The two-time defending champions will be presented with their championship rings in South Florida before the game with Chicago, who should have Derrick Rose back from injury, on October 29.

The game is the first leg of a double-header to open the 68th NBA season. The second game will be an all-Los Angeles affair when the Clippers, now under the guidance of Doc Rivers, play the Lakers.

Miami will play the San Antonio Spurs, last season's other NBA finalists, at home on January 26 then in Texas on March 6.

For the first time there will be two regular season games played overseas. The Spurs will play the Minnesota Timberwolves on December 4 in Mexico City while the Brooklyn Nets and Atlanta Hawks meet on January 16 in London.

(Reporting by Julian Linden; Editing by Peter Rutherford)

In an appearance in Providence on Tuesday, Kagan acknowledged the justices have a ways to go to understand technology such as Facebook, Twitter and even email.

"It's a challenge for us," Kagan said, while also noting that she herself uses email, goes online and reads blogs.

Kagan, 53, was appointed to the court in 2010 by President Barack Obama. She previously served as solicitor general of the United States and dean of Harvard Law School, among other accomplishments. She is the youngest justice and the one most recently appointed to the court.

When asked whether the justices email one another, Kagan said things are the same as when she clerked for the late Justice Thurgood Marshall three decades ago. She says justices write memos, which are then printed out on ivory paper that looks like it came from the 19th century. The memos are walked around the building by someone called a "chambers aide."

"The justices are not necessarily the most technologically sophisticated people," she said, adding that while clerks email one another, "The court hasn't really 'gotten to' email."

Kagan appeared Tuesday in a conversation with Ted Widmer, a historian and librarian at Brown University who has been an adviser to the Clintons. The event was part of a celebration of the 350th anniversary of Rhode Island's colonial charter and was hosted by Gov. Lincoln Chafee and sponsored by Roger Williams University School of Law.

Widmer brought up the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents exposing NSA programs that monitor Internet and phone data, suggesting the high court would likely hear more cases related to electronic surveillance.

Kagan said it was hard to predict what cases the court will address in the years to come, but she said she expects there will be new issues related to privacy, emerging technology and electronic snooping.

"I think we're going to have to be doing a lot of thinking about that," she said.

Kagan said the justices often turn to their clerks, who are much younger, to help them understand new technologies.

But they also try to learn on their own. In one case, involving violent video games the first year she was on the court, justices who had never played the games before dove in and gave them a try, Kagan said.

"It was kind of hilarious," she said.

She didn't say which games they played.

___

Follow Michelle R. Smith on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MRSmithAP

The primeval proteins, described today (Aug. 8) in the journal Structure, could reveal new insights about the origin of life, said study co-author Jos Manuel Sanchez Ruz, a physical chemist at the University of Granada in Spain.

Exactly how life emerged on Earth more than 3 billion years ago is a mystery. Some scientists believe that lightning struck thein ammonia-rich oceans, producing the complex molecules that formed the precursors to life. Others believe that chemical reactions at deep-sea hydrothermal vents gave rise to cell membranes and simple cellular pumps. And still others believe that space rocks brought the raw ingredients for life or perhaps even life itself to Earth. []

But it's difficult to recreate events that happened so far in the distant past.

Sanchez Ruiz and his colleagues decided to study a class of proteins called thioredoxins, which perform dozens of cellular functions in organisms across all three domains of life: Archaea, Eukaryotes and Bacteria. The proteins' broad functionality and presence in all life forms suggests they have primordial roots, the researchers said.

The team analyzed all the differences between the versions of the proteins found in organisms in each domain, and mapped those differences to the dates when the organisms are believed to have diverged.

Using that information, they determined the likely amino acid sequence of the ancient thioredoxin proteins, which spawned all other versions and existed in the .

They then recreated the protein in the lab. The "fossil" protein was incredibly stable, bound to many different chemicals and functioned well in a highly acidic environment.

"That makes a lot of sense because 4 billion years ago, many people think that the temperature was high and the oceans were acidic," Sanchez Ruz told LiveScience.

Of course, there are no traces of these ancient proteins, so there's no way to know for sure how closely the reconstructed proteins resemble the originals.

"There is no way to make absolutely certain unless we invent some kind of ," Sanchez Ruz said. "But we know that the properties we measure for these proteins are consistent with what we would expect of 4-billion-year-old proteins."

Follow Tia Ghose on and .FollowLiveScience , & . Original article on.

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The justices have a ways to go to understand technology such as Facebook, Twitter and even email, Kagan said in a conversation with Ted Widmer, a historian and librarian at Providence's Brown University who has been an adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

"The justices are not necessarily the most technologically sophisticated people," she said, adding that while clerks email one another, "The court hasn't really 'gotten to' email."

Kagan, at age 53 the youngest and most recently appointed justice, said communication among the justices is the same as when she clerked for the late Thurgood Marshall in 1987.

Justice write memos printed out on paper that looks like it came from the 19th century, she said. The memos are then walked around the building by someone called a "chambers aide."

Kagan was appointed in 2010 by President Barack Obama. She previously served as solicitor general of the United States and dean of Harvard Law School, among other accomplishments.

Widmer brought up the National Security Agency and Edward Snowden, who leaked classified documents exposing NSA programs that monitor Internet and phone data, suggesting the high court would likely hear more cases related to electronic surveillance.

Kagan said it was hard to predict what cases the court would address in the years to come, but she said she expects there will be new issues related to privacy, technology and surveillance.

"I think we're going to have to be doing a lot of thinking about that," she said.

Kagan said the justices often turn to their clerks, who are much younger, to help them understand new technology.

But they also try to learn on their own. In one case involving violent video games the first year she was on the court, justices who had never played the games before dove in and gave them a try, Kagan said.

"It was kind of hilarious," she said not divulging which games they played.

The event was part of a celebration of the 350th anniversary of Rhode Island's colonial charter and was hosted by Gov. Lincoln Chafee and sponsored by Roger Williams University School of Law.

___

Follow Michelle R. Smith on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/MRSmithAP

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Last year was one of the 10 hottest on record, with sea levels at record highs, Arctic ice at historic lows and extreme weather in various corners of the globe signaling a "new normal," scientists said Tuesday in the 2012 State of the Climate report.

Meant to be a guide for policymakers, the report did not attribute the changes in climate to any one factor, but made note of continued increases in heat-trapping greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.

"Our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place," said Kathryn Sullivan, acting administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The report was edited by NOAA scientists and drew contributions from 384 scientists from 52 countries.

The report's data indicate "new normal" conditions that can inform planning decisions, instead of relying on models that "count on the future being statistically a lot like the past," Sullivan said at a news briefing.

Global surface temperatures - land and water - were the eighth or ninth warmest, depending on which data set was used, since recordkeeping began in the late 1800s, the report found.

However, in the decade leading up to 2012, global temperatures actually declined by .09 degree F (.05 degree C), according to Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. Karl said the 50-year trend indicates global temperatures have consistently increased about .27 degree F (.15 degree C) per decade.

The recent decrease in temperatures has been noted by climate change skeptics who question the impact of human activities, such as the burning of fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide, on climate.

However, other changes detailed in the report paint a more complex picture:

- Sea levels reached a record high, after a sharp decrease in 2011 possibly linked to the Pacific Ocean phenomenon La Nina, which can have a cooling effect;

- Arctic sea ice shrank to its smallest summer minimum since satellite records began 34 years ago, while Antarctic sea ice reached a record high;

- More than 97 percent of the ice sheet covering Greenland melted at least a bit in the summer of 2012, four times greater than the 1981-2010 average;

- Average sea surface temperatures rose, but not much, making 2012 among the 11th warmest years on record;

- Ocean heat was near record high levels in the upper half-mile of the water, and temperatures also increased in the deep ocean.

The State of the Climate report is being published as a supplement to the August Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and is available online at http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/2012.php

(Editing by Ros Krasny and Doina Chiacu)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Facebook plans to test a mobile payments service that lets users make purchases inside mobile applications using payment information they have added to their account on the social network.

Facebook Inc. said Thursday that it is working on a "very small test" and the company says there is no set schedule for making the service available to users. The service would use payment information that shoppers store on Facebook to automatically complete checkout forms of certain mobile apps. Then, the app would process the purchase.

Spokeswoman Tera Randall said in an e-mailed statement that Facebook has a "great relationship with PayPal, and this product is simply to test how we can help our app partners provide a more simple commerce experience."

The test, she added, won't involve moving payment processing "away from an app's current payments provider, such as PayPal."

Nonetheless, shares of PayPal's owner, eBay Inc. declined on news of the potential competition. The stock closed down $1.05, or 1.9 percent, at $53.18.

Facebook's stock closed down 9 cents at $36.56.

Forrester Research analyst Denee Carrington thinks Facebook will face a challenge in offering mobile payments even though the company has been building up its database of users' credit cards.

"Consumers want safe, seamless and convenient mobile payments and there are a growing number of competitors that consumers trust more such as PayPal, Visa (V.me) and others," Carrington said in an e-mailed statement.

News of the test was reported earlier by AllThingsD.

Luca Parmitano wrote in his online blog, posted Tuesday, that he felt all alone as water filled his helmet outside the International Space Station.

Parmitano says he couldn't see far and couldn't hear anyone. He frantically tried to think of a plan to get back to the safety of the air lock. That's when he remembered his safety cable. He used the cable recoil mechanism, and its 3 pounds of force, to "pull" him back to the hatch. He says it felt like an eternity.

NASA has suspended spacewalks while determining the cause. The Russians, meanwhile, will stage their second spacewalk in under a week, this Thursday.

___

Online:

http://blogs.esa.int/luca-parmitano/

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou and Haiti's President Michel Martelly celebrated the official start of construction Tuesday on a new Supreme Court building to replace the one destroyed in the Haitian capital in a devastating January 2010 earthquake.

The two presidents laid the ceremonial first stone during Ma's one-day visit to Haiti, the first in a trip to the Caribbean and South America.

Martelly thanked Taiwan for its support for reconstruction, including nearly $16 million for the courthouse being built in a neo-colonial style near the grounds of the National Palace, which was also destroyed in the quake. The courthouse is expected to take about two years to complete and is being built by Taipei-based construction company OECC.

This was the first visit by a Taiwanese president to Haiti, and Martelly told reporters that he asked Ma to encourage Taiwanese companies to invest in Haiti. He also asked for support to help improve the impoverished country's agricultural sector.

Haiti is one of 23 countries to recognize the self-governing island of Taiwan. Mainland China considers Taiwan part of its territory and objects to diplomatic recognition of Taipei by other governments.

Ma will be visiting other countries that recognize Taiwan, including St. Kitts and Nevis; St. Lucia; St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Paraguay, where he will attend the new president's inauguration.

Noah and Connor Barthe, aged 4 and 6, were found dead early on Monday after the snake, a 45-kg (100 lbs) African rock python, escaped from its glassed-in enclosure, slithered through a ventilation shaft and fell into the room where they were sleeping.

A necropsy was performed on the snake, which was euthanized after the attack, and police said it appeared to be in good health.

The boys were at a sleepover in an apartment above the Reptile Ocean exotic pet store in Campbellton, New Brunswick, a town of about 7,500. The snake was being held in a glass enclosure in the same apartment.

The deaths dominated headlines in Canada and prompted questions about the safety and legality of keeping exotic pets in private residences.

The government of New Brunswick has said African rock pythons cannot be kept within the province without a permit, which would only be granted for an accredited zoo, not a private residence.

(Reporting by Cameron French; Editing by Janet Guttsman; and Peter Galloway)