This renewed effort starts with Secretary of State John Kerry's trip to Moscow this coming week for talks with leaders in Russia, the Syrian government's most powerful international friend.

Russia, alongside China, has blocked U.S.-led efforts three times at the United Nations to pressure Assad into stepping down. The U.S. hopes to change Moscow's thinking with two new arguments, officials said: the evidence of chemical weapons attacks and, with the war now in its third year, American threats to arm the Syrian rebels.

Russia represents the most difficult diplomatic test as the U.S. tries to assemble a global coalition to halt a war that has claimed more than 70,000 lives.

Washington wants a peaceful resolution and sees U.N.-imposed sanctions against Syria as an effective tool for pressuring Assad into negotiations. With Assad's government unwilling to talk with the opposition, and Russia providing military and diplomatic backing, hopes of a negotiated transition are all but dead for now.

The stalemate and the risk of greater chemical weapons usage are driving President Barack Obama to explore new options, including military ones. But, he made clear Friday during a visit to Costa Rica, "I do not foresee a scenario in which boots on the ground in Syria, American boots on the ground, would not only be good for America but also would be good for Syria."

Obama said at a Washington news conference earlier in the week that any new U.S. action should be taken prudently and in concert with international partners. Two days later, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said arming the Syrian opposition was a policy consideration.

Kerry's departure Monday for Russia sets the stage for some critical discussions.

In Moscow, officials said Kerry will attempt to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to support, or at least not veto, a fresh effort to impose U.N. penalties on Syria if Assad doesn't begin political transition talks with the opposition.

To make his case, Kerry will present the Russians with evidence of chemical weapons use and relay the Obama administration's readiness to give weapons to the Syrian rebels, according to the officials, who demanded anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly about the confidential diplomacy.

Although the U.S. is prepared to act with or without the Russians' help, officials say a coordinated effort to end the war would be much easier with Moscow on board.

China is seen as largely following Russia's lead.

The U.S. also wants Russia, which maintains a naval base in Syria, to stop honoring existing contracts with the Assad government for defense hardware and to refrain from doing anything else to bolster his forces.

Unlike with Afghanistan and Iraq, several of America's Western and Arab allies are significantly ahead of the United States in their readiness to intervene in Syria.

Just on Friday, an Israeli airstrike against Syria targeted a shipment of advanced missiles believed bound for the Lebanese military group Hezbollah, Israeli officials said Saturday. The officials said the attack was aimed at sophisticated "game-changing" weapons, but not chemical arms.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar have provided the rebels with advanced weaponry. Turkey has given the opposition leadership a home base and significant logistical support. Britain and France have ramped up support ahead of the U.S. at almost every step.

Somewhat similar to the Libya intervention two years ago, Washington is being pulled by several of its closest partners into an ambivalent escalation in Syria.

As the U.S. extricates itself from a decade of fighting in the Muslim world, it has been reluctant to get involved in a new conflict colored by sectarian warfare and terrorist groups engaged on both sides of the battle.

The U.S. also notes that the Syrian government has far greater defensive capacities than those of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, whose military was easily eliminated in 2011.

But the rising death toll, increased international clamoring for greater American leadership and the threat of weapons of mass destruction proliferation in the heart of the Middle East, between Iraq and Lebanon and bordering Israel, have led Obama to reassess his options.

Obama this past week reaffirmed his view that the "only way to bring stability and peace to Syria is going to be for Assad to step down." Even before the reports of chemical weapons use, he said, the U.S. sought to strengthen Syria's opposition. Now, however, "some options that we might not otherwise exercise ... we would strongly consider."

"The use of chemical weapons would be a game changer," Obama told reporters. "When you use these kinds of weapons, you have the potential of killing massive numbers of people in the most inhumane way possible, and the proliferation risks are so significant that we don't want that genie out of the bottle."

But the administration also has said the intelligence reports citing physical evidence of chemical weapons use were not certain enough to cross Obama's stated "red line," which he said last summer would have "enormous consequences."

Obama said Friday in Costa Rica that "we have evidence that chemical weapons have been used. We don't know when, where, or how they were used." A U.S. investigation, he said, will help "get a better handle on the facts."

"When it comes to using chemical weapons, the entire world should be concerned," he added.

Arming the rebels is the most likely escalation, officials said. Even the most ardent advocates of U.S. intervention don't want American military boots on the ground. A no-fly zone would demand an intensive operation to neutralize Syria's Russian-supplied air defenses. Officials said targeted strikes are likely to be considered only after uncontested proof emerges of chemical weapons use or the intelligence suggests repeat attacks may be imminent.

Any U.S. military action, including arming the rebels, would be weeks away, officials said. They stressed that a strategy would first have to be coordinated with several important allies to ensure that the right weapons get to the right forces and that donors aren't duplicating efforts. The U.S. also would try to secure contributions from more Arab and European partners, they said, while continuing to check rebel brigades that are untainted by al-Qaida or other extremists who've joined the anti-Assad fight.

The range of reservations to direct military intervention explains why the administration is putting great stock in a unified international approach. Swaying Russia would remove an important consideration for many potential coalition partners and leave Assad with only Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah as reliable allies.

It would eliminate the possibility of a Russian veto to any future request for U.N. authorization to directly intervene in Syria.

Obama never has said he must have a U.N. mandate to act, but U.S. officials repeatedly have cited it as one explanation for why the American response in Syria hasn't been more forceful. Also, no one in the United States wants a repeat of the diplomatic humiliation suffered by President George W. Bush in the runup to the 2003 Iraq war.

The chances for a Russian shift are unclear. U.S.-Russian relations are mired in disputes from missile defense in Europe to adoptions and new Russian laws against political dissent. Arguments outlining the costs of increased international criticism for remaining steadfast in support of the Assad government have repeatedly failed to move Moscow.

Officials say Kerry is optimistic he can sway Putin; others are more skeptical.

At a minimum, officials said, reaching out to Russia could pre-empt arguments that the U.S. is moving toward military options in Syria without giving diplomacy a final chance.

Gaining even Russia's grudging acquiescence in private to greater American involvement in Syria, as with NATO's Kosovo intervention in the 1990s, could be viewed as a critical if silent diplomatic victory for the United States.

In the Syrian civil war's latest alleged mass killing, activists said Friday that regime troops and gunmen from nearby Alawite areas beat, stabbed and shot at least 50 people in the Sunni Muslim village of Bayda.

The slayings highlighted in the starkest terms the sectarian overtones of a conflict that has already killed more than 70,000 people. Details of the killings came to light as the Obama administration said it was again weighing whether to arm the rebels.

Syria's 2-year-old crisis has largely broken along sectarian lines: the Sunni majority forms the backbone of the rebellion, while President Bashar Assad's minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, anchors the regime's security services and military officer corps. Other minorities, such as Christians, largely support Assad or stand on the sidelines, worried that the regime's fall would bring about a more Islamist rule.

The killings in Bayda fall against this backdrop. Tucked in the mountains outside the Mediterranean coastal city of Banias, the village is predominantly Sunni but is located in the Alawite ancestral heartland centered in the rugged region along the sea.

Activists say fighting broke out in Bayda early Thursday and that at least six government troops were killed. Syrian forces backed by Alawite gunmen known as shabiha from the surrounding area returned in the afternoon and stormed the village, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The gunmen torched homes and used knives, guns and blunt objects to kill people in the streets, the group said. It added that it has documented the names of at least 50 dead in Bayda, but that dozens of villagers are still missing and the death toll could rise to as high as 100.

Amateur video showed the bodies of at least seven men and boys lying in pools of blood on the pavement in front of a house as women wept around them.

"Don't sleep, don't move," one woman sobbed, leaning over to touch one of the men, who appeared already dead. A woman also is heard wailing, "Where are you, people of the village?"

The video appears genuine and consistent with reporting by The Associated Press from the area.

Syria's state news agency said late Thursday that the army conducted a raid in Bayda, killing several "terrorists" the term it uses for those trying to oust Assad and seizing machine guns, automatic rifles and other weapons.

Syrian troops were still in Bayda on Friday, conducting house-to-house searches, according to the Observatory's director, Rami Abdul-Rahman. He added that phone and Internet service to the village was cut, making it impossible to verify the final death toll or pin down more details on what happened.

The Observatory also reported clashes and government shelling of Sunni areas of Banias on Friday.

If confirmed, the bloodshed in Bayda would be the latest in a series of alleged mass killings in the civil war. Last month, activists said government troops killed more than 100 people as they seized two rebel-held suburbs of Damascus.

The violence in Bayda bears a closer resemblance to two reported mass killings last year in Houla and Qubeir, Sunni villages surrounded by Alawite towns. Some activists said the Houla and Qubeir carnage, which they blame on regime forces and shabiha, was aimed at driving Sunnis from areas near main routes to the coast to ensure Alawite control.

Months of bloodshed have sharpened the divide and unleashed sectarian hatred. The violence has ripped apart communities and brought a bloody end to decades of coexistence. Retaliatory kidnappings and killings have surged.

That raises the prospect of Syria taking the same path as neighboring Iraq, where violence in 2006 and 2007 effectively turned into a kind of sectarian cleansing as Sunnis and Shiites fled the bloodletting by rival militias to the relative safety of their own communities. Lingering animosity has helped fuel renewed violence along those fault lines in recent weeks between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq.

In what amounted to little more than a symbolic protest, rebels in Syria fired rockets at the village of Qardaha, the hometown of Assad's father, the Observatory said. There were no reports of casualties.

The main Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, condemned what it called "a large-scale massacre in Bayda," and urged the international community to act to protect Syrian civilians.

"It is time for the world to intervene and put an end to the grievous crimes of the Assad regime," the Cairo-based group said in a statement.

While the U.S. and its European allies have backed the opposition, they have been reluctant to provide those fighting Assad's troops with weapons that could challenge the regime's superior firepower. They fear the arms could end up in the hands of radical Islamic groups, such as the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, that in the past year have become the most effective fighting force on the opposition's side.

On Thursday, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Washington is rethinking its opposition to arming the rebels amid growing indications that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons something President Barack Obama has called a "red line."

The U.S. has said intelligence indicates Syria has used the nerve agent sarin on at least two occasions, but Obama has stressed that he needs more definitive proof before making a decision about how to respond and whether to take military action. Damascus denies using chemical arms, and says the opposition is trying to frame it.

Obama said Thursday his administration was proceeding cautiously as it looked at options to ensure that what it does is helpful to the situation rather than making it more deadly or complex.

The Syrian crisis started with largely peaceful protests of Assad's rule in March 2011, but shifted into an armed insurgency as opposition supporters took up weapons to fight a harsh regime crackdown on dissent.

The conflict has laid waste to cities and towns, forced more than 1 million Syrians to seek refuge in neighboring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, and displaced millions more inside Syria.

Syria's state news agency said mortars fired at the Damascus International Airport struck a kerosene tank and a commercial aircraft, causing significant material damage. It said the airport was functioning normally, although many airlines no longer fly into the Syrian capital because of the conflict.

___

Associated Press writer Barbara Surk contributed to this report.

Kirstine Stewart, the CBC's executive vice-president of English services, will leave immediately and a recruitment process for her replacement has been launched.

Stewart, an avid Twitter user herself, said she was named managing director of Twitter Canada and will remain in Toronto to open Twitter's first offices in the country.

"It is a fact of life in a competitive, creative business that when you have great people, others will try to entice them away with big opportunities," CBC Chief Executive Hubert Lacroix said in a statement announcing the departure.

CBC has struggled to maintain its programming, particularly in television, since the federal government slashed its funding by 10 percent last year.

While the CBC does get some revenue from commercial advertising, it relies heavily on government funding to produce its English- and French-language television, radio and online content.

Twitter has hired Stewart, one of the most influential executives in Canadian media, at a time when it is aggressively courting the traditional media industry as part of its growth strategy.

The San Francisco-based social media company, which makes money by selling advertising, has sought deals with television producers and marketers to encourage TV viewers to discuss programming and ads on Twitter. That, in turn, could help drive up ratings for broadcasters.

Many popular TV programs, for instance, display "hashtags" that tell users how to chat with other viewers on Twitter while they simultaneously watch the show.

"It's a very symbiotic partnership that Twitter can have with broadcasters," Stewart said by telephone on Monday. "I'm looking forward to starting our office and looking for those partnerships, those opportunities. Twitter's unique position is in that conversation around content."

The company, which is widely expected to hold a public stock offering within the next two years, will make just shy of $600 million in revenue this year, according an estimate by research firm eMarketer.

(Reporting by Alastair Sharp in Toronto and Gerry Shih in San Francisco; Editing by Peter Galloway and Carol Bishopric)

It's the latest mega-collaboration to learn more about the intricate mechanisms that lead to cancer. And while the headway seems significant in many ways, the potential payoff for ordinary people is mostly this: Someday there may be genetic tests that help identify women with the most to gain from mammograms, and men who could benefit most from PSA tests and prostate biopsies.

And perhaps farther in the future these genetic clues might lead to new treatments.

"This adds another piece to the puzzle," said Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research U.K., the charity which funded much of the research.

One analysis suggests that among men whose family history gives them roughly a 20 percent lifetime risk for prostate cancer, such genetic markers could identify those whose real risk is 60 percent.

The markers also could make a difference for women with BRCA gene mutations, which puts them at high risk for breast cancer. Researchers may be able to separate those whose lifetime risk exceeds 80 percent from women whose risk is about 20 to 50 percent. One doctor said that might mean some women would choose to monitor for cancer rather than taking the drastic step of having healthy breasts removed.

Scientists have found risk markers for the three diseases before, but the new trove doubles the known list, said one author, Douglas Easton of Cambridge University. The discoveries also reveal clues about the biological underpinnings of these cancers, which may pay off someday in better therapies, he said.

Experts not connected with the work said it was encouraging but that more research is needed to see how useful it would be for guiding patient care. One suggested that using a gene test along with PSA testing and other factors might help determine which men have enough risk of a life-threatening prostate cancer that they should get a biopsy. Many prostate cancers found early are slow-growing and won't be fatal, but there is no way to differentiate and many men have surgery they may not need.

Easton said the prospects for a genetic test are greater for prostate and breast cancer than ovarian cancer.

Breast cancer is the most common malignancy among women worldwide, with more than 1 million new cases a year. Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men after lung cancer, with about 900,000 new cases every year. Ovarian cancer accounts for about 4 percent of all cancers diagnosed in women, causing about 225,000 cases worldwide.

The new results were released in 13 reports in Nature Genetics, PLOS Genetics and other journals. They come from a collaboration involving more than 130 institutions in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. The research was mainly paid for by Cancer Research U.K., the European Union and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Scientists used scans of DNA from more than 200,000 people to seek the markers, tiny variations in the 3 billion "letters" of the DNA code that are associated with disease risk.

The scientists found 49 new risk markers for breast cancer plus a couple of others that modify breast cancer risk from rare mutated genes, 26 for prostate cancer and eight for ovarian cancer. Individually, each marker has only a slight impact on risk estimation, too small to be useful on its own, Easton said. They would be combined and added to previously known markers to help reveal a person's risk, he said.

A genetic test could be useful in identifying people who should get mammography or PSA testing, said Hilary Burton, director of the PHG Foundation, a genomics think-tank in Cambridge, England. A mathematical analysis done by her group found that under certain assumptions, a gene test using all known markers could reduce the number of mammograms and PSA tests by around 20 percent, with only a small cost in cancer cases missed.

Among the new findings:

For breast cancer, researchers calculated that by using all known markers, including the new ones, they could identify 5 percent of the female population with twice the average risk of disease, and 1 percent with a three-fold risk. The average lifetime risk of getting breast cancer is about 12 percent in developed countries. It's lower in the developing world where other diseases are a bigger problem.

For prostate cancer, using all the known markers could identify 1 percent of men with nearly five times the average risk, the researchers computed. In developed countries, a man's average lifetime risk for the disease is about 14 to 16 percent, lower in developing nations.

Markers can also make a difference in estimates of breast cancer risk for women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutations. Such women are rare, but their lifetime risk can run as high as 85 percent. Researchers said that with the new biomarkers, it might be possible to identify the small group of these women with a risk of 28 percent or less.

For patients like Vicki Gilbert of England, who carries a variation of the BRCA1 gene, having such details about her cancer risk would have made decision-making easier.

Gilbert, 50, found out about her genetic risk after being diagnosed with the disease in 2009. Though doctors said the gene wouldn't change the kind of chemotherapy she got, they suggested removing her ovaries to avoid ovarian cancer, which is also made more likely by a mutated BRCA1.

"They didn't want to express a definite opinion on whether I should have my ovaries removed so I had to weigh up my options for myself," said Gilbert, a veterinary receptionist in Wiltshire. "...I decided to have my ovaries removed because that takes away the fear it could happen. It certainly would have been nice to have more information to know that was the right choice."

Gilbert said knowing more about the genetic risks of cancer should be reassuring for most patients. "There are so many decisions made for you when you go through cancer treatment that being able to decide something yourself is very important," she said.

Dr. Charis Eng, chair of the Genomic Medicine Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, who didn't participate in the new work, called the breast cancer research exciting but not ready for routine use.

Most women who carry a BRCA gene choose intensive surveillance with both mammograms and MRI and some choose to have their breasts removed to prevent the disease, she said. Even the lower risk described by the new research is worrisomely high, and might not persuade a woman to avoid such precautions completely, Eng said.

___

AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng contributed to this report from London.

Biofuels are renewable sources of energy created using living organisms such as plants. The most common biofuel used in vehicles today is ethanol, more commonly known as drinking alcohol.

"Global demand for energy is rising and a fuel that is independent of both global oil price fluctuations and political instability is an increasingly attractive prospect," said researcher John Love, a synthetic biologist at the University of Exeter in England.

However, ethanol is not fully compatible with modern engines. As such, it requires blending withproducts, which means it can only meet a small fraction of the world's transportation fuel demand.

In contrast, "we are using synthetic biology to make not an alternative biofuel, but exact replicas of the fossil fuels that we use in engines today," Love told TechNewsDaily. "We can now make biofuels that function exactly like fossil fuels and require absolutely no modifications to existing engine technology." [See also: ]

The researchers devoted a decade to finding a way to use microbes to manufacture the kind of fuel molecules found in petroleum, known as alkanes. Nine of those years were spent looking at existing microbes for candidates "with very little progress," Love recalled. At one point, their industrial backers "even pulled the plug on our funding, as the research was going so slowly."

Love and his colleagues then decided to employ a synthetic biology approach to the problem they would take bits and pieces of a chemical pathway to make these fuel molecules from many different organisms and combine them into a single microbe in a way that did not exist before .

"That was the breakthrough," Love said. "It only took six months from that decision to get the first indication that we could produce and customize bio-alkanes."

Thethe researchers used was E. coli, a bacterium that normally lives in the human gut and is commonly used for lab research. E. coli naturally converts sugars into fat to build its cell membrane. The researchers altered this natural oil production system to make the kind of alkanes normally found in diesel orfuel. This required borrowing genes from a wide variety of organisms, including a bioluminescent bacterium, from the camphor tree, and from cyanobacteria, more commonly known as blue-green algae.

The microbes used to commercially manufacture ethanol currently do so by consuming sugar from crops such as corn and sugarcane. The bacteria Love and his colleagues employed to create alkanes also use sugar, but that sugar could come from other sources, including waste products.

"There is no reason that we couldn't use their potential to metabolize waste organic compounds such as waste plant biomass, or even animal waste or sewerage," Love said.

The researchers, who were supported by the oil company Shell,caution their technology still faces many challenges before it is ready for market, such as high enough yields for commercialization. Over the course of the next three years, "our aim is to increase yields hundredfold," Love said.

The scientists detailed their findings online April 22 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This story was provided by , a sister site to LiveScience.

The Finnish company says that sales last year were 152.2 million euros, up from 75.6 million euro a year earlier. Net profit in 2011 was 35.4 million euros.

CEO Mikael Hed says Rovio had a "stellar start" this year after four major game launches in 2012 and the recent release of the Angry Birds Toons animated series, with increased revenue expected from paid games, virtual goods and advertising.

Last year, the company grew by some 300 to 518 employees.

Rovio said Wednesday total game downloads have exceeded 1.7 billion since the December 2009 launch of Angry Birds.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board will now examine whether Zynga is fit to hold a gaming license that would allow gamblers in the state to bet real money on the San Francisco-based company's popular games like Zynga Poker, which currently involve only virtual chips with no monetary value.

Zynga is hoping that a lucrative real-money market could make up for a steep slide in revenue from its games like "FarmVille" and other fading titles that still generate the bulk of its sales.

"We anticipate that the process will take approximately 12 to 18 months to complete," Zynga Chief Revenue Officer Barry Cottle said in a statement. "As we've said previously, the broader U.S. market is an opportunity that's further out on the horizon based on legislative developments, but we are preparing for a regulated market."

Zynga, along with many major gaming industry players, is hoping that a tide of proposed legislation to regulate gaming could sweep through states across the U.S. and open a massive new online market.

Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey are among the states that have moved or are moving toward interactive gaming after the U.S. Justice Department last year declared that only online betting on sporting contests was unlawful, presenting the opportunity for states to legalize some forms of online gambling, from lotteries to poker.

Although widespread legalization of online gaming in the United States appears years away at the minimum, obtaining a license in Nevada would be a meaningful foot in the door for Zynga's nationwide aspirations.

Zynga has told investors in recent quarters that a concerted move into real-money gaming could represent a hefty - and badly needed - source of new revenue for the company, which has seen revenues sag and its stock plummet by more than three-quarters in the past year as gamers abandoned titles like "CityVille."

In October, the company slashed its 2012 full-year earnings outlook for the second time and laid off employees to trim costs, while CEO Mark Pincus implored investors to give him time to turn around the company by pursuing initiatives like real-money gaming.

That month, Zynga struck a deal with bwin.party, a Gibraltar-based gaming company, to provide real money casino games like poker and slots in the United Kingdom beginning in the first half of 2013.

(Reporting By Gerry Shih; Editing by Chris Gallagher)

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) -- Cyprus' Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a new trial for four former airline officials who had been acquitted of manslaughter and other charges for a 2005 plane crash that killed 121 passengers and crew members. The Helios Airways crash drew international attention because of the unusual circumstances surrounding it.

Greek investigators have blamed the accident on human error after inadequate cabin pressure knocked out everyone aboard, including the two pilots, after takeoff from Cyprus' main airport of Larnaca.The aircraft on its way to the Czech Republic reached Athens on autopilot and crashed there after running out of fuel.

Six of the Supreme Court's nine judges upheld Attorney General Petros Clerides' appeal of the acquittal, saying the lower Cyprus court was mistaken in its "selective and piecemeal" evaluation of the evidence and calling its reasoning that there was nothing linking the defendants to the crash "fundamentally flawed."

In a majority decision in December 2011, the three-judge criminal court acquitted the four former Helios Airways officials: managing director Demetris Pantazis, chief executive Andreas Drakos, chief pilot Ianko Stoimenov and operations director George Kikides.Prosecutors had argued the defendants failed to prevent the Helios Airways Boeing 737-300 from being flown by "unsuitable and inadequate" pilots.

The Supreme Court ruled that verdict didn't sufficiently take into account expert testimony questioning the pilots' abilities and erred in concluding that the defendants bore no responsibility for what happened before the day when the aircraft crashed.The judges also said the lower court was wrong to say the defendants can't be held criminally liable for how the airline operated overall.

The lower court found the four defendants innocent of manslaughter, which carries a maximum life sentence in Cyprus, and causing death by recklessness.

In April, after another trial regarding the Helios Airways crash, aGreek court convicted Pantazis, Stoimenov and Kikides of negligent manslaughter, sentenced them to 10-year prison terms, and fined each of them 10,000 ($12,993). That verdict is now being appealed.

Relatives of the plane crash victims welcomed Tuesday's ruling in Cyprus, which did not set a date for the new trial. "We didn't believe that no one could be blamed" for the crash, said the president of the relatives' association, Nicholas Yiasoumis.

Testimony at the lower court trial suggested that the pilots of the Aug. 14, 2005 flight apparently failed to notice and adjust a switch that would automatically have pressurized the interior of the plane while it was flying.

A Greek fighter pilot who scrambled to try to intercept the unresponsive jet reported seeing a man who somehow managed to stay conscious enter the flight deck shortly before the crash and try to fly the plane.Autopsies indicated that all the passengers were alive at the time of the crash, but were in a deep comatose state because of the prolonged lack of oxygen.

Helios Airways went out of business about a year after the crash.

"When I got to the bottom, I saw skid marks from the ROV," Cameron said yesterday (Dec. 4) here at the , referring to a 2009 survey by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.to the Mariana Trench were presented at the meeting this week, and Cameron and the researchers described the highlights to a packed crowd.

Cameron reported a new, corrected depth for his landing 35,803 feet (10,912 meters) which beats by five feet (1.5 m) the record set byat the same spot. However, "because the error [calculating the depth] on Don's dive is much greater, we're just going to have to call it a tie," Cameron said.

Deepsea Challenger

Cameron's Deepsea Challenger expedition made dives to the New Britain Trench and the Mariana Trench in the southwestern Pacific Ocean between Jan. 31 and April 3, withby Cameron to the Mariana's Challenger Deep, the deepest spot in any ocean.

Unusual, never-before-seen species were snared and brought back to the surface. A bizarre microbial mat community was discovered living on altered rocks in the Sirena Deep, another deep pool 6.77 miles (10.9 kilometers) below the surface.

Changes in temperature and salinity starting at 26,200 feet (8 km) deep hint at an unknown current coming into the Challenger Deep, said Doug Bartlett, a microbiology professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

The filmmaker journeyed inside a high-tech lime-green machine a steel sphere encased in foam dubbed the Deepsea Challenger. The expedition traveled with two unmanned seafloor "landers" large contraptions hoisted over the side of a ship and dropped to the seafloor. Once on the bottom, bait attached to the lander lured seafloor creatures to the craft, and a suite of instruments took samples, photographs and data. []

The two contraptions working together proved to be a very good system, Cameron said. "We could rendezvous on the bottom and see the results of that bait running for six to eight hours, and that's how Doug could find a new species of giant arthropod," Cameron said.

Challenging journey

The March 26 dive proved to be a physical and mental challenge for Cameron. "I did yoga for six months so I could contort myself into the sphere," he said.

As he sank through the water, Cameron said he "burned though my whole checklist," designed to distract him during the long hours of the dive. "I still had 3,000 meters left to go with pretty much nothing left to do but sit quietly and think about the pressure building up around the hull," he said.

The sub touched down gently, and Cameron immediately took a sample of the seafloor, as planned. This was a good contingency, because the sub's hydraulic fluid line then burst, leaving him unable to collect more samples.

To his surprise, the sub's voice communications worked perfectly. "We actually expected they wouldn't, and I would have to default to texting," he said. "Texting while driving is not a good thing, especially if you're using two hands to operate seven joysticks and you're 7 miles down."

Cameron first drove the sub about 200 meters, finding the seafloor elevation stayed the same. In fact,turned out to be remarkably flat, and the sub was easy to drive. "The vehicle was quite nimble, the sub's yaw rate was very good," he said. (Yaw describes the left-to-right rotation of a craft.)

A quick return

After about three hours, some of the submersible's batteries had low charge readings, the steering was problematic, and it was time to return to the surface. The mission should have lasted five to six hours. "I hate this. I hated having to go back," Cameron recalled thinking.

The trip to the top was mercifully short at 73 minutes. The submersible covered nearly 7 miles in a little over an hour slow in a car, but like riding a missile for a human in a metal ball. Cameron said the surface trip is when he noticed the aches and pains from the cramped sub. "That's when your butt is really sore, and when you notice how much it hurts." []

The sub now sits in a barn in Santa Barbara, waiting for Cameron or another group with enough money to . He declined to say how much it cost to build and mount the expedition.

"I would love for the sub to dive again," he said. "I personally feel that we just barely got started before we had to turn back and there's just so much out there."

"And if not, at the very least, the technical innovations can be incorporated into other vehicle platforms," Cameron added. "As far as I'm concerned, it's an open source situation."

Reach Becky Oskin at . Follow her on Twitter . Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter . We're also onand .

The tumultuous love triangle between human girl Bella Swan, vampire Edward Cullen and werewolf Jacob Black, that has gripped avid fans known as "Twi-hards" for seven years, comes to a tantalizing end as "Breaking Dawn-Part 2" hits movie theaters around the world.

The "Twilight" film franchise, based on a series of novels by Stephenie Meyer, rocketed the three main stars, Kristen Stewart (Bella), Robert Pattinson (Edward) and Taylor Lautner (Jacob), into the spotlight and the first four films have grossed more than $2.5 billion at the worldwide box office.

For director Bill Condon, who shot both parts of "Breaking Dawn" together and split into two movies post-production, the fifth and final film was all about the fans - who get a surprise twist to the ending.

"The real challenge was to make sure it was a satisfying climax," Condon told reporters. "The film opens with an overture of all the main scenes from all five movies, and at the end, I...brought (it) back to the spirit of the old movies."

The movie pays homage to the angst-ridden teenage romance between Bella and Edward that was underscored by the off-screen real-life romance between Stewart, 22, and Pattinson, 26.

"Breaking Dawn-Part 2" shifts the action from a love story to a family story, as the Cullen clan recruit their extended vampire family to protect Bella and Edward's daughter Renesmee from an ancient vampire coven.

"I think it's very sweet, especially the ending of it, I think it's very close to the book as well. It seems to be that it's really made for the fans," Pattinson told Reuters.

GOING OFF BOOK

While the past four films have stayed true to the books, author Meyer and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg came up with a plot twist that adds a major scene that may surprise movie-goers.

"(The action) is off screen in the novel because we only see what Bella sees, and this was just a way of making visual what some of the other characters might have seen," Meyer told reporters.

"It does feel very surprising. There's something new to see but to me it doesn't seem like it's going hugely off the page," she added.

While the fourth film saw Bella's human life draw to a conclusion when she died giving birth to a human-vampire hybrid baby with new husband Edward, "Breaking Dawn-Part 2," sees Bella as a mother and a newly-transformed vampire.

"The coolest thing about vampire Bella is that I got to play her as a human for so long, and the special parts of each vampire are always informed by the great things that they were as a human and so I got to walk in those shoes," Stewart told Reuters.

"Everything made total sense to me. I waited for so long (to play a vampire), once I finally got it, it was so comfortable, I couldn't wait," the actress added.

"The Twilight Saga," first published in 2005, kicked off a wave of vampire or supernatural-themes books, films and TV shows including HBO's "True Blood," the CW TV network's "The Vampire Diaries" and Richelle Mead's "Vampire Academy" series of young adult novels.

As the sun sets on the franchise Meyer brought to life, the author said that while she didn't rule out the possibility of finding more stories in the vampire-werewolf universe, she had closed the chapter on the Cullens.

"I don't know if I'll ever get back to these (stories). Someday I'll write down what was going to happen next. It's sad knowing I don't have another party with the kids again, I really hope I have a chance to at least see my friends again," she told Reuters.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Marguerita Choy)