The inscriptions on artifacts found south of Shanghai are about 1,400 years older than the oldest written Chinese language. Chinese scholars are divided over whether the markings are words or something simpler, but they say the finding will shed light on the origins of Chinese language and culture.

The oldest writing in the world is believed to be from Mesopotamia, dating back slightly more than 5,000 years. Chinese characters are believed to have been developed independently.

Inscriptions were found on more than 200 pieces dug out from the Neolithic-era Liangzhu relic site. The pieces are among thousands of fragments of ceramic, stone, jade, wood, ivory and bone excavated from the site between 2003 and 2006, lead archaeologist Xu Xinmin said.

The inscriptions have not been reviewed by experts outside the country, but a group of Chinese scholars on archaeology and ancient writing met last weekend in Zhejiang province to discuss the finding.

They agreed that the inscriptions are not enough to indicate a developed writing system, but Xu said they include evidence of words on two broken stone-ax pieces.

One of the pieces has six word-like shapes strung together to resemble a short sentence.

"They are different from the symbols we have seen in the past on artifacts," Xu said. "The shapes and the fact that they are in a sentence-like pattern indicate they are expressions of some meaning."

The six characters are arranged in a line, and three of them resemble the modern Chinese character for human beings. Each shape has two to five strokes.

"If five to six of them are strung together like a sentence, they are no longer symbols but words," said Cao Jinyan, a scholar on ancient writing at Hangzhou-based Zhejiang University. He said the markings should be considered hieroglyphics.

He said there are also stand-alone shapes with more strokes. "If you look at the composition, you will see they are more than symbols," Cao said.

But archaeologist Liu Zhao from Shanghai-based Fudan University warned that there was not sufficient material for any conclusion.

"I don't think they should be considered writing by the strictest definition," Liu said. "We do not have enough material to pin down the stage of those markings in the history of ancient writings."

For now, the Chinese scholars have agreed to call it primitive writing, a vague term that suggests the Liangzhu markings are somewhere between symbols and words.

The oldest known Chinese writing has been found on animal bones known as oracle bones dating to 3,600 years ago during the Shang dynasty.

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Before we begin, we'll note that technically the NSA isn't allowed to look at the stuff you do online. Thanks to the Patriot Act, it can (and does)Americans make every daywho was called, how long the call lasted, maybe some location data. The NSA also pulls in online content, but can't do so legally on targets in the United States. This is part ofyou may have heard about, in which the NSA can access data from an array of companies in near-real-time. In practice, the NSA's procedures arethat it does collect information (content) from Americans, of course. And until 2011, , including subject lines and to- and from-addresses.

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That is the worst case scenario. Yes, the NSA is definitely slurping up scads of information about your phone calls. It probably isn't storing your Facebook chats, emails, and Skype calls. Our goal with this guide is to detail exactly what you need to do to assure that it can't, even if it wants to. As you will see, it is a cumbersome process.

For assistance in fleshing out this guide, we spoke with Micah Lee, staff technologist with .

The world learned about PRISM thanks to a series of slides leaked by Edward Snowden. Among those slides was one where, you can see the companies that participate in the program but also the data they offer the NSA, if the agency asks. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo (complete with trademark exclamation point), Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL, Apple. All of the logos smushed into the header of the slide. And all of the companies to be avoided if you don't want any chance that the NSA can surveil what you're doing.

Again: We are not saying that you should not use Facebook. What we are saying is that if you are desperate to prevent the NSA from knowing what you're doing, you shouldn't use Facebook. And there's nothing you can do to make using Facebook betterno encryption, no anything can make Facebook safe from the NSA. (We'll discuss this more a little later on.)

But it gets worse. These are the companies known to be participating in PRISM as of last October (when Apple was added). Since then, others may have been added; others may be added in the future. The truly paranoid, then, will have second thoughts about nearly any major Internet company.

And then it gets worse still, as Lee pointed out. "Any company that's inside of U.S. jurisdiction," he said, "can get government requests for data. Even if they're not listed in the PRISM slides, that doesn't mean the government isn't getting data from them." If the NSA wants your data, in other words, it can probably get it. It just might not be in real-time.(There is some hope: Montana recently passed a bill that requires the governent to btain a probable cause warrant before spying on you through your cell phone or laptop. As , "if you don't want the government to spy on you, move to Montana." Montana might be the safest state from cyber-spying in the nation, as it is the first to pass a comprehensive anti-spying bill, doing so even before the Edward Snowden saga broke out.)

Before we continue, we should flesh out an important distinction. When you think of an email, what you generally think of is the content of the email, the message. In order for that message to get to you, though, the email also needs to contain metadata, a term loosely-and-not-entirely-accurately used to refer to information about the email message itself. For example: who it is addressed to, who it came from, what its subject is. (We .)

That distinction is important because email operates like a letter sent through the post office. A letter, sealed in an envelope, can be hidden from the mailman. But the mailman needs to be able to read the address, or your letter won't get there. In this case, the metadata is what appears on the envelope; the content is the letter.

So there is a good way to hide the content of your email messages. A tool called PGP (short for "Pretty Good Privacy"), created by a man named Philip Zimmerman, offers a way to encrypt (encode) email messages between two parties using what's know as peer-to-peer encryption. That's an important property. It means that person A encoded the message and only person B is able to decode it. So as the envelope moves around the web, you can be sure it stays sealed until it gets where it's going. (How PGP actually works isn't important for our purposes. In short: It involves doing a math problem involving two very, very large numbers.)

How do you get PGP? PGP as a brand is now , so you can give them your money and they will set you up. But there are also open source implementations of the technology. (If you're deeply knowledgeable about technology, you can establish your own PGP systembut if you can do this, we doubt you need a tutorial.) One such product is known as GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard), which comes in bothandversions. This is not simple to implement, mind you, but the documentation is pretty thorough.

That's the tradeoff on this stuff. You can use a packaged product like, say , a program that gives you a free email account that can send encrypted messages. But when you sign up, you'll see a little notice that the company will work with law enforcement if you're using your account for illegal activity. And in the past,when ordered to do so. Easy to use, but not a guaranteed protection against the NSAas the site's .

So you've got your PGP up and running and you're all set, right? Nope. Lee explains why. "PGP protects the content of your email," he says. "Specifically: Just the body, not the subject line. Even without the content of the email, it still doesn't protect the metadata." As recently as two years ago, the government was scooping up all of that metadata, reading all of those envelopes. PGP can't help with that. So how do you protect yourself from having your metadata read?

One way is to use email servers that employ a system called . This is complicated, but if two email servers employ STARTTLS, even the metadata information on emails is encrypted. So the NSA could see two email servers communicating, but not the To and From addresses involved.

An easier way to hide your metadata is to restrict your email to one domain. As Lee explains, if you're sending an email from someone at privateemail.com to someone at privateemail.com, that message never goes out on the Internet. Meaning that the government can't watch it zip around and pick up the metadata. It's like leaving a note for your roommatethe mailman won't see that.

Unless the mailman kicks in your door/the NSA subpoenas your email provider. Or if your email provider already has an agreement with the governmentGMail or Outlook, for exampleit may be easier than that. How do you solve  that problem? Run your own email server and don't send email over the Internet.

Easier: send a letter. (Or , either.)

The NSA also collects data on targeted individuals' web activity. To prevent them from snooping on your important web activity (if you're like us: reading The Atlantic Wire; looking at pictures of animals), you again need to worry about encryption.

In web browsers, that means using HTTPS. HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol, is the normal way content is shipped from a web server to your browser. HTTPS is the secure version of that, using encryption between the server and your browser, preventing those watching the traffic go past from seeing what's happening. The most important thing you can do, Lee suggests, is use HTTPS whenever possible. To that end, the EFF has a browser plug-in called , which will make web pages that support HTTPS use it by default.

As always, though, there's a weakness. Let's go back to the mail-sending analogy. If you seal up a package nice and tidy, write Joe's address on it, and send it off, Joe will get a nice, tidy package from you. But somewhere along the way, the NSA could have grabbed the package, opened it, looked at it, resealed it, and sent it on its way. That's what Lee called a "man in the middle" attackliterally someone stepping in between the sender and the recipient. In the case of web traffic, you might send an encrypted message to your bank which someone intercepts on the way, reads, re-encrypts and sends on.

The way web traffic avoids that problem is using signed certificates. (That's what they're called, but it's a metaphor.) Companies like Facebook go to a certificate authority and get a certificate for their encryption. When you send a request to Facebook, your browser checks that the security certificate is valid; if it is, all of the encryption happens without you even knowing. If the certificate isn't valid, your browser returns a warning. You've probably seen it. In Chrome it looks like this:

Generally, this system works well. If a certificate authority gets hacked and its signing keythe tool it uses to authenticate certificatesis stolen, that could be a significant problem, allowing the hacker to forge certificates for any number of websites. But it probably wouldn't go undetected. EFF also maintains what it calls the , which keeps records of the certificates for websites and lets users compare the signed certificates they encounter on the web with the ones the EFF has on file. (It's done automatically, in case that seemed off-putting.) If the certificate for, say, Twitter were to change, the EFF would start seeing that change reflected in its toolkit. The organization could check with Twitter and see if there was a valid reason for the change and, if not, issue warnings to its users.

You may see the flaw here. If the government gets access to a signing key or uses Twitter's certificate, Twitter or the certificate authority may not be authorized to tell EFF anything out of the norm is happening. "If Facebook or any of these companies gives the NSA a copy of its cryptokeys, or if they obtain them some other way," Lee points out, "it would allow them to spy on traffic." But on the other hand, "Facebook could just give access to all of the users data," making the complexity of this somewhat unnecessary.

Besides encryption, there is a tool that will allow you to mask who you are as you travel the webto some extent, anyway. Called(short for The Onion Router), it establishes a system through which your requests to web servers travel through three other anonymous servers around the world first. It's like changing between three cabs on your way to your destination. Anyone trying to figure out where you came from would have a very difficult time doing so.

Particularly because the analogy is more like if you and 100 people shared that cab. The anonymous server through which you're traveling is someone else's TOR setup. You and many other people travel through each point, making the next destination of each hard to determine. Of course, if you use TOR to access your personal Facebook account, it's not going to keep the government from knowing what you're doing on Facebook. But if you visit a site with information you'd rather not be linked to, TOR can help sweep the path clean behind you.

If someone knew where literally every cab in a city was running and when, though, they could eventually figure out who started and ended where. This is the problem with TOR, as noted by Lee and . The NSA surveils a massive amount of network traffic, bothand . Could it have an overview of the entire system of TOR traffic. It could. It probably doesn't. As the recent revelations about therevealed, some fraction of network data is currently being gatheredthat could be a lot of data, but probably not all. Without a record of all of the stops, it's much harder to track those cabs.

For those of you dependent upon real-time chat with your friends, a few words of warning. First of all, the "off the record" sessions offered by Google Chat offer zero protection. Second, most other chat systems, particularly web-based ones, aren't much better.

You do have some options, though. IM protection works a lot like email, Lee points out, generally requiring end-to-end encryption using an external application. He recommends , an app which, unlike Google's "off the record" mode, provides that sort of end-to-end encryption. It requires an external chat client, for which .

Apple's iMessage isn't one of them. But itin the past thanks to its encryption, and the company insists that , which would mean that its involvement in PRISM wouldn't put your messages at risk. Some . After all, if Apple software is creating keys to encrypt your data, it necessarily has access to those keys. Anyway, it would only work when communicating with another Apple device using iMessage.

Nor does that end-to-end encryption obscure the metadata  again, as with email. The government could know that you sent a message to someone, and to whom it was sent, just as it can know who was called from which phone number. And speaking of phones:

We'll start by distinguishing between two types of phones. There is the type of phone that makes phone calls (a "phone") and the type of phone that primarily serves as a crutch for those desperate to retain a connection to the internet while not near a computer (a "smartphone").

If your goal is to mask the phone calls you make using a traditional phone, you're probably out of luck. It's still not entirely clear which companies turn over bulk metadata on calls made, but there's absolutely no reason to think any large carriers don't. If you use a small regional phone company, the odds are better that your call records are not going straight to the NSA that is, as long as you never call anyone who uses a larger phone company. Same goes for mobile phone providers. The smaller the company the less likely the NSA has gotten around to monitoring them, but don't bet on it.

Smartphones expand your options a little bit, but not much. "With phones, it's a lot closer to you not having a choice," Lee notes. Your options:

Voice over IP. VoIP is the term for using a machine's internet connection to transmit digital versions of voice communication. It's Skype, in other words. But of course you don't want to use Skype, since it's a PRISM company. Lee suggests , an Android app that offers encrypted voice communications. It requires two Android phones, though.

Textsecure. Another Android app from the same company as Red Phone,does what it says on the tin: end-to-end encryption over text message. Also as with Red Phone, TextSecure is Open Source, meaning that anyone can access the source code to the software. This helps explain questions like, "who might have access to my encryption key?"

TOR Browsers. You can also get TOR browsers forordevice. See above warnings / restrictions / hand-wringing.

(As it turns out, your smartphone is just a little computer, meaning that we're basically repeating the admonitions above. Who knew?)

And that's it. All of the ways you can protect yourself when you go online. Remember: no form of prevention is 100 percent effective. The only truly safe way to protect yourself is to abstain completely.

Top photo: Theodore Kaczynski's cabin in the woods of Lincoln, Mont., in 1996. (AP)

BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - Browsing through the racks of printed T-shirts and scarves, a handful of shoppers inspect the latest designs in what has become one of the most popular clothing stores in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

One of them, Ali, a student, holds up a T-shirt printed with a popular Libyan expression "Grab what is new before it becomes old", one of the many catchphrases that adorn the designs in Boza, a small shop in an upmarket neighborhood.

"I always bought clothes with English writing on them but now for the first time, I am buying a T-shirt with Arabic print," he said. "I am so happy."

Ali is one of the hundreds of Libyans who have flocked to Boza since it opened a few months ago, eager to get their hands on designs that have become a talking point among the youth in Benghazi's popular coffee shops.

Its name meaning "stylish", the store - the first of its kind in Libya according to its owners - sells T-shirts, bags, head and neck scarves printed with "Made in Libya", "Walk like a Libyan" or a jumble of letters spelling out Benghazi.

Some T-shirts are printed with "I love Cyrenaica", referring to Libya's eastern province where calls for more regional autonomy have heightened since Muammar Gaddafi's ouster in 2011.

Benghazi was the cradle of the Libyan revolt and discontent has mounted over continued neglect from Tripoli. Easterners say their oil-rich region was starved of cash under Gaddafi.

Other colorful T-shirts carry portraits of King Idris, whom Gaddafi ousted in his 1969 coup.

"Our designs have political messages, it is difficult to separate daily life from politics," Ahmed Benmussa, a 32-year old oil engineer and Boza co-owner, said.

"We take inspiration from Libyan heritage because we have a rich culture. Reviving history is one of our aims."

Some of the T-shirts tackle the serious issues plaguing post-war Libya - the mass of weapons on its streets and the armed militias which have hobbled governance.

"Better the devil you know" reads the message on one T-shirt accompanied by the drawing of a knife.

"Some of the messages are critical, perhaps in a more humorous way," Benmussa said. "This is how we express ourselves, unlike those who actually use weapons."

PERSONALISED DESIGNS

The shop itself is a mix between old and new. An old record player lies idle in the middle of the store while a large television screen beams Boza's latest designs.

Importing blank T-shirts and scarves from Turkey, its designers use a small printing machine to decorate the clothes and accessories. Customers can also personalize goods or propose new designs on a "suggestion wall" in the store.

Boza's T-shirts, which sell for around 50 Libyan dinars ($40), are popular among Benghazi's youth who say the designs allow them to express themselves - a still relatively new freedom after Gaddafi's 42-year iron-fisted rule.

"This is a great way in which you can express yourself in a modern and fashionable manner," Alaa al-Baba, a 24-year old engineer, said. "It would be great if everybody could do that."

Boza's owners use social media site Facebook to promote the store, both at home and abroad, posting pictures of the owners' friends wearing designs around town like professional models.

"We have sent T-shirts to customers in Saudi Arabia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Indonesia, United States, Qatar, Ireland, France, Egypt and Spain," Benmussa said.

Capitalizing on Boza's success in Benghazi, plans are now under way to open a branch in the capital.

"There will be a Boza in Tripoli in coming days," he said.

(Writing by Ghaith Shennib and Marie-Louise Gumuchian)

As friends, family, and even strangers mourn the loss of all but one member of a "Hotshot Crew" fighting the Yarnell Hill fire, a team of investigators reportedly has arrived to reconstruct the events that led to the deaths of the firefighters Sunday.

The fire, which started last Friday following a lightning strike, had covered only about 200 acres when high winds on Saturday fanned the blaze, expanding it to 2,000 acres within a few hours, according to the .

By Monday morning, the fire had enlarged to 8,400 acres, its rough size Tuesday as it burns through grass and chaparral. The fire reportedly has destroyed some 50 homes.

"The winds were coming from the southeast, blowing to the west, away fromand populated areas. Then the wind started to blow in. The wind kicked up to 40- to 50-mile-per-hour gusts, and it blew east, south, west every which way," Prescott, Ariz., city councilman Len Scamardo told the AP. "What limited information we have was there was a gust of wind from the north that blew the fire back and trapped them."

The question for meteorologist Cliff Mass, at the University of Washington in Seattle, is whether anyone had pointed out in advance the strong likelihood that this would happen. The downdraft, known as a gust front, came from an approaching storm and served as a blacksmith's bellows, quickly reversing the wind direction that had prevailed through much of the afternoon and suddenly turning the fire back onto the firefighters.

"We have satellite images every 15 minutes and radar every six minutes," says Dr. Mass, a meteorology professor at the university who performs weather forecasts for firefighters in the Pacific Northwest. "This was not a difficult forecast."

Balloon-based measurements of the atmosphere taken at Flagstaff, Ariz., at 1 p.m. local time Sunday showed that in terms of the potential for powerful downdrafts should thunderstorms build, the atmosphere was loaded for bear.

A remote weather station about five miles from where the fire started and set up to monitor conditions in potentially fire-prone areas tells the story from the local perspective, Mass says.

From midday through 5 p.m., winds were blowing generally out of the south at about 30 miles an hour, driving the fire away from Yarnell. At 5 p.m., the wind abruptly shifted, blowing out of the north at about 40 miles an hour with gusts up to 65 miles an hour. At the same time, measurements of sunlight had been falling in an uneven, stair-step pattern since about 2 p.m., indicating that clouds were spreading over the region.

This led Mass to look back over satellite photos and regional radar, which at 1 p.m. showed a line of thundershowers moving toward the area from the northeast. By 3:30 p.m., clouds had moved over the fire site. By 4:45 p.m., a pyrocumulus cloud a towering cloud formed by rising heat from the fire had punched through the clouds the storm brought. From above, that was a telltale sign the fire had exploded, Mass explains.

Warning signs also were appearing in the output of the high-resolution, rapid-response forecast model from the(NWS), Mass notes. It put the storm over the fire site about the same time that clouds began to cover the area.

The model is designed to provide fresh 18-hour forecasts once an hour. Another forecast model, at the University of Arizona, yielded similar results.

"That's what bothers me so much," Mass says. "Perhaps this didn't have to happen. The data was there to have saved these people."

Typically, on major fires, incident managers will call on the local NWS forecast office for weather-forecasting support, notes Heath Hockenberry, who manages the NWS's fire-weather program, based in Boise, Idaho.

Incident managers take a look at the complexity of the initial fire and the resources available and determine what people and equipment to send in for the initial attack on the fire, he says. Those decisions include determining if on-site forecasters are needed or whether firefighters can get by relying on the general forecasts that the local forecast office provides.

When forecasters are called in, "we show up with a laptop, a global broadband unit to get satellite data, and usually we just plug into the team's network," he says. "We start forecasting as soon as we get there."

The forecast teams primarily look for anything that has the potential to compromise safety, Mr. Hockenberry says. Thunderstorm outflows, such as those that apparently turned the fire on the firefighters at Yarnell Hill, top the list.

Typically, NWS forecasters are called in for on-site forecasts when a firefighting effort becomes most complex, relying on resources from multiple agencies or political jurisdictions, he says.

That day, the local forecast office was supplying forecasts "that we do every day for every department," Hockenberry says. "Unfortunately, what happened over the weekend was that we didn't have a person on site; we weren't requested."

The fire hadn't reached a level of complexity to prompt incident managers to call in the weather cavalry.

"That's the really sad part," he adds. "There's just not enough [forecasting] bodies to go around to respond to everything. The firefighters they have to respond to everything."

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Topics covered: Increasing Demand for Midstream Assets - U.S. Energy Infrastructure Build Out - Emerging Shale Plays - Oil and Gas Transportation Infrastructure Demand - Master Limited Partnerships Distribution Growth - Outlook for Natural Gas Liquids - Canadian Oil and Gas Investments

Companies include: RMP Energy (RMP.TO), TriOil Resources (TOL.V), Legacy Oil + Gas (LEG.TO), Crescent Point (CPG.TO) and many others.

In the following excerpt from the 2013 Oil & Gas Review, Don Rawson, a Managing Director at AltaCorp Capital, describes his investing methodology and top picks in the Canadian Oil and Gas sector:

...there is a lot of value out there, but I don't think that you need to be a hero by buying the cheapest names - this is a quality name that's been sold off heavily.

TWST: In your coverage right now, who are your top picks that pay a dividend?

Mr. Rawson: Among the yield names, definitely Crescent Point (CPG.TO) sticks out as a very well-run company with a well-regarded management team and business model. It is focused in a few key top-notch oily resource plays, it has great netbacks and is very conservatively run in terms of its balance sheet, hedge book and track record of managing Street expectations.

It typically trades at a premium multiple supporting its business acquisition model, which has been one of the cornerstones of its strategy in the past. Right now though, it has sold off, and it's quite attractive on today's valuation, yielding close to 8%. On our numbers, it's trading at about eight times debt-adjusted cash flow this year, which is really quite cheap compared to its typical trading multiple historically.

TWST: Looking ahead, is there anything that you see on the horizon that could significantly either hurt or help the sector?

Mr. Rawson: I think differentials and how they play out is a key risk to the downside or to the upside. I think the differential question wasn't one that investors even focused on until a year ago, and because there are so many moving parts, it's a difficult one to get your arms around. It's a difficult thing to forecast.

The other thing I would say is that to a large degree, U.S. institutional investors have backed away from Canada, and if interest in the sector from U.S. investors gets reignited, that would be a turn to the upside. This market is oversold. Capital flows have...

For more of this interview and many others visit the Wall Street Transcript - a unique service for investors and industry researchers - providing fresh commentary and insight through verbatim interviews with CEOs, portfolio managers and research analysts. This special issue is available by calling (212) 952-7433 or via .

As part of his drive to make the Catholic Church more austere and focus on the poor, Francis told young and trainee priests and nuns from around the world that having the latest smartphone or fashion accessory was not the route to happiness.

"It hurts me when I see a priest or a nun with the latest model car, you can't do this," he said.

"A car is necessary to do a lot of work, but please, choose a more humble one. If you like the fancy one, just think about how many children are dying of hunger in the world," he said.

Since succeeding Pope Benedict in March, the former cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of Argentina has eschewed some of the more ostentatious trappings of his office and has chosen to live in a Vatican guest house rather than the opulent papal apartments.

The ANSA news agency said the pope's car of choice for moving around the walled Vatican City was a compact Ford Focus.

(Reporting By Catherine Hornby; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)

The 40-year-old All-Star right wing was captain of the Senators and his decision not to re-sign with the team was a surprise.

Alfredsson will join a Red Wings roster featuring fellow Swedes Henrik Zetterberg, Johan Franzen, Gustav Nyquist, Niklas Kronwall and Jonathan Ericsson.

Media reports said Alfredsson had signed a one-year $5.5 million deal.

There were 20 signings in the first hour of free agency, including forward Nathan Horton going to the Columbus Blue Jackets for a seven-year contract.

Horton had spent the past three seasons with the Boston Bruins and is facing time off for shoulder surgery in the off-season.

Ottawa brought in left wing Clarke MacArthur on a two-year deal after he scored eight goals and 20 points for the Toronto Maple Leafs last season.

The Edmonton Oilers snapped up defenseman Andrew Ference on a four-year deal, reported to be worth $13 million.

The 34-year-old Ference, born in Edmonton, entered free agency after playing with Boston for seven seasons.

The Bruins, defeated by the Chicago Blackhawks in this season's Stanley Cup finals, were busy making deals of their own with a 'blockbuster' trade with the Dallas Stars.

The Bruins signed forwards Loui Eriksson, Reilly Smith and Matt Fraser and defenseman Joe Morrow from Dallas for centers Tyler Seguin and Rich Peverley and defenseman Ryan Button, the teams announced on Thursday.

The New York Islanders re-signed Kazakh goaltender Evgeni Nabokov and the Philadelphia Flyers added goaltender Ray Emery from Chicago. Both were one-year deals.

The Carolina Hurricanes brought in defenseman Mike Komisarek on a one-year deal after Toronto allowed him to enter free agency. (Reporting By Simon Evans in Miami, editing by Gene Cherry)

NUERBURGRING, Germany, July 7 (Reuters) - Triple world champion Sebastian Vettel is not one for tears or emotional pronouncements and even his first victory at his home German Grand Prix on Sunday was treated largely like any other race.

The 26-year-old Red Bull driver has dominated Formula One for the past three years and leads the standings again by 34 points but his CV was missing a victory on home asphalt and a win in July.

Now that has been chalked off it is onwards and upwards, with little fanfare and lots of single-minded determination.

"In the end it's just another race and we try to prepare as much as we can for every race," Vettel told a news conference, his matter-of-fact expression barely changing after his 30th career victory in F1.

"Surely winning here is very special and tastes very, very sweet, especially the way we won today with a lot of pressure from behind, but I think we did our homework."

It was the nature of the close victory which thrilled Vettel as much as it coming at the Nuerburgring, with Lotus driver Kimi Raikkonen chasing him down to the last.

"For sure he is extremely proud about what he has achieved today but he has always taken the bigger picture. We discussed it before the race and said 'let's go for the best we can and if that is second today it's second'," Red Bull team principal Christian Horner told reporters.

"There are just as many points attached to this race as the other 18."

Always extremely knowledgeable technically, Vettel consumes every detail of Formula One while keeping the media at arms length when it comes to his private life.

He is often coy in news conferences, especially this week when asked if he would like Raikkonen to replace the retiring Webber at Red Bull, but gives credit where credit is due.

"We had a little bit of a cushion but Lotus was incredibly quick today and gave us definitely a big run for our money," he said.

Red Bull ensured Vettel pitted to cover the third stop of third-placed Romain Grosjean and all went well in the end.

"For sure, there are a lot of expectations. Especially when you have a good car and for a couple of years you've had a good run, when you come to home soil people expect you to win," said the German.

"I think the whole team, including myself, we never ever let that get to our head but it just feels very, very sweet now to have succeeded after a couple of tries."

Vettel hit the headlines after ignoring orders and overtaking Australian team mate Mark Webber to win in Malaysia in March. That same stone-cold attitude of a champion means he is unlikely to be partying long into the German night. (Editing by Alan Baldwin)

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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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - From his home in the English town of Leicester, former business administrator Elliot Higgins trawls through sometimes hundreds of online videos a day from Syria's civil war.

His research, begun after he took redundancy late last year, has made him a self-taught expert on the weaponry of a conflict largely inaccessible to outsiders, in which disparate rebel groups, some linked to al-Qaeda, form their own supply lines.

"I was just interested, and no one else seemed to be doing it," the 34-year-old said in a telephone interview.

In recent months, he has noticed that the rebels have been getting much more sophisticated Chinese, Croatian and other foreign equipment, notably the anti-tank and anti-aircraft weaponry they have long sought.

More traditional experts, many of whom read Higgins' blog, have come to the same conclusion, although they say the supplies are not significant enough to change the dynamic of the rebel fight against President Bashar al-Assad's heavily armed forces.

"What we are seeing now are weapons that could not have been taken from government stockpiles or bought within the region," said Higgins, who blogs under the pseudonym "Brown Moses".

"They must be being flown in and shipped across the border from Jordan and Turkey."

Saudi Arabia and Qatar, most believe, are the major buyers.

The shakily filmed rebel videos posted on YouTube and elsewhere are almost invariably impossible to verify and contain few signs of hits on genuine targets, although fighting has devastated towns and cities, killed more than 100,000 people and forced millions to flee.

Some appear deliberately intended to showcase new weaponry, particularly the latest types to arrive such as the shoulder mounted HJ-8 Chinese-made wire guided missile. Rebels crouch behind rubble, trees or buildings, quietly chanting religious slogans before firing.

The most sophisticated anti-tank weapon obtained by the rebels so far, it is capable of punching through even modern "reactive armor" able to repel older and smaller missiles, although some rebels have complained they are not up to expectations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZrrEXRZLYc&list=PLPC0Udeof3T7wInD7fItyPomPInljZCvn&index=1

The Chinese-made FN-6 MANPAD also appears to have helped the rebels raise their game, with one video apparently showing one bringing down a Russian-built helicopter gunship. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZgIZqAB7Ao&list=PLPC0Udeof3T7yvmzc2Dv93BRyy5fQ4rqW&index=1

NOT ALWAYS GOOD QUALITY

In the two weeks since the White House announced Assad's use of chemical weapons had prompted increased but ill-defined "military support" to the rebels, U.S. officials will not say if Washington itself has provided arms.

That it is looking to be more closely involved in the supply of weaponry from other states, however, is not disputed.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one U.S. national security source did not question that Qatar might be providing MANPADs, but said it was a matter of concern to Washington.

Such weapons can also be used against civilian airliners, helicopters or military jets.

Where exactly the weapons are coming from is unclear. With Beijing still broadly opposed to foreign-backed regime change, few believe Qatar could have bought directly from China.

"They must be being bought from a third party - perhaps one that has not always kept the weapons in good condition," says blogger Higgins, pointing to one video where the missile appears to drop to the ground almost immediately after firing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhSqHegW6hI&list=PLPC0Udeof3T7yvmzc2Dv93BRyy5fQ4rqW

Judging by the videos, he said much of the Chinese-made weaponry appeared to be going direct to Islamist groups.

The Croatian-manufactured Soviet-style weaponry thought to be supplied by Saudi Arabia, in contrast, appeared to be going almost exclusively to the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.

They included RAK 12 multiple rocket launchers, RBG-6, M79 and M60 anti-tank weapons and the RPG-22, capable of going through more than a meter of reinforced concrete.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1afGS9C1C4&list=PLPC0Udeof3T7u4PiSmzR-RLjFK0RYLiWc

That matches the views of other analysts, although Qatari officials have said controls over arms shipments have been tightened.

"After all the criticism they have had, the Saudis are being very careful where they send weapons," said Bilal Saab, director and head of research at the Institute for near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Washington DC, adding that U.S. pressure was a factor.

"The Qataris care much less. They are arming whoever they want."

LUCRATIVE BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY?

Last month, Gulf sources told Reuters Saudi Arabia was also looking to buy French weapons to ship to the rebels.

So far, however, analysts say there was little sign of them reaching the battlefield - although French weapons from the Libya conflict, particularly rocket launchers, were turning up.

Even before the war, Syria was awash with weaponry.

Using data from a variety of sources, University of Sydney based website www.gunpolicy.org estimates Assad's army and police had well over 2 million firearms between them, with an estimated 735,000 weapons - likely mainly AK-47s - in private hands.

Local smugglers have clearly been busy. According to a study by the Small Arms Survey released this week, the price of guns and ammunition increased by 60-80 percent in Lebanon between February and September last year, almost entirely on Syria demand.

Throughout the region, the growing demand for weaponry to go to Syria is an open secret and lucrative business opportunity.

"They know we are sending guns to Syria," Libyan arms dealer Abdul Basit Haroun told Reuters last month, showing off a warehouse packed with arms and ammunition awaiting shipment. "Everyone knows."

For British blogger Higgins, tracking such trade is now more than just a hobby. With his website now receiving 2,000-4,000 hits a day, he has raised enough money to make it his main focus at least until the end of the year.

He has also begun to advise activists keen to track weapons' transfers in other current and former conflict zones.

"When you're here, you don't get a real feel for how important it is," he says. "Then you get out and meet people and see what it means to them."

(Additional reporting by Mark Hoselball in Washington and Thomas Grove in Geneva; editing by Philippa Fletcher)