The now nineteen-year-old Wilson recently spoke to a TED audience about his design for a small, modular fission reactor that is both less expensive and much safer to operate than today's nuclear reactors.

Its assembly-line construction, 30-year fuel life and low usage cost make Wilson's reactor an ideal source of electricity for both developing nations and space explorers, according to the young scientist.

To get an idea of how today's nuclear reactors work, Wilson first explained to his listeners at TED how electricity is produced using a steam turbine. In a steam turbine system, water boils and turns to steam, which turns the turbine and creates electricity.

Nuclear fission, Wilson said, is really just a fancy tool for getting the water in a steam turbine system to boil quickly and steadily.

Today's nuclear power plants produce steam for their turbines using pressurized-water reactors or big pots of water under high pressure which are heated up with help from uranium dioxide fuel rods encased in zirconium. These rods control and maintain the nuclear fission reaction.

When nuclear power was first used to heat water in a turbine system, it was a big advancement in existing technology. But Wilson said his idea for a redesign stemmed from the suspicion that it wasn't really the best way to do it.

"Is fission kind of played out, or is there something left to innovate here?" Wilson said he asked himself. "And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world."

Instead of finding a new way to boil water, Wilson's compact, molten salt reactor found a way to heat up gas. That is, really heat it up.

Wilson's fission reactor operates at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius. And because the laws of thermodynamics say that high temperatures lead to high efficiencies, this reactor is 45 to 50 percent efficient.

Traditional steam turbine systems are only 30 to 35 percent efficient because their reactors run at low temperatures of about 200 to 300 degrees Celsius.

And Wilson's reactor isn't just hot, it's also powerful. Despite its small size, the reactor generates between 50 and 100 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 homes, according to Wilson.

Another innovative component of Wilson's take onis its source of fuel. The molten salt reactor runs off of "down-blended weapons pits." In other words, all the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium collecting dust since the Cold War could be put to use for peaceful purposes.

And unlike traditional nuclear power plants, Wilson's miniature power plants would be buried below ground, making them a boon for security advocates.

According to Wilson, his reactor only needs to be refueled every 30 years, compared to the 18-month fuel cycle of most power plants. This means they can be sealed up underground for a long time, decreasing the risk of proliferation.

Wilson's reactor is also less prone to proliferation because it doesn't operate at high pressure like today's pressurized-water reactors or use ceramic control rods, which release hydrogen when heated and lead to explosions during , like the one at Fukushima in 2011.

In the event of an accident in one of Wilson's reactors, the fuel from the core would drain into a "sub-critical" setting- or tank- underneath the reactor, which neutralizes the reaction. The worst that could happen, according to Wilson, is that the reactor is destroyed.

"But we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land," said Wilson. "So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity."

Wilson said his idea could help combat climate change, bring affordable power to the developing world and .

"There's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars," Wilson said, "Because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky ... there's something poetic about perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy."

This story was provided by , a sister site to LiveScience. Email or follow her. Follow us , onor on.

KYOTO, Japan (Reuters) - Japanese author Haruki Murakami made his first public appearance in his homeland in 18 years on Monday, describing his newest novel, which was an instant-best seller, as a story that takes place in the real world, unlike many of his other novels.

"Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" has attracted positive reviews, with readers spotting familiar Murakami themes such as people bonding through pain.

Publisher Bungeishunju made the rare decision to print 1 million copies within a week of its April release in Japan.

The novel is about a lonely 36-year-old engineer named Tsukuru Tazaki, who embarks on trips in Japan and Finland to overcome his most painful experience - broken friendships.

"Usually things are divided into the real and unreal, but I was wondering how it will be if I bring all of that into the stage of the real world," Murakami told an audience of about 500 fans in Kyoto.

"People get hurt and close their minds, but as time passes, they gradually open up, and they grow as they repeat that. This novel is about growth."

The fans who won a lottery to attend the event were surprised that the 64-year-old, whose fiction is often surreal and who has made a handful of speeches overseas in recent years but none in Japan, was actually speaking to the public.

"I am a fan of his novels but I have never seen him in person nor heard his voice. Is he a normal person?" Hiroko Yamada, 40, asked as she waited for the event to start.

Murakami said he decided to speak in public to honor his friend Hayao Kawai, a psychologist who died in 2007.

"It's not like I get purple dots all over myself when I am in front of many people. I like to go around on the bus and the subway and live a normal life," he joked.

"I want you to think of me like an endangered species - it's fine to look at me from far away, but be careful because I may bite if you come near and talk to me or touch me."

(Editing by Robert Birsel)

The American Cancer Society is pushing to make New York the first state to enact a comprehensive restriction on the sale of candy- and fruit-flavored cigarillos, chewing tobacco and tobacco used in water pipes. Its proposal would restrict the sale of all fruit- and candy-flavored tobacco products to tobacco shops, banning those products from convenience stories.

Maine bans the sale of larger "premium" flavored cigars and other states including Maryland have proposed laws, according to the University of Maryland Law School. New York City and Providence, R.I., also have restricted the sale of flavored tobacco.

"If New York acts, it would be the first state in the nation, and turbocharge efforts nationally," said Blair Horner, vice president of advocacy at the American Cancer Society and Cancer Action Network of New York and New Jersey.

The little cigars, chewing tobacco and loose tobacco for use in water pipes are sold individually for as little as 99 cents or in packs and avoid stiff cigarette taxes aimed at dissuading young people from smoking.

"I couldn't believe this when I saw it," Horner said. "Lawmakers may not even know about them ... this ease of access of cheap, tasty, and deadly tobacco."

New York law prohibits the sale of tobacco products to anyone under age 18. But anti-smoking advocates say restricting sales to adults-only smoke shops would stymie illegal sales and hinder youths purchasing cigarettes through an adult who buys them at a corner store.

Not everyone agrees with the proposed crackdown on sweet smokes.

"This is an adult product, like you have flavored liquors," said Audrey Silk, founder of NYC CLASH, a national smokers' rights group based in New York City. "The flavoring is an excuse to exploit the emotional driven 'for the children' (argument). Adults should be allowed to smoke flavored tobacco. There are already laws that exist that restrict sales to minors."

Driving flavored cigars and other products out of convenience stories will simply drive sales to unregulated sources, such as the Internet, the mail, or Indian tribes, said James Calvin, president of the New York Association of Convenience Stores.

"Do you want them sold in a regulated environment or sold without any controls?" Calvin said.

There has been a rise in flavored tobacco products over the last five years, he said, and store owners have improved compliance to 94 percent in state stings to root out stores selling cigarettes to underage customers. A decade ago, the compliance rate was 80 percent, he said.

A tobacco industry spokeswoman had no immediate comment Friday. Tobacco companies have said they oppose smoking by those under age 18. The companies have mounted extensive efforts to curb youth smoking and some of the billions the companies paid in a nationwide court settlement have been directed at keeping minors from starting to smoke.

In 2009, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned candy-, fruit- and clove-flavored cigarettes. Federal health authorities and regulators say those products appeal especially to young people and are thought to attract new smokers. The FDA says 17-year-old smokers are three times as likely to use flavored cigarettes as smokers over the age of 25.

The agency says almost 90 percent of adult smokers picked up the habit as teenagers, and it estimates the 2009 ban helps prevent an average of more than 3,600 young people each day from starting to smoke.

The ban on manufacturing, importing, marketing and distributing flavored cigarettes didn't include menthol cigarettes or some flavored tobacco products such as cigars. The FDA is studying those products.

Although New York City has a measure to restrict the candy- and fruit-flavored tobacco, city youths can easily buy them across the city line. As other states consider restrictions, the New York state effort is bolstered by New York City's already enacted ordinance that the courts have upheld.

"They are not selling broccoli and spinach flavored products," said Russ Haven of the New York Public Interest Research Group, which supports the New York bill. "These are marketed for kids."

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea's Supreme Court has upheld a ruling sentencing a man to a year and half in prison for exchanging emails with an alleged North Korean spy and praising Pyongyang on his website.

Spokesman Lee Hyun-bok said Tuesday the court cited the National Security Law in its ruling earlier this month against a 45-year-old South Korean identified only as Lee.

The law prohibits glorifying North Korea or contacting North Korean spies. Park could have received 10 years in prison.

The spokesman said the court deemed North Korea as a threat to South Korea. He provided no details about the alleged spy.

Lee's organization did not answer a call seeking comment.

Relations between Seoul and Pyongyang remain tense. They remain technically at war because their 1950-53 conflict ended with a truce.

Hannah Warren has been unable to breathe, eat, drink or swallow on her own since she was born in South Korea in 2010. Until the operation at a central Illinois hospital, she had spent her entire life in a hospital in Seoul. Doctors there told her parents there was no hope and they expected her to die.

The stem cells came from Hannah's bone marrow, extracted with a special needle inserted into her hip bone. They were seeded in a lab onto a plastic scaffold, where it took less than a week for them to multiply and create a new windpipe.

About the size of a 3-inch tube of penne pasta, it was implanted April 9 in a nine-hour procedure.

Early signs indicate the windpipe is working, Hannah's doctors announced Tuesday, although she is still on a ventilator. They believe she will eventually be able to live at home and lead a normal life.

"We feel like she's reborn," said Hannah's father, Darryl Warren.

"They hope that she can do everything that a normal child can do but it's going to take time. This is a brand new road that all of us are on," he said in a telephone interview. "This is her only chance but she's got a fantastic one and an unbelievable one."

Warren choked up and his wife, Lee Young-mi, was teary-eyed at a hospital news conference Tuesday. Hannah did not attend because she is still recovering from the surgery. She developed an infection after the operation but now is acting like a healthy 2-year-old, her doctors said.

Warren said he hopes the family can bring Hannah home for the first time in a month or so. Hannah turns 3 in August.

"It's going to be amazing for us to finally be together as a family of four," he said. The couple has an older daughter.

Only about one in 50,000 children worldwide are born with the windpipe defect. The stem-cell technique has been used to make other body parts besides windpipes and holds promise for treating other birth defects and childhood diseases, her doctors said.

The operation brought together an Italian surgeon based in Sweden who pioneered the technique, a pediatric surgeon at Children's Hospital of Illinois in Peoria who met Hannah's family while on a business trip to South Korea, and Hannah born to a Newfoundland man and Korean woman who married after he moved to that country to teach English.

Hannah's parents had read about Dr. Paolo Macchiarini's success using stem-cell based tracheas but couldn't afford to pay for the operation at his center, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. So Dr. Mark Holterman helped the family arrange to have the procedure at his Peoria hospital, bringing in Macchiarini to lead the operation. Children's Hospital waived the cost, likely hundreds of thousands of dollars, Holterman said.

Part of OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, the Roman Catholic hospital considers the operation part of their mission to provide charity care, but also views it as a way to champion a type of stem-cell therapy that doesn't involve human embryos, the surgeons said. The Catholic church opposes using stem cells derived from human embryos in research or treatment.

Macchiarini has been involved in 14 previous windpipe operations using patients' own stem cells five using man-made scaffolds like Hannah's but in adults; and nine using scaffolds made from cadaver windpipes, including one in a 10-year-old British boy.

He said only one patient died, a 30-year-old man from Abingdon, Md., who had the operation in November 2011 to treat late-stage cancer of the windpipe. He died about four months later of uncertain causes, Macchiarini said.

Similar methods have been used to grow bladders, urethras and last year a girl in Sweden got a lab-made vein using her own stem cells and a cadaver vein.

Scientists hope to eventually use the method to create solid organs, including kidneys and livers, said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of Wake Forest University's Institute for Regenerative Medicine. He said the operation on Hannah Warren "is really showing that the technique is workable."

Hannah had breathing difficulties at birth and Korean doctors soon discovered the missing windpipe. They reconfigured her esophagus so that a breathing tube could go down it from her mouth to her lungs. The esophagus normally runs behind the windpipe and carries food to the stomach.

Korean doctors said she couldn't live long with the tube and told her parents there was nothing more they could do.

Hannah outlived their expectations and has thrived despite the grim prognosis and other abnormalities including an undeveloped voice box that prevented her from speaking. Now that she has a windpipe and can breathe more normally, doctors expect the larynx to grow and function normally. She will work with speech therapists to help her learn to talk.

Holterman said Hannah will likely need a new windpipe in about five years, as she grows.

She breathes with help from a ventilator but no longer has a tube in her mouth that she'd lived with since shortly after birth, Holterman said. She's not yet able to eat normally, but doctors let her have her first taste ever of food a few licks on a lollipop. Her father said she already has discriminating taste and prefers chocolate Korean lollipops to the American kind.

"I asked her, 'Is it good?'" he said, "and she immediately nodded her head."

___

Online:

Regenerative Medicine: http://1.usa.gov/13IWdrx

___

AP Medical Writer Lindsey Tanner can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/LindseyTanner

RICHMOND, Virginia (Reuters) - The most nail-biting U.S. governor's race this year is centering on whether a Tea Party Republican can win Virginia, the southern state that has twice backed Democratic President Barack Obama.

So far, the answer is: maybe.

Republican state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, known for his anti-abortion and tax-cutting positions, is in a tight race with Terry McAuliffe, a former national Democratic Party chairman. The election will take place in November.

With Cuccinelli set to be nominated formally at a state party convention on Saturday, a Quinnipiac University poll this week showed him with 38 percent support, behind McAuliffe's 43 percent.

"The 17 percent of voters who say they are undecided will determine the Commonwealth's next governor," Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a statement. "At this point, neither man seems to have much of an edge."

More than $11 million has poured into a race seen as crucial to reviving national fortunes for Republicans, and especially its Tea Party right wing, after Obama's re-election last year and the loss of two seats in the Senate.

Robert Holsworth, a political analyst who has worked for governors from both parties, said Republicans saw Cuccinelli's candidacy as a national test case.

"Would Republicans be better off running someone with clear principles like Cuccinelli or someone in the mushy middle?" Holsworth said. "Some people will read these elections as an early signal about 2014" midterm congressional elections.

More than anything else, Cuccinelli, 44, has been known for sticking to the conservative principles that have made him a darling of the anti-tax, anti-government Tea Party movement.

Cuccinelli set off a storm in Virginia by pushing through rules mandating that abortion clinics meet the same standards as hospitals. Abortion rights supporters said it could lead some clinics to close.

Cuccinelli also opposed a bipartisan transportation package Republican Governor Bob McDonnell got through the legislature because it would bring in $880 million a year from new taxes.

"WE WERE BEAT"

At a Chesterfield County Republican Party gathering in late April, Cuccinelli urged the crowd to shake off the "depression" that had set in since Obama won the state in November for the second time.

"We were beat, and we have a lot of ground to make up," he said.

With jobs and the slow-growing economy the top issues for voters, McAuliffe, a 56-year-old millionaire who headed President Bill Clinton's re-election campaign in 1996, told supporters when he kicked off his campaign this month that he woke up every morning thinking about "training a good work force."

Virginia's unemployment rate was 5.3 percent in March, more than 2 percentage points below the national average. But the state is one of the biggest recipients of federal outlays, and officials fear it could be hit hard as the U.S. government cuts spending.

Besides indicating a tight race, polls point to an electorate that is at odds with Cuccinelli and Virginia Republicans' positions on social issues.

Although Cuccinelli opposes gay marriage, a Washington Post poll this week showed 56 percent of Virginians were in favor of it. Fifty-five percent also support keeping abortion legal, the poll said.

CRITICISM

McAuliffe has been criticized because of his connection with GreenTech, a struggling Mississippi-based electric car manufacturer that he helped launch. He later quit as chairman, saying he wanted to focus on his race for governor.

Critics have said the company failed to live up to its promise and undermines McAuliffe's claim to be a successful entrepreneur.

Cuccinelli has come under fire following news stories questioning his relationship with nutritional supplement company Star Scientific and Chief Executive Officer Jonnie Williams Sr. Cuccinelli has acknowledged that he took gifts from Williams, including a catered $1,500 Thanksgiving dinner.

McAuliffe is ahead in fundraising, generating $6.7 million to Cuccinelli's $4.4 million as of March 31. By comparison, almost $41 million was spent in the 2009 governor's race McDonnell won.

In a sign of the national interest in the contest, much of the money for this year's race is from outside Virginia. McAuliffe's top donors are Robert Johnson of Monroe, Connecticut, and media entrepreneur Haim Saban of Beverly Hills, California, who both gave $250,000.

Cuccinelli's backers include the Republican Governors Association, which has given $1 million; investor Foster Friess, who backed Republican Rick Santorum's presidential bid last year; and conservative political activist David Koch.

In New Jersey, the only other state with a gubernatorial race this year, incumbent Republican Chris Christie holds a double-digit lead over his Democratic opponent, state Senator Barbara Buono, in early polling.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Arlene Getz and Lisa Von Ahn)

(This story is corrected to show that Johnson, Saban are top McAuliffe donors, not that McAuliffe is his own top donor in 22nd paragraph, . Removes reference to McAuliffe giving almost $300,000, as that was for a previous fundraising cycle.)

QIANTUN, China (Reuters) - Two years short of 70, Zhang Guosheng spends his days caring for an 81-year-old fellow villager - washing his clothes, bringing meals to his bed, and keeping him company - a routine he'll keep up until he himself needs the type of care he is now giving.

"Living here is better than staying at home alone. We help each other and have a common language," said the spritely Zhang, an enthusiastic dancer. "We are very happy here."

With younger villagers who would traditionally have looked after their parents and grandparents flocking to the booming cities to seek work as part of Beijing's urbanization drive, Qiantun village in northern China's Hebei province has had to pioneer a new model - the old looking after the even older.

Surrounded by green wheat fields that stretch across a flat plain, Qiantun is unremarkable among countless rural Chinese communities, but its old-age care model is now a prototype cited by central government as a solution to the daunting challenge of caring for a vast and rapidly greying rural population.

One of every four Chinese will be older than 60 by 2030, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Massive rural-to-urban migration will further strain the rural areas' ability to provide care for the elderly, as personal savings and family support remain the primary pillars of old-age care.

"Migrants to urban areas are mainly young adults, leaving mostly the elderly in villages with children," said Wang Dewen, an expert with the World Bank's Beijing office. "The formal eldercare system in rural areas is very weak, and basically a blank spot in many places."

As a result, the gap between the number of elderly in rural and urban areas is expected to balloon over the next 15 years, to 11 percentage points from today's 1.24 percentage points, the ministry projects.

The costs of caring for China's rapidly expanding elderly population are likely to be too heavy a burden for the government, forcing Beijing to find cost-effective and creative ways to provide care in myriad localities. The self-help model practiced among the 1,500 residents of Qiantun offers a cheaper and streamlined alternative to a state-run system.

More than 95 percent of China's rural elderly still adhere to the traditional practice of seeking old-age care within their families, Wang said. But families are no longer able to cope, with youth and even middle-aged people heading to cities to find work, leaving the elderly behind to fend for themselves.

THE "LIGHT" OF FEIXIANG

In their search for affordable eldercare models, Beijing's leaders have turned their attention 450 km (280 miles) to the south in Hebei's Feixiang county, where Qiantun lies. The practice of old people taking care of each other posed a simple and attractive solution.

Labeled "mutual assist eldercare", the Feixiang model is set to be expanded to the rest of rural China, with 3 billion yuan ($490 million) set aside by the central government to get it started over the coming three years.

"The light of Feixiang will shine across China," Li Liguo, minister of civil affairs, declared enthusiastically during a trip to Feixiang in 2011. "Feixiang has set an example for the whole country."

But not everyone is as optimistic about the model.

"As people get older, they don't tend to get healthier. So if you have somebody in their sixties caring for somebody in their nineties, are they going to be able, and trained and strong enough themselves to care for somebody who has chronic conditions?" said Tony Buccheri, a manager with Right at Home International, a U.S.-based senior home care provider that offers services in China through a partner.

Buccheri's concern echoes that of Cai Qingyang, pioneer of the model and Qiantun's village chief.

"Old people with critical illnesses need more than the very basic care provided here, and we will have to think of other ways to care for them," said the 61 year-old former soldier Cai, watching several old villagers dancing in the yard.

"But this really is the only feasible way given the local elder care situation. The village and the government simply can't afford proper institutional care for every aged rural resident," Cai added.

In 2008, Cai sought to do something about the lack of care for rural elderly left behind as young adults sought better paying work in cities. He turned an abandoned brick house into an old-age home, where 25 elderly villagers moved into 11 rooms, keeping each other company, sharing meals, as well as farming and doing housework.

His innovation has thrived under state support and more than a dozen other provinces have replicated the model.

OLD BEFORE RICH

What separates China's ageing pattern from that in other Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore is that the country is still relatively poor on a per capita basis. The phrase "getting old before rich" reflects the fact that even though China's economic growth remains robust, its demographics work against it.

Those in the emerging middle class have more options among at-home care providers, and public as well as private senior homes, and are more likely to find them affordable.

The rural elderly have fewer resources and fewer choices, while youth migration patterns unstitch the traditional family safety net. And despite years of efforts by China's leaders, the income gap between urban and rural residents has increased. A report published by the World Bank last year noted that rural elderly have "remained consistently poorer than the urban elderly over time".

Nor is that likely to change. Two-thirds of elderly Chinese currently live in rural areas, and although migration patterns cloud demographic estimates, many demographers believe the majority of China's elderly will remain in the countryside.

To meet the challenge, says the World Bank's Wang, China must make its urbanization an equalizer of basic social services for urban and rural residents. To do that, he adds, it must reform the household registration system that ties social services to people's registered home, to facilitate family migration to cities and receive care there.

But in the short term, rural areas such as Qiantun, which has three times as many elderly residents as young adults, can only make do with the resources they have. The government provides 600 yuan ($97.68) a year in subsidies for each of the 30 elderly Qiantun villagers at the centre. Their average age is 75.

By contrast, offering professional care at an old-age care institution would cost a minimum of ten times as much, 6,000 yuan a year, according to government estimates, offset by a mere 120 yuan annual subsidy from the government.

At the Qiantun villager centre, "old" Zhang, as he is known, talks about the future as he brings a bowl of dumplings and medicine to the bedside of his charge, bedridden by a broken thigh bone.

"He can't move around now, I help him," said a still spry Zhang. "When I can't move, someone will also care for me."

($1 = 6.1428 Chinese yuan)

(Editing by Ben Blanchard and Ian Geoghegan)

WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) - Canada will put forward a list of U.S. products it wants to target in retaliation for U.S. country-of-origin meat labels if last-minute changes to U.S. label regulations don't prove satisfactory, Canadian officials said on Friday.

The dispute stems from a 2009 U.S. requirement that retail outlets put the country of origin on labels on meat and other products in an effort to give U.S. consumers more information about their food.

Canada and Mexico complained that the rule caused a decline in U.S. imports of their cattle and pigs, and the World Trade Organization has ordered the United States to make changes by May 23.

"We will be putting forward a list of retaliatory products to make sure that the Americans have a further understanding of what that will be," Ritz said at an unrelated news conference in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. "The process requires that it goes back to the WTO for a ruling on whether or not their changes are acceptable. Should they not be, then those retaliatory measures are assessed and put into play, and that process can take some months if not a year."

A spokesman for the minister, Jeffrey English, said later that Canada will not submit any list to the WTO until it sees what changes the U.S. government proposes. He said Canada still hopes the U.S. will comply with the WTO by May 23, but is planning its next steps in case it does not.

Ritz did not say what products Canada will seek to target, but last month he said he expects to go beyond targeting only U.S. beef and pork.

Carol Guthrie, spokeswoman for the U.S. Trade Representative, said the United States intends to comply by May 23, and therefore no retaliation should be authorized.

Canada is also aiming to build consumer confidence about the food it produces after a major recall of tainted beef last year from an Alberta packing plant. Ritz announced a plan on Friday that he said would result in better food inspection in Canada, including improved controls on E.coli bacteria in beef plants.

(Reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba; additional reporting by Doug Palmer in Washington; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Sofina Mirza-Reid and Peter Galloway)

RELATED:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergon April 5 alongside , a sophisticated Android launcher designed to take over the phone's homescreen, providing users with a constant feed of Facebook content and new Facebook-specific messaging features like . (Home can also be installed a handful of other Android devices, so the HTC phone was always kind of a dry run of a first-look partnership — more a PR boon for the phone maker than a test of the social network's mobile capabilities.) Along, The Atlantic Wirethe phone's design and battery life but questioned the utility of Home, a well-designed but often cumbersome attempt to inject Facebook's social features into an otherwise ordinary, low- to mid-level Android phone. Salon"an unmitigated disaster," and itsremain overwhelmingly negative — in part because Home works on just a few select devices.

RELATED:

It's ironic, then, that the First would be discontinued first. Facebook threw a lot of weight behind Home —  the famed Apple iOS designer Mike Matas, whoFacebook in August 2011 — and was clearly banking on its features to move First sales. The company'sfor Home exclusively featured the HTC device, not any ofon which Home could be installed. But it looks like Home wound up hampering sales. "AT&T sales representatives do not like Facebook Home or the First at all," BGR noted, "and they are making little if any effort to sell the handset to customers."

The agreement, known as a "change-of-conduct accord," was drafted at the companies' request with federal prosecutors who are handling two civil lawsuits against Chevron and Transocean, the prosecutors' press office in Rio de Janeiro said.

The lawsuits are the largest-ever environmental prosecutions in Brazil. The press office declined to give details of the accord but said they would be presented at a public hearing on December 14 in Rio de Janeiro by federal prosecutor Gisele Porto.

Chevron officials were not immediately available for comment. Transocean's press officer in Houston declined to comment. Both companies say they committed no crime and acted correctly during and after the spill.

After the December14 hearing and possible changes, the agreement is expected to be presented to the federal judge in Rio who is hearing the lawsuits.

Porto is lead prosecutor on the civil lawsuits against Chevron, the No. 2 U.S. oil company, and Transocean, the world's largest offshore oil drilling rig operator, for the 3,600-barrel spill in the Frade field northeast of Rio de Janeiro.

No one was hurt in the Frade accident. No oil reached shore and there was no discernible environmental damage, according to Brazil's petroleum regulator, the ANP.

The Frade field was producing 62,000 barrels of oil per day when it was shut in March to examine unexplained leaks in the area near the site of the November 2011 spill. Frade is operated by Chevron, which also owns 52 percent of the field.

Brazil's state-led Petrobras owns 30 percent, and Frade Japo, owned by Japanese trading houses Sojitz Corpand Inpex Corp , has an 18 percent stake. Neither Petrobras nor Frade Japo is the subject of spill-related prosecutions.

Chevron, Transocean and 17 of their employees and executives also face criminal charges that can carry financial penalties and jail terms of up to 31 years.

The spill was not as severe as other recent offshore accidents. More than 5 million barrels of oil was spilled in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in BP Plc'sMacondo field in the Gulf of Mexico. Eleven people died in the accident and beaches and fishing grounds were polluted.

On November 15, BP agreed to pay a record $4.5 billion in penalties and plead guilty to criminal misconduct for the disaster.

While criticizing some of Chevron's actions and levying 35.1 million reais ($16.6 billion) in fines on the company, the ANP said in a July report that there was no negligence in the 2011 spill. The ANP said Transocean had no responsibility for the spill.

Both companies have said they will vigorously challenge the civil and criminal cases against them.

(Reporting by Jeb Blount; editing by John Wallace)