Angry Birds Valentine?s Edition: Images Leaked

Angry Birds Valentine?s Edition: Images Leaked

Images from the Valentine?s edition of Angry Birds have been leaked into the websphere. From the images, the Valentine?s edition looks like previous holiday themed editions such as Angry Birds Halloween, but with many more shades of pink. Many casual gamers will be ecstatic with the new edition to the Angry Birds series. It should be available in the iPhone App Store and the Android Market Place next week.

Anyone have a sneak peaks into what the TV Show will look like?


About the Author

Fatema is the West Coast editor of TNW she is based in San Francisco. Fatema writes about startups and entrepreneurs. Follow her on twitter, @FatemaYasmine

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Governors Get Advice for Saving on Medicaid

However, the administration refused to say whether it would allow states to adopt stricter eligibility standards that would, in effect, throw low-income people off the Medicaid rolls and eliminate their insurance coverage.

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said she was still studying that question.

Governors said the ideas, though constructive, were not nearly enough. They said they wanted waivers of some federal requirements and relief from Congress, and they noted that the new health care law would greatly increase Medicaid rolls in 2014.

In a letter to governors on Thursday, Ms. Sebelius said, ?I have heard the urgency of your state budget concerns.? Ms. Sebelius emphasized that states already had substantial discretion to alter benefits and establish or increase co-payments.

While state Medicaid programs must cover hospital and doctors? services, Ms. Sebelius said, many other services are classified as optional. The optional services, she said, include prescription drugs, physical therapy, respiratory care, optometry services and eyeglasses, dental services and dentures.

An administration official, discussing the letter on condition of anonymity, said: ?Cuts can hurt people. We certainly see that.?

The official said that, instead of taking an ax to Medicaid, states should find ways to save money and improve care at the same time. For example, the official said, states should more aggressively manage the care of the sickest Medicaid recipients.

?Just 1 percent of all Medicaid beneficiaries account for 25 percent of all expenditures,? Ms. Sebelius said, and 5 percent of the recipients account for more than half of Medicaid spending.

In addition, Ms. Sebelius said, states could save large sums by reducing premature births and medically unnecessary Caesarean sections, by reducing hospital admissions and by using proven techniques to improve the care of children with asthma.

Republicans in Congress are introducing bills to give states much more latitude in Medicaid and to block the provision of the new health care law that vastly expands eligibility.

The law, with some exceptions, generally bans states from restricting eligibility. In Arizona, Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, has asked the federal government for permission to remove 280,000 people from the rolls.

Despite painful cuts in benefits and in payment rates for health care providers, Ms. Brewer said, the Arizona Medicaid program ?is still growing at an astounding rate.?

The 29 Republican governors recently asked President Obama for relief from the Medicaid eligibility requirements, which they said tied their hands.

Mike Schrimpf, a spokesman for the Republican Governors Association, said, ?Secretary Sebelius?s cleverly buried response to governors is that she is still studying the issue.?

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a Republican, said, ?Secretary Sebelius?s letter fails to provide solutions that immediately address the exploding state budget problems posed by the Medicaid program.? Governors of both parties want the administration to remove the ?burdensome constraints? on states? ability to change Medicaid eligibility rules, Mr. Barbour said.

In 2003, when President George W. Bush proposed to give states new power to reduce or eliminate optional Medicaid benefits, advocates for poor people and the disabled denounced the idea. They expressed similar concerns on Thursday.

? ?Optional services? is a misnomer,? said Peter W. Thomas, a lawyer for the Consortium for Citizens with Disabilities, a national advocacy group. ?These items and services, which include artificial limbs, wheelchairs and kidney dialysis, are life-saving and life-sustaining. They improve functional abilities and the quality of life for millions of people.?

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Does Flash Really Sap Your iPhone Battery?

Famously, you can do almost anything on an iPhone apart from run Adobe Flash; a move that Apple has always defended on the grounds that Flash isn?t finger-friendly and that it drains the battery life too much.

According to IT Pro, this firmly held line has led to ?one of the most bitter and unresolved disputes in the technology industry.? What's more, the site has also undertaken some testing to discover the truth about the iPhone Flash video and battery life debate.

IT Pro sets the battle-lines between Apple and Adobe by pointing out that ?Apple?s backing of H.264 over Flash has helped increase the popularity of H.264. For example, YouTube has converted its entire library to H.264 for playback on iOS devices.?

If this trend is widened to all mobile devices, one of Adobe?s primary products will be undermined by the increasing demand and importance of smartphones and tablet PCs. However, if Apple is incorrect to deny iOS devices access to Flash, alternative mobile OSes such as Android would become even more popular, leaving Apple?s shiny iPhones and iPads gathering dust on the shelves.

IT Pro?s testing methods involved creating two video files of the same movie, ?one using the H.264 codec in a .m4v container and the other using the Sorenson Spark codec, one of the most popular codecs used in online Flash videos before the rise of H.264, in a .flv container.?

The tester then played back these videos in a few different playback apps, measuring the time before the battery of a Samsung Galaxy Tab and an Apple iPod Touch gave out. The test setup was actually quite complicated to ensure comparability, so for more details, see IT Pro?s test setup page.

The results were surprising to say the least ? Apple?s Videos app was more frugal with the power draw than the VLC app, for example. ?Either Apple's in-house app developers are very good (or have access to some trick or a private API for prolonging battery life) or Applidium, the developers of the VLC app, still have a lot of work to do.?

Meanwhile, the Android-powered Galaxy Tab lasted for half an hour less when playing the Flash version of the video than when playing the H.264 file. What's more, the difference was even greater on the Apple device.

For a bit more analysis, it's also worth heading over to the conclusion page.

Is Apple completely justified or totally wrong to ban Flash from iPhones and iPads? Let us know your thoughts in the forums.

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Researchers "Grow" New Blood Vessels

Synthetic blood vessels that can be made in advance and stored until surgery could help patients undergoing heart surgery, hemodialysis?cleansing of the blood in cases of kidney failure?and other procedures. Laura Niklason, an anesthesiologist and biomedical engineer at Yale University, and her collaborators have grown blood vessels using human cells and tested them in baboons, showing that they provoke no immune rejection and avoid common complications of synthetic vessels, such as clotting, bursting, or contracting over time. Researchers hope these studies will show that the vessels are safe enough to win permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials.

During bypass surgery, doctors looking to circumvent blocked arteries usually harvest vessels from a patient's leg or arm. But people who suffer from vascular disease or who have had previous procedures may have no suitable vessels left. The other options have complications: grafts from donors are often rejected by the recipient's immune system, artificial plastic vessels have high rates of blood clots and other problems, and vessels grown from a patient's own tissue take more than six months to mature. "Artificial grafts suffer from clotting and obstruction because they are not tissue," says Niklason, especially when plastic is used.

Niklason says she has solved this problem by creating vessels that are derived from living tissue but can be used off-the-shelf and are not rejected by the immune system. Using a technique she developed at MIT in the 1990s, researchers seed tubular scaffolds with smooth muscle cells. The cells secrete collagen and other connective tissue molecules around the scaffolds, forming blood vessels. After the scaffolds break down, the vessels are washed with a detergent that strips away the cells, leaving behind the fibrous tubes of collagen.

Because the tubes contain no living cells, they do not trigger an immune response and have a shelf life of more than a year. The group has previously grown vessels using cells from several different animal species, including canine versions for heart bypass surgeries in dogs.

Now, in a report published in Science Translational Medicine, the researchers have grown vessels using human cells for the first time. They used the vessels to link an artery and a vein in baboons, creating a structure called a fistula to mimic the setup required by hemodialysis patients, who have a needle injected into such a link two or three times a week to get their blood filtered. Also, while previous versions of the vessels required a wait of several weeks while the insides of the vessels were "personalized" with some of the patient's own cells, a process that makes them less likely to clog, these hemodialysis vessels did not need that treatment.

"That means they could potentially be immediately available to the patient," says Shannon Dahl, a biomedical engineer who cofounded a biotechnology company called Humacyte with Niklason and another colleague to help bring the technology to market. Humacyte initially plans to test its technology in hemodialysis patients, though Dahl declined to give a timeline for clinical trials.

Researchers ultimately hope to test the vessels for heart surgeries, but they first want to show that the technology is safe and effective. "I would love to get to coronary bypass at some point, but we have to prove that this is a good, safe therapy in other anatomical locations first," says Niklason. A hemodialysis graft is much more easily replaced than a bypass graft if there are infections or other problems.

The researchers' use of baboons also provides important additional support before they move into human trials, says David Putnam, a chemical engineer at Cornell University who studies biomaterials. The reason is that the dynamics of blood flow in baboons are a good model for what happens in humans, he says. "They are going about this very well, very carefully. They're building a house with very strong bricks," he says. "And the next step is humans."

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An Engine that Harnesses Sound Waves

A startup company has developed a new type of engine that could generate electricity with the efficiency of a fuel cell, but which costs only about as much as an internal combustion engine.

Etalim, based in Vancouver, Canada, says its engine, roughly the size of a basketball, could improve the economics of electricity production for the cogeneration of power and heat in homes, and as a way to harness the heat produced at concentrating solar collectors. The company has created a prototype, but has yet to achieve the kind of efficiencies?in excess of 40 percent?that its computer models indicate are within reach.

The device shares some principles of a Stirling engine, in which an external heat source is used to expand a fixed amount of working gas (usually helium), which then contracts when it is pushed into a cooler space. This expansion-contraction cycle repeats itself, turning heat into mechanical work by driving a piston.

Etalim's CEO on Klopfer says a fundamental problem with Stirling engines is that they need to run at very high temperatures and pressures to be efficient, making it difficult to keep the gas sealed inside the cylinder that encases the piston. "At these temperatures, you can't use traditional methods of sealing," he says. "You can't use rubber, lubricants. It must be dry metal on metal, and those are very expensive, high-precision parts that lead to high costs."

Etalim's founder and chief scientist, Thomas Steiner, saw an opportunity to eliminate all the rubbing parts and seals that are prone to wear and leakage by using a design based on thermoacoustics?which employs heat to control the intensity of sound waves within a sealed cavity.

Encased within the core of Etalim's engine is a plate of metal that replaces the function of a piston in a conventional Stirling engine. When pressurized helium on the top side of the metal plate is heated, sound waves traveling through the gas are amplified, causing the plate to vibrate, and a metal diaphragm below (separated by a cooler layer of helium) to push down on a shaft. All mechanical friction is eliminated. The shaft is attached to a an alternator that produces electricity.

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Battlefield 1943, Bad Company 2 Onslaught cancelled for PC

Break out the tissues. DICE has just announced the cancellation of two anticipated PC projects: Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Onslaught. The former is a complete game that launched on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in July 2009, while the latter is a new game mode for Bad Company 2 released as downloadable content for consoles in June 2010.

Both were supposed to be available on PC in the near future but DICE has decided to halt development on the projects to focus its energy on a completely new title. "There comes a time when we as a studio have to choose where to best put our efforts," explained general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson. "This is one of those cross roads where I need to make a hard decision."


Although the developer will continue supporting Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and previous games, much of DICE's manpower will be allocated to the creation of Battlefield 3. The upcoming installment is being developed with a new version of the Frostbite engine and will be unveiled at a press event before this year's Game Developers Conference (February 28 through March 4).

"Our goal is crystal clear: we're going to build the best Battlefield game ever, and we'll do whatever it takes to make this the biggest launch in DICE's history," Troedsson said. Little is known about Battlefield 3, but Frostbite 2.0 supposedly takes "full advantage" of DirectX 11 and 64-bit processors. Building hype, Troedsson told fans to keep their eyes peeled for some exciting news.

Update: Game Informer has revealed its March cover featuring none other than Battlefield 3.

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G.O.P. Hopefuls Leave Egypt Crisis to the President

But as the crisis in Egypt has intensified this week, elevating foreign affairs above domestic political skirmishes, the potential Republican candidates and the party?s leaders in Congress have, with only a few exceptions, had little to say.

As a result, President Obama has had the moment practically all to himself ? for better or worse ? as he gingerly proceeds without a sustained counterargument on a matter that could reshape United States foreign policy for years.

The lack of debate underscores the relative absence of muscular Republican voices on foreign affairs in general, a sharp contrast to the way things were four years ago, when President George W. Bush?s Iraq policy was a flashpoint between the two parties at this point in the election cycle.

To some degree, the silence from Republicans reflects a lack of substantive differences, especially on Egypt. House Speaker John A. Boehner set the tone on Sunday, saying, ?Our administration so far has handled this tense situation pretty well.? And in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, said Tuesday, ?America ought to speak with one voice, and we have one president.?

Party elders have largely agreed. On Wednesday, James A. Baker, the former secretary of state, said of the Obama administration, ?They?ve been handling this Egyptian crisis quite well, frankly.?

The delicate nature of the situation in Egypt, where events have moved fast and turned violent in the past week, helps explain the measured Republican response.

But the crisis has illustrated a broader pattern in which Republicans have been strikingly unwilling or unable to draw sharp contrasts with the administration on foreign policy ? including Iraq and Afghanistan ? and have instead taken aim mainly at Mr. Obama?s domestic agenda.

While it is hardly rare for opposition candidates to have limited foreign policy experience ? take, for example, Senator Barack Obama as he started his candidacy four years ago ? the president?s Republican rivals so far do not even have a high-profile issue, as Mr. Obama did with Iraq, on which they can offer national security policies and values that contrast with those of the White House.

The escalating crisis in Egypt has attracted fresh attention to foreign policy at the very time that prospective Republican contenders are trying to establish their credentials as prospective commanders in chief. Gone are the days when the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire were the only obligatory stops on the campaign trail. Particularly for candidates who want to appeal to evangelical voters, Israel, Jordan and other points across the Middle East are now important stops as well.

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, completed his 15th visit to Israel this week. Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi is set to leave on Saturday for a trip to Israel that is scheduled to include a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, made a similar visit last month, and Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, has led a trade delegation to Israel.

While most of these potential Republican contenders have offered mild criticism of how the United States has handled the Egypt crisis, particularly Mr. Obama?s delay in distancing himself from President Hosni Mubarak, the tenor of the remarks has been muted in comparison with the Republican reaction to the administration?s health care law or economic policy.

In a policy sense, Republicans, like Democrats, are walking a fine line between support of a quick transition to a new government in Egypt and the concern, felt especially keenly in Israel, that the removal of Mr. Mubarak could lead to instability and the possible rise of an Islamist government.

Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska, who seldom goes more than a few days without criticizing the administration, has been silent about the turmoil in Egypt.

Nor have the sounds of disagreement been heard on Capitol Hill, where Republican advisers urge party members to keep dissent to a minimum and continue to focus on domestic issues like health care, government spending and jobs.

Instead, most of the alternative foreign policy views to those of the administration have come by way of the Fox News Channel, where several potential Republican contenders also serve as paid analysts. (Mr. Huckabee assumed the role of a roving pundit for Fox, filing on-the-scene dispatches from Israel, saying the credibility of the United States was quickly eroding.)

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who is considering a presidential bid, has been among the most critical voices.

?I don?t think they have a clue,? Mr. Gingrich said of the White House?s stance toward the Mubarak government in an interview on Fox News this week with Greta Van Susteren. ?It?s very frightening to watch this administration.?

Bob Kasten, a former Republican senator from Wisconsin who has traveled extensively in Egypt and was scheduled to be there this week in his role as a trustee at American University in Cairo, said that strong Republican voices had been lacking in the Egypt discussion.

An effort to show unity, he said, may have sent the impression that Republicans think the president has handled the situation flawlessly.

?The major issues of the day among most Americans are the economic issues, and the Republican Congress wants to keep the focus on those issues, but foreign policy is so important,? said Mr. Kasten, who served on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

?The administration and the president are trying to be too cute and trying to have it all ways,? he said. ?They are going to end up with all sides being disappointed with them.?

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