions into its solar division. Shell partnered with another company to fire up a plant to convert agricultural waste into ethanol.

So strong was the lure of alternative energy that veterans of the oil patch began fleeing for startups.

In 23 years at Shell, David Aldous helped develop projections that showed a booming world population and rising energy demand. He also saw how hard it was for big oil companies to find enough oil every year to replace all they sold. He left Shell to join Range Fuels, a company that promised to turn wood chips into ethanol, in 2008.

"I felt we needed faster innovation," he says.

___

THE RACE FOR NEW TECHNOLOGY

But while the national focus was on alternatives, the oil and gas industry was innovating too. New technology allowed drillers to do two crucial things: find more places where oil and gas is hidden and bring it to the surface economically.

Large oil companies such as Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP turned up huge discoveries offshore in ultra-deep water with the help of better sensors and faster computers that allowed them to see once-hidden oil deposits.

Onshore, small drillers learned how to pull oil and gas out of previously inaccessible underground rock formations.

For most of the oil age, drillers have looked for large underground pools of oil and gas that were easy to tap. These pools had grown over millions of years as oil and gas oozed out of what is known as source rock. Source rock is a wide, thin layer of sedimentary rock like frosting in the middle of a layer cake that is interspersed with oil and gas.

An engineer named George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy, spent years searching for a way to free natural gas from this source rock. He finally succeeded when he figured how to drill horizontally, into and then along a layer of source rock. That allowed him to access the gas throughout a layer of source rock with a single well. Then he used a process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" to create tiny cracks in the rock that would allow natural gas to flow into and up the well.

The United States, which was facing a gas shortage five years ago, now has such enormous supplies it is looking to export the fuel in large volumes for the first time.

The common wisdom in the industry was that the process Mitchell had invented for natural gas wouldn't work for oil. Oil molecules are bigger and stickier than gas molecules, so petroleum engineers believed it would be impossible to get them to flow from source rock, even if the rock were cracked by fracking. But Mark Papa, the CEO of a small oil and gas company called EOG Resources, didn't accept that.

"The numbers were too intriguing, the prize was so big," he remembered.

He thought there could be as much as a billion barrels of oil within reach in Texas, North Dakota and elsewhere if only he could squeeze it out.

In 2003, he had a "eureka!" moment while poring over pictures of rock. Sections of a 40-foot-long column of source rock had been run through a CT scanner, the same type used to peer into the human body.

He saw something in the source rock sections the rest of the industry didn't know was there: a network of passageways big enough for oil molecules to pass through. Papa believed the passageways could act like rural roads for the oil to travel through. Fracking could then create superhighways for the oil to gather and feed into a pipe and up to the surface.

EOG began drilling test wells, and in 2005, Papa got some results from one in North Dakota that made him realize oil could flow fast enough to pay off.

"It was kind of like holy cow," he says. "My first thought was we need to replicate this, make sure it's not a freak result."

It wasn't. EOG snapped up land in a similar formation in South Texas known as the Eagle Ford Shale for $400 an acre when his competition thought it would never produce much oil. That land now goes for $30,000 per acre.

Papa thought the Eagle Ford might hold 500,000 barrels of oil. The Department of Energy now predicts it holds 3.4 billion. Some even expect 10 billion, which would make it the biggest oil field in U.S. history.

___

SMART DRILLS, RIGS THAT CAN WALK

But even after drillers figured out how to find oil and gas deep offshore and in onshore source rock, they still needed to develop technology that would make it economical.

At the tip of every oil or gas drill is a rotating mouth of sharp teeth that chews through rock. In the past, these drill bits could only dig straight down. Now they are agile enough to find and follow narrow horizontal seams of rock.

The drilling-services company Baker Hughes has designed a bit that can change directions underground, without having to be drawn back up to the surface, reducing drilling time by as much as 40 percent.

Behind the drill bit, attached to a long line of steel known as the "drill string," is an array of sensors. The sensors bombard rock with subatomic particles and measure the gamma radiation that bounces back. They assess how easily electricity flows through the rock and underground fluids. They analyze the magnetism of the rock and how it vibrates both up and down and side to side while drilling.

"To the layman, it looks like dumb iron, but you'd be shocked about what's inside," says Art Soucy, president of global products and services at Baker Hughes.

All this information is sent to engineers via fiber-optic cables. They run the information through supercomputers as powerful as 30,000 laptops to create a picture of the earth thousands of feet below the surface.

The people analyzing this data and even directing the drill bits are often sitting hundreds of miles away. Shell's Pennsylvania drilling operations are directed from a center in Houston, where experienced drillers monitor the progress at several sites across the country from a single room.

And when the drilling is done, the rig itself can "walk" a hundred feet or so to another location and start drilling again. In the past, rigs had to be taken down and reassembled, which could take days. New rigs are built on sliding "shoes" that allow hydraulic lifts to shuffle the rig forward in short steps.

"It has made possible things that were unthinkable 10 years ago," says Claudi Santiago, managing director at First Reserve Corp., a private-equity firm that invests in energy companies.

Now, drillers are finding oil faster than the world is using it. At the end of 2001, the industry had enough "proved oil reserves" to satisfy world demand for 45 years, according to BP's annual statistical review, a closely watched study. By the end of 2011 that had grown to 51 years even though a decade's worth of oil had been used and daily demand had grown 14 percent. And "proved reserves" refers to oil that can be economically tapped using today's technology. Tomorrow's methods could yield even more.

This is good news for a global economy that remains dependent on fossil fuels, but it's terrifying to climate scientists.

"If we're willing to go down this road of squeezing whatever petroleum we can out of the earth, we can easily get carbon dioxide levels up to unfathomable levels and put in motion what would be dramatic or catastrophic changes in our climate system," says Michael E. Mann, a geophysicist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University.

___

RENEWABLES PROGRESS, BUT NOT FAST ENOUGH

Renewable technologies have had their successes. The average cost of a solar power system has fallen by 31 percent in the last two years. Solar now generates six times more electricity in the U.S. than it did a decade ago, and wind produces 14 times more. Most major automakers offer some type of electric vehicle.

And this success has come despite the fact that renewable energy's major benefit that it doesn't pollute is given little or no value in the marketplace because most governments haven't adopted taxes or penalties for fossil fuel pollution.

But the outlook for wind, batteries and biofuels is as dim as it's been in a decade. Global greenhouse gas agreements have fizzled. Dazzling discoveries have been made in laboratories, and some of these may yet develop into transformative products, but alternative energy technologies haven't become cheaper or more useful than fossil fuels.

Solar, wind and geothermal sources together accounted for 4.8 percent of U.S. power generation last year. Ten percent of U.S. gasoline demand was satisfied with corn ethanol, but ethanol and other fuels made from non-food sources have yet to hit the market.

"In many cases, renewables aren't ready for primetime yet," says George Biltz, vice president for energy and climate change at Dow Chemical, which continues to work on a host of renewable technologies.

Likewise, electric cars have not enjoyed the success many expected. The battery alone in an electric car costs as much as a new gasoline-powered car, and electric vehicles are not selling nearly as fast as once projected. General Motors expected to sell 60,000 Chevy Volts globally last year, but sold just half that many. Sales of Nissan's all-electric Leaf grew 22 percent around the world last year to 26,000, short of Nissan's projected 50 percent growth.

The cost of wind and solar power has declined, but the price of electricity made with newly cheap fossil fuels has fallen too, making it harder for wind and solar to compete.

"Renewables are now under scrutiny. They haven't made the kinds of quantum leaps we have seen in the oil and gas industry," says First Reserve Corp.'s Santiago, who now shuns investments in alternatives.

David Aldous, the former Shell executive, learned that lesson while trying to turn wood chips into ethanol at Range Fuels. The system that fed the chips into a gasification chamber didn't work well, and the project failed.

"Things don't always scale from the petri dish to the demo plant and then to the commercial plant. It's just part of building up a new industry," Aldous says.

Range went out of business in 2011, and it was hardly alone. Dozens of biofuel, battery and solar companies failed even though federal and state governments supported alternatives with loans and grants, and mandated their use. Others are limping along.

Pacific Ethanol, which traded near $300 per share in 2006, now trades for 27 cents. Amyris, an advanced biofuels company, traded near $34 a share as recently as last year, but now trades at $2.65. The battery maker A123 was forced to file for bankruptcy protection last year, three years after going public. An index of clean energy companies that was first traded in March 2005 is down 70 percent since then. A similar index of traditional energy companies is up 73 percent over the same period.

___

THE NEXT 10 YEARS

This dark period for alternative energy could last for years. With government debt soaring and no more worries about running out of oil, many renewable subsidies are being scaled back.

"The world is completely different now," MIT's Greenstone says.

But there are still hundreds of companies, including fossil fuel giants, working on new renewable-energy projects. ExxonMobil is investing in Synthetic Genomics, a company started by the geneticist J. Craig Venter to try to create strains of algae that will produce fuels. BP and Shell continue to work on ways to turn plant waste into fuels.

California, meanwhile, set the nation's most ambitious renewable energy goals and is on track to meet them. One-fifth of the power delivered by the state's three biggest utilities now comes from renewables, not including large hydroelectric dams. By 2020, that portion will rise to one-third.

President Barack Obama in March proposed using $2 billion in federal oil and gas royalties to invest in clean energy technology research. Obama is also expected to promote renewables through pollution regulations, if not with new laws.

And for all the world's newfound oil, prices are still high because developing nations are consuming more.

"It's not time to write the epitaph yet," Aldous says. Eventually the global economy will fully recover, he says, and demand for energy of all kinds will increase.

"New sources of energy are going to be in vogue again," he says.

Experts didn't see the oil and gas boom coming five years ago. It's certainly possible the world will change direction again in the next five years.

But EOG's Papa says oil and gas companies will just invest in even more sophisticated technology. He estimates that current techniques pull only 6 percent of the oil trapped in source rock to the surface. Learning to double that would yield yet another enormous trove of hydrocarbons.

"Now we go into the next phase of technology," he says. "How are we going to get the rest of it out of the ground?"

____

Follow Jonathan Fahey on Twitter at http://twitter.com/JonathanFahey

The actor, who won an Oscar for his performance in 2010s The King Speech, is in talks to star in The Secret Service, Matthew Vaughns adaptation of a comic he co-created with Mark Millar and artist Dave Gibbons.

Vaughn co-wrote the screenplay with frequent collaborator Jane Goldman and is directing, producing and financing via his MARV Films banner, in the same fashion as he adapted Millars comic Kick-Ass.

20th Century Fox picked up the North American distribution rights in March and set a .

Service, a six-issue mini-series, tells of a ruffian from the rough neighborhoods of London who gets recruited by his uncle into ta British spy school of the sort that churns out suave, sophisticated gentlemen-agent types in the 007 mold.

"This is James Bond meets My Fair Lady, Millar told Heat Vision in April, 2012.

Firth would play the uncle should a deal get made. Aaron Johnson was pursued for the lead but was unavailable.

The comic was made with Hollywood in mind. Not only was Vaughn a co-creator of the book, the comic also featured cameos from such real life personages as Mark Hamill and Ridley Scott (connected to the machinations of the villain). It is unclear at this time if they will appear in the movie.

Firth, known for his British period dramas and romantic comedies, next appears in Arthur Newman and Devils Knot.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama plans to nominate on Monday Charlotte, North Carolina, Mayor Anthony Foxx to be his next transportation secretary, a White House official said on Sunday.

If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Foxx would replace Ray LaHood, who has served as transportation secretary since January 2009.

Foxx is African-American and would add to the Obama Cabinet's racial diversity, something the president's supporters have been urging him to do.

As Charlotte mayor, Foxx is credited with improving the city's transportation systems.

"Foxx's career as a public official, in a rapidly changing urban environment, has been marked by an ability to integrate local, state and federal resources to meet important transportation challenges," the White House official said.

North Carolina has been an important swing state in presidential elections. It voted for Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election, but backed Obama in 2008. Charlotte hosted the Democratic National Convention in 2012.

(Additional reporting by Steve Holland, Sarah N. Lynch; Editing by Stacey Joyce and Mohammad Zargham)