Weather permitting, observers in western Australia should be getting their first glimpses of the celestial show right now as the sun rises above the horizon.

If you don't happen to live in that part of the world, you can. One is courtesy of the online Slooh Space Camera and the other is provided by the Coca-Cola Space Science Center.

"We have multiple feeds set-up, so weather permitting, we should have some nice looks," Slooh president Patrick Paolucci wrote in an email. "We will be on air for at least a few hours." []

Slooh's webcast features views from an observatory in Australia as well as expert commentary from Paolucci, Slooh outreach coordinator Paul Cox, Prescott Observatory manager Matt Francis and Astronomy Magazine contributing editor and writer Bob Berman. Live shots of the sun supplied by the Prescott Observatory in Arizona will also be on hand during the webcast.

The Coca-Cola Space Science Center's webcast also features live views from Australia. Interested skywatchers can email their questions to webcast@ccssc.org.

An occurs when the moon passes between the Earth and the sun, casting a shadow on the planet. The moon still appears smaller than the sun in the sky, giving the eclipse its distinctive ring shape.

About 95 percent of the sun is covered during the eclipse, but the sky will not be noticeably darker. For this reason, it's important to use special protective eyewear or other methods of shielding to safely observe the eclipse in person.

The path of annularity will lead the eclipse through Australia and into Papua New Guinea. The Solomon Islands, Gilbert Islands and other parts of the Pacific Ocean also lie in the 8,264 mile (13,300 kilometer) track of the eclipse. In total, this eclipse will cover about 0.5 percent of the Earth's surface area, according to NASA officials.

Although this is the firstof 2013, it is not the last. A rare hybrid solar eclipse when an annular eclipse transitions into a total eclipse will be seen in the northern Atlantic Ocean and into equatorial Africa on Nov. 3.

You can watch the webcast directly from Slooh's iPad app or the group's website: http://events.slooh.com/

You can also watch the CCSSP webcast directly from the organization's website: http://www.ccssc.org/webcast/eclipse2013.html

WARNING:Never look directly at the sun during an eclipse with a telescope or your unaided eye. Severe eye damage can result and scientists use special filters to safely view the sun.

Editor's Note: If you live in the observing area of today's solar eclipse and safely snap an amazing picture of the sun that you'd like to share for a possible story or image gallery, send photos, comments and your name and location to Managing Editor Tariq Malik at.

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The attendees came to the first-ever Space Hacker Workshop on Saturday and Sunday (May 4 and 5) to learn about how they could build and fly experiments on a new generation of manned suborbital vehicles such as XCOR Aerospace's .

The event, which was sponsored by the Silicon Valley Space Center and Citizens in Space, attracted high-school and college students, university professors, space professionals, scientists, technology experts and others interested in this emerging field. []

New reusable vehicles slated to come online soon will provide affordable and repeated access to space for professional and amateur scientists and help to revolutionizeand science education, said Citizens in Space founder Ed Wright.

"With the suborbital vehicles being developed...there's going to be an opportunity to fly many thousands of small payloads on suborbital vehicles every year," Wright said.

Citizen space scientists

Citizens in Space is a program run by Wright's Texas-based organization, the U.S. Rocket Academy, which has purchased 10 flights aboard the two-seat Lynx just for research. Ten lucky citizen scientists will get to fly in the passenger seat of the vehicle and operate the experiments that they have designed and built. Five of those slots already have been filled.

So, just how cheap will it be to fly experiments in space? Wright said that while a typical tinymight cost between $3,000 and $5,000 to build and another $100,000 or more to launch into orbit, developing and flying scientific payloads aboard the Lynx will be many orders of magnitude cheaper.

"At the base level, you're going to have people who are able to build an experiment for $200 or less and have an opportunity to fly in space through programs such as Citizens in Space, and I think this is just going to change everything," Wright said.

"We may reach the point in five or 10 years where every high school science major will have the opportunity to build and fly a payload in space during the course of his academic career before he graduates, he added.

The development of suborbital vehicles such as the Lynx andis coming at a time when maker spaces are popping up all over the country. Wright said these joint work spaces are perfect places for people to build the types of do-it-yourself science experiments that Citizens in Space wants to fly.

Wright's academy is developing the Lynx Cub Payload Carrier, a unit that can hold up to a dozen small experiments in a space behind the pilot's seat. The carrier will give XCOR the ability to flyin the passenger's seat while also carrying scientific experiments as secondary payloads.

A seat on Lynx costs $95,000, while a ticket to fly on SpaceShipTwo which last week made its will set you back $200,000 at the moment. (Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson said recently that ticket prices would soon temporarily rise to $250,000.) []

A range of experiments

Four XCOR employees traveled 300 miles (500 kilometers) north from the town of Mojave, where they are building the first Lynx, to address the Space Hacker audience and answer questions.

Khaki Rodway, XCOR's director of payload sales and operations, gave an overview of Lynx's capabilities and a progress update on the assembly of the first vehicle, which could fly by the end of this year.

"We're doing it because there's lots of stuff to do," Rodway said of the emerging market for experiments.

During the two-day workshop, participants heard talks about the experiments that will be carried out in the microgravity environment and vacuum of space. These experiments will range across many different fields, including materials processing, fluid dynamics, life sciences, protein crystal growth and technology demonstrations.

NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle talked about sending odd "water bears" into space. Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are tiny organisms that are virtually impervious to heat, radiation and vacuum conditions. Cagle believes that by studying water bears, scientists can learn a great deal about how to help humans adapt to space.

Jason Reimuller, president of the company Integrated Spaceflight Services, told the audience about his Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere (PoSSUM) campaign, which will use a Lynx to study the dynamics of clouds over the North Pole. The vehicle will operate out of a high-altitude spaceport in either Alaska or Sweden, Reimuller said.

Ryan Gillespie, an aerospace engineer from Sunnyvale, Calif., said he is interested in pursuing Citizens in Space's High Altitude Astrobiology Challenge, which is offering cash prizes of up to $10,000 for the development of a device that will collect micro-organisms living at the edge of space.

I'm not so much interested in the $10,000 it's more the fact that when you come up with anything, it needs a purpose," Gillespie said. "Here's something that actually has a purpose for mankind."

Driving technology forward

Richard Mains of Mains Associates, who works with the NASA Flight Opportunities Program that funds experiments on , said these new spaceships are driving technology development at a much faster rate than traditional NASA programs tend to do.

"I think what's actually going on here with these reusable suborbital launch vehicles is kind of a whole new paradigm where you're not putting a payload up onfor six months," Mains said. "And these vehicles aren't that big. But they are flying very often, So these payloads now have to be small, smart, autonomous very very easy to kind of activate and deactivate, reprogram, get data out of."

"I see all of that driving technology in a very, very interesting fashion," Mains added, mentioning the emergence of open-source platforms as another powerful driver. "So I'm very excited about what I've heard here."

Silicon Valley was a perfect location to hold the workshop given that it's at the leading edge of technology development, Mains said.

Wright said he was extremely pleased with the workshop, which sold all of its 95 tickets and had a waiting list on Saturday morning.

"I think it's gone very well," Wright said. "It's really been a great turnout. It's been very exciting for everyone here. The people from the NASA Flight Opportunities program were very excited about this. XCOR was very excited about this."

Wright says he hopes to conduct five or six additional workshops in cities across the country over the next year.

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Skype, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp in 2011, allows its users to communicate via voice, video or chat over the Internet, by-passing traditional telephone networks. The service has hundreds of millions of users across the globe.

The announcement comes a day after BlackBerry said its new Q10 smartphone will be available in Canada on May 1, and in the United States before the end of May. The Q10, which comes with the physical keyboard that many of BlackBerry's core fan base cherish, is the second device to be powered by the company's new BB10 operating system.

Skype will be available on the Q10 on launch day. Users of the existing Z10 touchscreen device will have to wait a few weeks more to get Skype, after a software upgrade on the operating system, BlackBerry said.

A smaller app base than Apple's iOS and Google Inc's Android platforms has been one of the biggest criticisms of the new BlackBerry system. It has yet to offer some big-name apps like Netflix and Instagram.

(Reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Bernard Orr)

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"On behalf of the wireless industry, we are pleased that Commissioner Clyburn has been named Acting Chairwoman of the FCC.We have worked for several years with the Commissioner and her staff, and believe that she will serve with distinction during her time as Acting Chairwoman. We look forward to working with her during this time period on the range of key issues that are pending before the Commission, including the ongoing efforts to establish the framework for the upcoming broadcast incentive auctions."

CTIA-The Wireless Association () is an international organization representing the wireless communications industry. Membership in the association includes wireless carriers and their suppliers, as well as providers and manufacturers of wireless data services and products. CTIA advocates on behalf of its members at all levels of government. The association also coordinates the industry's voluntary best practices and initiatives, and sponsors the industry's leading wireless tradeshows. CTIA was founded in 1984 and is based in Washington, D.C.

Twitter: @ctia | Blog: | Facebook: |LinkedIn Group:| Google+:

SOURCE CTIA-The Wireless Association

When people start downloading the Home software upon its April 12 release in the U.S., Facebook will become the new hub of their Android smartphones.

Switch on your phone and you'll see friends' photos, overlaid by status updates, links and eventually, advertisements in Facebook's quest to bring in more revenue and restore its stock price to where it stood when the company went public nearly 11 months ago.

About 80 percent of what currently appears within a Facebook user's News Feed will automatically be transferred into the "cover feed" of the Home service. For instance, a sibling's status update might be featured prominently on the phone's home screen when it's unlocked. Swipe a finger and there might be a photo posted by one of your best friends. Want to like what you see? Just tap on the home screen twice. Comments can be posted directly from the home screen, too.

If other friends happen to send you a message, their Facebook photo will pop up as a notification.

Other Facebook features, such as video, will be added to Home in future months. A Home version for Android-powered tablet computers also will be coming later this year.

Once they have had their fill of what Facebook is feeding them on the Home service, users can just swipe a finger on the screen to get to all the standard Android apps to listen to music, watch videos or send email.

At first, Home will only work on some Android devices, including HTC Corp.'s One X and One X Plus and Samsung Electronics Co.'s Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note 2. For now, Home isn't compatible with the Nexus phone designed by Google, a fierce Facebook rival whose pliable Android software is being modified to accommodate the new service.

A phone from HTC that comes pre-loaded with Home will be available starting April 12, with AT&T Inc. as the carrier. The HTC First will sell for $99.99 with a two-year data plan from AT&T.

Home is debuting after several years of speculation that Facebook intended to make its own phone or mobile operating system to drive more traffic to its social network. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the speculation never made sense to him because he believes a company-produced phone might only end up in the hands of 10 million to 20 million people. The Home service gives Facebook a chance to take control of the main screen of every phone running on Android, the leading mobile operating system. In the U.S. alone, about 64 million people will be relying on Android-driven phones this year, estimated the research firm eMarketer.

"Just building a phone isn't enough for Facebook," Zuckerberg said Thursday during Home's unveiling at the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

The idea behind the software is to bring Facebook content right to users' home screens, rather than requiring them to check various apps to see what their friends are up to, or to chat. Down the line, Facebook will integrate its existing camera app and other features. Though cameras and calls won't be built into the initial version of Home, Zuckerberg promised the software will be updated at least once a month to add more features and fix bugs.

"Home" comes amid rapid growth in the number of people who access Facebook from phones and tablet computers. Of the social network's 1.06 billion monthly users, 680 million log in using a mobile gadget. As a result, the money Facebook makes from mobile advertising is also growing. Taking over the entire screen of smartphones and, eventually, tablet computers will provide Facebook for a larger canvas for selling mobile ads.

Zuckerberg, already a multibillionaire, didn't dwell on Home's moneymaking potential Thursday. Instead, he depicted the software as a noble attempt to put a higher priority on personal relationships than utilitarian apps.

"Why do we need to go into all the apps in the first place to see what is going on with the people we care about," he asked.

"We think this is the best version of Facebook there is," he said.

That statement implies that using Facebook on Apple's iPhone and other smartphones may become a less enriching experience. Apple Inc., which rigidly controls how apps work on the operating system built for the iPhone and iPad, has ingrained more Facebook features into the most recent versions of its mobile software.

Apple had no immediate comment about Home.

Zuckerberg said users can have an experience on Android phones unavailable on other platforms because Google makes the software available on an open-source basis. That allows phone manufacturers and software developers to adapt it to their needs.

Recognizing that text messaging is one of the most important tasks on a mobile phone, Facebook programmed Home to include a feature called "chat heads." This lets users communicate with their friends directly from their home screens without opening a separate app.

"What Facebook wants is to put itself at the front of the Android user experience for as many Facebook users as possible and make Facebook more elemental to their customers' experience," said Forrester analyst Charles Golvin.

While the Home service probably makes sense for Facebook, Golvin believes the company is overestimating "the extent to which this is something their users want."

"I'm sure there are people out there whose lives revolve around their social network and for them it makes sense to have it front and center," Golvin said. "But this doesn't describe the majority of consumers."

Google Inc. is among the companies hoping that Golvin is correct. The Internet search leader gives away its Android software for free, in the hope that it will steer phone users to ads sold by Google. With Home, Facebook will be muscling its way in between Android users and Google, creating an opportunity for Facebook to seize the advertising advantage.

This is not the first time a big Internet company has co-opted Android: Amazon.com's Kindle Fire tablets run a version of Android that strips out all Google services, replacing them with Amazon's equivalents. Google responded by releasing its own tablet to compete against the Kindle Fire last year.

The mobile advertising market is growing quickly, thanks in large part to Facebook and Twitter, which also entered the space in 2012. EMarketer expects U.S. mobile ad spending to grow 77 percent this year to $7.29 billion, from $4.11 billion last year.

Facebook, meanwhile, is expected to reel in $1.53 billion in worldwide mobile ad revenue this year according to eMarketer, up from $470.7 million last year.

Facebook's stock rose 82 cents, or 3.1 percent, to close Thursday at $27.07. That's 29 percent below its initial public offering price of $38. Meanwhile, the Standard & Poor's 500 index has surged by 20 percent since Facebook's rocky debut.

___

Barbara Ortutay reported from New York. AP Technology Writer Peter Svensson contributed to this story from New York.

Twenty-one-year-old Jenelle Evans was arrested in Brunswick County on Tuesday and charged with possession of a controlled substance, possession with intent to manufacture, sell or deliver heroin, simple assault and a child support violation.

Evans' husband, Courtland Rogers, has been charged with assault on a female and possession with intent to manufacture, sell or deliver heroin.

Her attorney, Dustin Sullivan, did not immediately return a telephone call. It wasn't clear whether he has an attorney.

The "Teen Mom" show documents the challenges of four teens' first years of motherhood.

A medical exodus is taking place in the Caribbean territory as doctors and nurses flee for the U.S. mainland, seeking higher salaries and better reimbursement from insurers. Many of their patients, frustrated by long waits and a scarcity of specialists, are finding they have no choice but to follow them off the island.

Among them is Marilu Flores, a 60-year-old rural mail carrier who is battling advanced rheumatoid arthritis.

She not only is flying to the U.S. mainland to receive treatment; she's moving to Texas.

"The best doctors left a long time ago," she said.

In the last five years, the number of doctors in Puerto Rico has dropped by 13 percent, from 11,397 to 9,950, according to the island's Medical Licensing and Studies Board. The biggest losses are primary care physicians and specialists within a specialty, such as thoracic oncologists.

Of the roughly 400 cardiologists who practiced in Puerto Rico about five years ago, only about 150 remain. The number of anesthesiologists has dropped from roughly 300 to about 100 in roughly the same time period, said Dr. Eduardo Ibarra, president of the island's Association of Surgeons.

"Same with the neurosurgeons. They don't even number 20 now," Ibarra said. "There are no specialized surgeons in certain areas."

Those seeking a thoracic oncologist, for example, have to go to Florida, if they can afford it.

"It's truly catastrophic," he said.

The exodus of doctors is part of a larger wave of professionals who have left the U.S. island territory in recent years, settling in states such as Florida and New York, where there is a big demand for bilingual workers, especially police and nurses. Many Puerto Ricans also seek to escape a wave of violent crime and higher cost of living. Almost a million more Puerto Ricans now live on the mainland than on the island.

Medical professionals say they expect the situation will worsen.

President Barack Obama's new health care law means U.S. states will soon seek more doctors amid an influx of patients, said Dr. Guillermo Tirado, an internal medicine specialist in Puerto Rico.

"All states are preparing to cull a lot of doctors from Puerto Rico," he said. "If we have a big exodus now, we're going to see it get worse ... There hasn't been a revolution yet because the escape valve is to buy a plane ticket to Orlando," referring to the many patients who fly to the U.S. for treatment if they can afford it.

Puerto Rico currently does not meet federal recommendations on the number and types of doctors needed per capita, Tirado said.

The island of 3.7 million people has no more than two pediatric neurosurgeons, even though guidelines state there should be at least one pediatric neurosurgeon per roughly 80,000 people, he said.

Puerto Rico also lacks 93 full-time primary care physicians to adequately cover the medical needs of the population, according to statistics from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, which tracks areas suffering from a shortage of health professionals. Of the island's 78 municipalities, 37 need more health care professionals, including the capital of San Juan and Ponce, the island's second largest city. The island has roughly 7,000 primary care physicians, Ibarra said.

At the same time, the island's medical tourism industry is growing, with two new hospitals being built in Manati and Bayamon, catering mostly to foreigners from elsewhere in the Caribbean, and even some from the U.S. mainland, said Pedro Pierluisi, the island's representative in Congress who has limited voting powers. "In a way, it's inconsistent," he said.

Tirado said U.S. patients seek mostly cosmetic procedures, while Caribbean patients often seek specialists not available on their islands, such as endocrinologists.

"It's a paradox," he said, noting that U.S. tourists who need other medical services while on vacation often choose to go back to the mainland in an air ambulance.

To prevent doctors from leaving, one legislator has introduced a bill that would require medical students to stay and practice in Puerto Rico the amount of time it took to complete their residency if the government paid for it.

"We're being left without specialists," said Jose Aponte, former president of the House of Representatives.

The government pays for the residencies of at least 95 percent of all Puerto Rican medical students, investing $35,000-$45,000 a year for each, Aponte said. Puerto Rico has four medical schools, and roughly 400 medical students graduate a year.

If the bill is approved, students would have to reimburse the government the cost of their residency if they leave before practicing medicine for the required time.

"Currently, they are disappearing from the scene because they go to the U.S., where they have received incredible offers," he said.

Tirado agreed: "Job offers rain down every day," he said. "It's a huge bombardment."

Family and general practitioners in Puerto Rico earn about $72,000 a year, while in the U.S. they earn about $180,000, according to 2012 statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor.

That's partly due to the lower standard of wages on the island, where the median wage is less than $28,000 a year, far below mainland income. Ibarra and Tirado say peculiarities in the island's health insurance system also force doctors to accept less income or to leave.

Puerto Rican health care providers also get less reimbursement from Medicare for particular services than do those in any other U.S. state or territory, Pierluisi said. They get about 20 percent less than those on the U.S. Virgin Islands and the base rate for hospital patients is 14 percent less than on the U.S. mainland, he said.

Currently, more than 670,000 people in Puerto Rico use Medicare.

"It's a huge number of patients for doctors," said Pierluisi. "It's the best plan we have. It serves as the top plan. If Medicare is not paying our physicians well, the commercial insurers in the private sector will do the same."

While the U.S. government is scheduled to revise how Medicare reimbursements are determined next year, that won't stop doctors from leaving, Tirado said.

A recent study commissioned by the island's Association of Surgeons found the problem is aggravated by retiring doctors, and by the fact that fewer doctors are studying allergy, endocrinology, geriatrics and urology. The study also warned about a scarcity of specialists including cardiologists, anesthesiologists and orthopedic surgeons.

Flores said she is looking forward to not having to worry about scarcity of doctors once she moves to the U.S.

"I've already taken the decision to quit my job," she said. "It pays well, but my health is more important."

NUEVA YORK (Reuters Health) - Los hospitales de Estados

Unidos tendran un incentivo econmico para no implementar las

estrategias y las tcnicas que reducen las complicaciones

quirrgicas.

Eso no quiere decir que "los hospitales estn considerando

'Podemos ganar ms dinero si tenemos ms complicaciones'", dijo

el autor principal de un nuevo estudio, el doctor Atul Gawande,

del Hospital de Brigham y de la Facultad de Salud Pblica de

Harvard, Boston.

Pero el equipo de Gawande hall que el sistema hospitalario

del sur de Estados Unidos termin con ms ganancia por paciente,

lo que tcnicamente se conoce como "margen de contribucin",

cuando sus pacientes tenan una o ms complicaciones

postquirrgicas.

En JAMA, el equipo publica que entre el 3 y el 17 por ciento

de las intervenciones tiene complicaciones, lo que suma unos

11.500 dlares por paciente.

El equipo revis cunto dinero gastaban y reciban 12

hospitales del sur del pas despus de atender a 34.000

pacientes operados en el 2010. Unos 1.820 pacientes sufrieron de

una o ms complicaciones postquirrgicas, desde infecciones en

el sitio quirrgico hasta infartos cerebrales y paros cardacos.

Los autores hallaron que los hospitales obtenan una

ganancia por paciente cuando los pacientes tenan una cobertura

privada o de Medicare. Los hospitales obtuvieron unos 17.000

dlares por paciente en aquellos casos con seguro privado y sin

complicaciones postquirrgicas, y 56.000 dlares por paciente en

los casos con cobertura privada y una o ms complicaciones.

Por cada beneficiario de Medicare, los hospitales ganaron

unos 1.900 dlares en los casos sin complicaciones y unos 3.600

dlares en los casos con una o ms complicaciones.

En cambio, los centros perdieron dinero, independientemente

de si surga o no una complicacin, cuando sus cirujanos

operaban a pacientes que haban pagado la ciruga o eran

beneficiarios de Medicaid. Esos pacientes eran apenas el 10 por

ciento de los pacientes hospitalarios. Los centros ganaron unos

8.000 dlares por cada complicacin.

INCENTIVOS

A pesar de esa aparente ganancia, los autores aseguran que

el sistema hospitalario estudiado termin perdiendo dinero al

final del ao tras considerar los costos fijos, como el agua o

la electricidad, y otros gastos.

Pero la ganancia por paciente es lo que ms preocupa a los

hospitales.

Nancy Foster, vicepresidente de polticas de calidad y

seguridad de los pacientes de la Asociacin Estadounidense de

Hospitales, dijo que el estudio demuestra que los hospitales son

castigados cuando aplican programas de mejora de la calidad

porque sus prdidas son an mayores.

"La estructura de pagos se dise para que, a veces, cuando

los hospitales actan en beneficio de los pacientes (...)

reciban un impacto financiero por hacer algo correcto para sus

pacientes", dijo Foster, que no particip del estudio.

Gawande, que escribi el libro The Checklist Manifesto, dijo

que sus resultados sugieren que los hospitales no estaran

interesados en cambiar a un sistema de reembolsos que incentive

la aplicacin de medidas de control de calidad, como las listas

de control.

En un editorial sobre el estudio, Reinhardt escribe que

Medicare, que reune los pagos desde mediados de la dcada de

1980, sera un "pagador ms inteligente" que las aseguradoras

privadas a partir de estos resultados. "Medicare habra evitado

durante mucho tiempo recompensar a los hospitales por los

errores evitables", escribi Reinhardt.

Gawande coment que el equipo detect una reduccin de las

complicaciones y la mortalidad luego de trabajar con los

hospitales del sur del pas para renegociar contratos con los

aseguradores y aplicar programas de mejora de la calidad.

"Ignoramos la respuesta a la segunda parte de la pregunta:

si la reduccin se mantendr en el tiempo y si ayudar a

transformar la prdida en ganancia", dijo.

FUENTE: The Journal of the American Medical Association,

online 16 de abril del 2013.

(notasdesalud2006@yahoo.com.ar)

"Our crew just heard about the.We all pass our condolences and thoughts to everyone affected," Expedition 35 commander Chris Hadfield said today via Twitter, where he posts as @Cmdr_Hadfield.

The cause of the explosions remains under investigation as of Monday evening. Boston police officials have confirmed that the blasts killed at least three people and wounded more than 100.

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