NEW YORK – Apple Inc. shares hit an all-time high Thursday after a published report suggested the intensely scrutinized yet secretive company may be getting ready for a major product announcement.
Citing unnamed people familiar with the preparations, the Financial Times reported on its Web site Wednesday that Apple has rented space for several days in late January at an arts center in San Francisco.
The company is famed for its highly staged launches. CEO Steve Jobs has used past events to introduce groundbreaking — and lucrative — gadgets such as the iPod and the iPhone.
Although Apple has not acknowledged working on a tablet computer — the company is notorious for keeping upcoming product plans closely guarded — analysts expect the company’s next blockbuster to be something of a cross between a laptop and an iPod Touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the calling features.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request Thursday for comment on the FT report.

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CASSELTON, N.D. – Boomer may be a buster: Measuring 3 feet tall at the shoulders and 7 feet long from nose to destructive wagging tail, he might be the world’s tallest living dog. Owner Caryn Weber says her 3-year-old Landseer Newfoundland keeps all four paws on the floor when he drinks from the kitchen faucet in her family’s eastern North Dakotafarm house.

Boomer stares into car windows eye to eye with drivers. A 20-pound bag of dry dog food lasts the 180-pound canine a couple of weeks.

Weber says her furry black and white dog "comes into the house and his tail is so high everything gets knocked around."

Weber plans to send Boomer’s measurements to Guinness World Records. The previous record holder was a nearly 4-foot-tall Great Dane that died this summer.

CANTON, Ohio – A teacher from Ohio has won top honors in a pumpkin-growing contest with a 1,725-pound behemoth that could land worldwide bragging rights.
Christy Harp of Jackson Township near Canton took first place at the Ohio Valley Giant Pumpkin Growers annual weigh-off Saturday in Canfield. She won $2,500 and could claim the world title.
Contest organizers say the entry topped the 1,689-pound record-holder grown in 2007 by Joe Jutras of North Scituate, R.I.
The seeds from Harp’s winning pumpkin will be dried and given to anyone who asks.
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Information from: The Repository, http://www.cantonrep.com

STOCKHOLM – Americans Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas Steitz and Israeli Ada Yonath won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for atom-by-atom mapping of the protein-making factories within cells.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work on ribosomes has been fundamental to the scientific understanding of life and has helped researchers develop antibiotics.
Yonath is the fourth woman to win the Nobel chemistry prize and the first since 1964, when Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin of Britain received the award.
"I’m really, really happy," Yonath said. "I thought it was wonderful when the discovery came. It was a series of discoveries … We still don’t know every, everything, but we progressed a lot."
This year’s three laureates, who will share the 10 million kronor ($1.4 million) award, generated three-dimensional models that show how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes.
"These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering," the academy said in its announcement.
The researchers used a method called X-ray crystallography to pinpoint the positions of the hundreds of thousands of atoms that make up the ribosome.

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LONDON, England (CNN) — Initially derided for its promotion of inane chatter, Twitter has become a valuable news syndication platform, a campaign tool, and was even used by London’s Royal Opera House to commission an opera libretto made up of tweets sent in from around the world.

Now the increasingly popular micro-blogging service — which claims 50 million followers –has received one of life’s most prestigious accolades: a street named after it.

And, of course, money is involved — though not that much. The street, which is now named "@arjanelfassed tweetstreet," is located in Askar, a Palestinian refugee camp in the north of the West Bank.

The street name was bought for $140 by the Dutch-Palestinian owner of a twitter account called "Arjan El Fassed," through a Web site set up to support cultural after-school activities for children in the camp.

Speaking to CNN from Utrecht in The Netherlands, 36-year-old Arjan explained his motive for the unusual homage to social media: "Twitter is a great place to connect people with issues. But it’s also good at bridging cultural gaps. For most people, it’s difficult to identify with life in a refugee camp, but by linking it to a global network that resonates with millions, I was aiming to promote a sense of connectedness."

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STOCKHOLM – Americans Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak won the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering a key mechanism in the genetic operations of cells, an insight that has inspired new lines of research into cancer.

It was the first time two women have been among the winners of the medicine prize.

The trio, working in the late 1970s and 1980s, solved the mystery of how chromosomes, the rod-like structures that carry DNA, protect themselves from degrading when cells divide.

The Nobel citation said the laureates found the solution in the ends of the chromosomes — features called telomeres that are often compared to the plastic tips at the end of shoe laces that keep those laces from unraveling.

Blackburn and Greider discovered the enzyme that builds telomeres — telomerase — and the mechanism by which it adds DNA to the tips of chromosomes to replace genetic material that has eroded away.

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MOSCOW (AFP) – Norwegian telecom firm Telenor and Russia’s Altimo announced on Monday the creation of new a mobile operator, ending a protracted feud over control of a leading Russian mobile operator.
Telenor and Altimo, a unit of a conglomerate controlled by billionaire Mikhail Fridman, will combine their common assets in Vimpelcom and Kyivstar to create a new mobile operator, in a deal that means "resolution of all outstanding disputes" between the two firms, the companies said.
"We have turned a five-year struggle into an exciting venture for the future," Jon Fredrik Baksaas, president and chief executive of Telenor Group, said in the statement.
The merger puts an end to a bitter corporate feud that had for a half a decade festered between Telenor and Alfa Group over control of Vimpelcom, Russia’s second-biggest mobile operator.
Altimo and Telenor have now agreed to suspend all their ongoing legal proceedings and will move to withdraw or settle them before the deal is completed by mid-2010, the companies said.
Baksaas was one of a handful of executives who met with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin over lunch last week, the same day the powerful premier called on foreign investors to commit to Russia.
Analysts welcomed the deal, saying its main motive has been an attempt by the Russian firm and the Nordic company to put their differences behind them.

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PARIS (AFP) – Nicolas Sarkozy’s every move at the climate summit in Denmark will be tracked on Twitter, but the French president won’t be busy typing updates on the micro-blogging website himself, officials said.

“The president won’t use Twitter himself, but we will detail his steps all along the summit and the progress of the negotiations,” said presidential spokesman Franck Louvrier.

The crucial December 7-18 talks in Copenhagen, under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), aim to craft a new international pact for curbing the heat-trapping gases that drive global warming.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The fountain of youth may exist after all, as a study showed that scientists have discovered means to extend the lifespan of mice and primates.
The key to eternal — or at least prolonged — youth lies in genetic manipulation that mimics the health benefits of reducing calorie intake, suggesting that aging and age-related diseases can be treated.
Scientists from the Institute of Healthy Ageing at University College London (UCL) extended the lifespan of mice by up to a fifth and reduced the number of age-related diseases affecting the animals after they genetically manipulated them to block production of the S6 Kinase 1 (S6K1) protein.
Scientists have shown since the 1930s that reducing the calorie intake by 30 percent for rats, mice and — in a more recent finding — primates can extend their lifespan by 40 percent and have health benefits.
By blocking S6K1, which is involved in the body’s response to changes in food intake, similar benefits were obtained without reducing food intake, according to the study published in the US journal Science.
The results corroborated those of other recent studies.
“Blocking the action of the S6K1 protein helps prevent a number of age-related conditions in female mice,” explained UCL professor Dominic Withers, the study’s lead author.

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By Kenneth Corbin (internetnews.com)

Search giant launches ad exchange to simplify connecting ad buyers with Web publishers.

Search leader Google is making its biggest push to date into display advertising, launching on Thursday a hub to connect publishers and advertisers through its DoubleClick division.

The new DoubleClick Ad Exchange promises to streamline the process of connecting buyers and sellers of online display ads, vaulting Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) into more direct competition with online media hubs such as Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) and AOL.

The thrust behind Google’s pitch is that display advertising should be simpler. The DoubleClick ad exchange is designed as a real-time marketplace where prices and placements for display ads are determined through an auction, similar to the way that Google sells search ads through its AdWords bidding system.

“It’s just like a stock exchange,” Google said in a note (available here in PDF format) explaining the new service.

The ad exchange is the most significant product to emerge from Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick in 2007, a move that signaled the search leader’s intent to build out its graphical ad business.

But for some analysts, that process has been slow in coming.

“Although we do not think Google has made much of a mark in the display market even with DoubleClick — and this has been somewhat surprising to us — we think this new ad exchange indicates Google remains serious about and focused on this area,” Standard & Poor’s analyst Scott Kessler wrote in a research note.

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