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TransMedics to Participate in the 43rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
In a significant legal battle, the lawsuit between Arm Holdings and Qualcomm ended in a mistrial. The jury ruled in Qualcomm's favor on a critical licensing issue involving its central processor chips, resulting in a rise in Qualcomm's shares and a decline in Arm's stock. The Delaware federal court case could face a retrial, as Judge Maryellen Noreika encouraged both parties towards mediation, noting neither side secured a definitive victory. Deliberations lasted over nine hours but failed to produce a unanimous verdict on claims that Nuvia, a startup acquired by Qualcomm for $1.4 billion, violated its Arm license. The jury did, however, find Qualcomm's use of Nuvia technology in its chips to be properly licensed under Qualcomm's agreement with Arm, enabling further sales in the PC market. Qualcomm celebrated the decision, while Arm has yet to comment. Analysts expressed reduced concern over Qualcomm's future without Nuvia's technology. (With inputs from agencies.)
MALAGA, Spain (AP) — No. 1-ranked Jannik Sinner won matches in singles and doubles to lead defending champion Italy to a 2-1 comeback victory over Argentina on Thursday, earning a return trip to the Davis Cup semifinals. “I’m here trying to do the best I can in the singles,” Sinner said. “If they put me on the court in doubles, I’ll also try my best.” On Saturday, Italy will face Australia in a rematch of last year's final, but this time it will only be for a chance to play for the championship. Australia eliminated the U.S. 2-1 earlier Thursday to reach the final four at the team competition for the third consecutive year. The other semifinal, to be contested Friday, is the Netherlands against Germany. The Dutch got past Rafael Nadal and Spain in the quarterfinals earlier in the week, sending the 22-time Grand Slam champion into retirement. Italy fell behind 1-0 in the quarterfinals when Argentina’s Francisco Cerúndolo defeated Lorenzo Musetti 6-4, 6-1 on an indoor hard court at the Palacio de Deportes Jose Maria Martina Carpena in southern Spain. But then in stepped Sinner, whose season already includes two Grand Slam trophies — at the Australian Open and U.S. Open — plus the title at the ATP Finals last weekend in Turin, Italy. First he overwhelmed Sebastián Báez 6-2, 6-1. Then Sinner teamed with 2021 Wimbledon runner-up Matteo Berrettini in the deciding doubles match to win 6-4, 7-5 against Andres Molteni and Maximo Gonzalez. “He carried me today,” Sinner said about Berrettini. After arriving late to Malaga from Turin, Sinner did not get a chance to practice on the Davis Cup competition court before taking on Báez and stretching his streak to 22 sets won in a row. “In three minutes, he was perfectly comfortable on court,” Italy captain Filippo Volandri said. “He’s a special one.” Volandri swapped out his original doubles team, Simone Bolelli and Andrea Vavassori, for Sinner and Berrettini, and the change paid dividends. Australia, the Davis Cup runner-up the last two years, advanced when Matt Ebden and Jordan Thompson beat the surprise, last-minute American pairing of Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul 6-4, 6-4 in that quarterfinal's deciding doubles match. The Shelton-Paul substitution for Paris Olympics silver medalists Austin Krajicek and Rajeev Ram was announced about 15 minutes before the doubles match began. Ebden and John Peers beat Krajicek and Ram in the Summer Games final in August. The Australians broke once in each set of the doubles. In the second, they stole one of Shelton’s service games on the fourth break opportunity when Ebden’s overhead smash made it 5-4. Thompson then served out the victory, closing it with a service winner before chest-bumping Ebden. The 21st-ranked Shelton made his Davis Cup debut earlier Thursday in singles against 77th-ranked Thanasi Kokkinakis, who emerged from a tight-as-can-be tiebreaker by saving four match points and eventually converting his seventh to win 6-1, 4-6, 7-6 (14). No. 4 Taylor Fritz , the U.S. Open runner-up, then pulled the Americans even with a far more straightforward victory over No. 9 Alex de Minaur , 6-3, 6-4. When their match finally ended, on a backhand by Shelton that landed long, Kokkinakis dropped onto his back and pounded his chest. After he rose, he threw a ball into the stands, then walked over to Australia’s sideline, spiked his racket and yelled, before hugging captain Lleyton Hewitt. “I don’t know if I’ve been that pumped up in my life. I wanted that for my team,” said Kokkinakis, who won the 2022 Australian Open men’s doubles title with Nick Kyrgios. “It could have gone either way, but I kept my nerve.” AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennisThe law of supply and demand has always made it tough to get a table at a popular restaurant – but as Scarsdale foodie Mark Hauser tells us, “the Manhattan hotspots now that you really want to get a reservation – like Atomix – it’s really hard unless you know somebody.” It turns out it’s not just foodies trying to score a restaurant reservation— it’s also “bots”. Amy Zhou, is the executive director of operations at Gracious Hospitality Management, which runs COTE Korean Steakhouse and COQODAQ. Zhou noticed an uptick in no-shows over the last two years, and discovered “bad actors would program bots that had the ability to understand when my reservations systems were going to release every single reservation online and they would take every single one of them.” The owner of Moscato, in Scarsdale, points out that unsold reservations leave eateries holding the bag. Mario Fava tells us, “especially having a small restaurant, if you don’t fill a table, that hurts the bottom line at the end of the day.” In the last two years, some restaurants began noticing a huge jump in no-shows... from the industry’s typical five to 10 percent...to 20 and even 25 percent. Hot spots like COTE Korean Steakhouse offer four hundred reservations a night. “All of a sudden, one hundred covers don’t show up, that’s— on any given night— three servers, bartender, three server assistants,” Zhou said. “Food runners. That’s up to ten to twelve staff who are not making the income they were expecting to make for an evening. It’s really damaging.” A new state law in New York aims to enforce rules like the ones against ticket scalping — making it illegal for third-party reservation services to make unauthorized reservations. “We’re putting an end to the predatory black market for restaurant reservations — protecting consumers and businesses, and giving everyone a chance to get a seat at the dinner table,” Governor Kathy Hochul said. “New York is home to some of the best restaurants in the world, and whether you’re returning to your favorite local spot or trying out the latest in fine dining, you deserve a fair system.” Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance, believes that with this measure, “at least government can go after them, issue penalties and mitigate the impact.” Keep in mind, this action is not about companies like Open Table and Resy. Instead, it focuses on third-party businesses that don’t have an authorized business relationship with the restaurant. With this new law signed Thursday, Rigie believes “maybe the humans will have a little bit of an upper hand getting the reservation because they’re not competing with technology.” At Moscato restaurant, regular patron Mike Wallace, who’s from Southport CT, says the key to scoring a reservation at a popular spot is patience. “I think if you’re persistent, it helps,” Wallace said.
2025 Travel & Tourism Seminar to be held in Plymouth this FebruaryBIG TEN ROUNDUP
New studies led by researchers at the University of Central Florida offer for the first time a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs. The findings, published today in Nature Astronomy, reveal the distribution of ices in the early solar system and how TNOs evolve when they travel inward into the region of the giant planets between Jupiter and Saturn, becoming centaurs. TNOs are small bodies, or ‘planetesimals,’ orbiting the sun beyond Pluto. They never accreted into planets, and serve as pristine time capsules, preserving crucial evidence of the molecular processes and planetary migrations that shaped the solar system billions of years ago. These solar system objects are like icy asteroids and have orbits comparable to or larger than Neptune’s orbit. Prior to the new UCF-led study, TNOs were known to be a diverse population based on their orbital properties and surface colors, but the molecular composition of these objects remained poorly understood. For decades, this lack of detailed knowledge hindered interpretation of their color and dynamical diversity. Now, the new results unlock the long-standing question of the interpretation of color diversity by providing compositional information. “With this new research, a more-complete picture of the diversity is presented and the pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together,” says Noemí Pinilla-Alonso, the study’s lead author. “For the very first time, we have identified the specific molecules responsible for the remarkable diversity of spectra, colors and albedo observed in trans-Neptunian objects,” Pinilla-Alonso says. “These molecules — like water ice, carbon dioxide, methanol and complex organics — give us a direct connection between the spectral features of TNOs and their chemical compositions.” Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the researchers found that TNOs can be categorized into three distinct compositional groups, shaped by ice retention lines that existed in the era when the solar system formed billions of years ago. These lines are identified as regions where temperatures were cold enough for specific ices to form and survive within the protoplanetary disk. These regions, defined by their distance from the sun, mark key points in the early solar system’s temperature gradient and offer a direct link between the formation conditions of planetesimals and their present-day compositions. Rosario Brunetto, the paper’s second author and a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique researcher at the Institute d’Astrophysique Spatiale (Université Paris-Saclay), says the results are the first clear connection between formation of planetesimals in the protoplanetary disk and their later evolution. The work sheds light on how today’s observed spectral and dynamical distributions emerged in a planetary system that’s shaped by complex dynamical evolution, he says. “The compositional groups of TNOs are not evenly distributed among objects with similar orbits,” Brunetto says. “For instance, cold classicals, which formed in the outermost regions of the protoplanetary disk, belong exclusively to a class dominated by methanol and complex organics. In contrast, TNOs on orbits linked to the Oort cloud, which originated closer to the giant planets, are all part of the spectral group characterized by water ice and silicates.” Brittany Harvison, a UCF physics doctoral student who worked on the project while studying under Pinilla-Alonso, says the three groups defined by their surface compositions exhibit qualities hinting at the protoplanetary disk’s compositional structure. “This supports our understanding of the available material that helped form outer solar system bodies such as the gas giants and their moons or Pluto and the other inhabitants of the trans-Neptunian region,” she says. In a complementary study of centaurs published in the same volume of Nature Astronomy, the researchers found unique spectral signatures, different from TNOs, that reveal the presence of dusty regolith mantles on their surfaces. This finding about centaurs, which are TNOs that have shifted their orbits into the region of the giant planets after a close gravitational encounter with Neptune, helps illuminate how TNOs become centaurs as they warm up when getting closer to the sun and sometimes develop comet-like tails. Their work revealed that all observed centaur surfaces showed special characteristics when compared with the surfaces of TNOs, suggesting modifications occurred as a consequence of their journey into the inner solar system. Among the three classes of TNO surface types, two — Bowl and Cliff — were observed in the centaur population, both of which are poor in volatile ices, Pinilla-Alonso says. However, in centaurs, these surfaces show a distinguishing feature: they are covered by a layer of dusty regolith intermixed with the ice, she says. “Intriguingly, we identify a new surface class, nonexistent among TNOs, resembling ice poor surfaces in the inner solar system, cometary nuclei and active asteroids,” she says. Javier Licandro, senior researcher at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC, Tenerife, Spain) and lead author of the centaur’s work says the spectral diversity observed in centaurs is broader than expected, suggesting that existing models of their thermal and chemical evolution may need refinement. For instance, the variety of organic signatures and the degree of irradiation effects observed were not fully anticipated, Licandro says. “The diversity detected in the centaurs populations in terms of water, dust, and complex organics suggests varied origins in the TNO population and different evolutionary stages, highlighting that centaurs are not a homogenous group but rather dynamic and transitional objects” Licandro says. “The effects of thermal evolution observed in the surface composition of centaurs are key to establishing the relationship between TNOs and other small bodies populations, such as the irregular satellites of the giant planets and their Trojan asteroids.” Study co-author Charles Schambeau, a planetary scientist with UCF’s Florida Space Institute (FSI) who specializes in studying centaurs and comets, emphasized the importance of the observations and that some centaurs can be classified into the same categories as the DiSCo-observed TNOs. “This is pretty profound because when a TNO transitions into a centaur, it experiences a warmer environment where surface ices and materials are changed,” Schambeau says. “Apparently, though, in some cases the surface changes are minimal, allowing individual centaurs to be linked to their parent TNO population. The TNO versus centaur spectral types are different, but similar enough to be linked.” How the Research Was Performed The studies are part of the Discovering the Surface Composition of the trans-Neptunian Objects, (DiSCo) project, led by Pinilla-Alonso, to uncover the molecular composition of TNOs. Pinilla-Alonso is now a distinguished professor with the Institute of Space Science and Technology in Asturias at the Universidad de Oviedo and performed the work as a planetary scientist with FSI. For the studies, the researchers used the JWST, launched almost three years ago, that provided unprecedented views of the molecular diversity of the surfaces of the TNOs and centaurs through near-infrared observations, overcoming the limitations of terrestrial observations and other available instruments. For the TNOs study, the researchers measured the spectra of 54 TNOs using the JWST, capturing detailed light patterns of these objects. By analyzing these high-sensitivity spectra, the researchers could identify specific molecules on their surface. Using clustering techniques, the TNOs were categorized into three distinct groups based on their surface compositions. The groups were nicknamed “Bowl,” “Double-dip” and “Cliff” due to the shapes of their light absorption patterns. They found that: Bowl-type TNOs made up 25% of the sample and were characterized by strong water ice absorptions and a dusty surface. They showed clear signs of crystalline water ice and had low reflectivity, indicating the presence of dark, refractory materials. Double-dip TNOs accounted for 43% of the sample and showed strong carbon dioxide (CO2) bands and some signs of complex organics. Cliff-type TNOs made up 32% of the sample and had strong signs of complex organics, methanol, and nitrogen-bearing molecules, and were the reddest in color. For the centaurs study, the researchers observed and analyzed the reflectance spectra of five centaurs (52872 Okyrhoe, 3253226 Thereus, 136204, 250112 and 310071). This allowed them to identify the surface compositions of the centaurs, revealing considerable diversity among the observed sample. They found that Thereus and 2003 WL7 belong to the Bowl-type, while 2002 KY14 belongs to the Cliff-type. The remaining two centaurs, Okyrhoe and 2010 KR59, did not fit into any existing spectral classes and were categorized as “Shallow-type” due to their unique spectra. This newly defined group is characterized by a high concentration of primitive, comet-like dust and little to no volatile ices. Previous Research and Next Steps Pinilla-Alonso says that previous DiSCo research revealed the presence of carbon oxides widespread on the surfaces of TNOs, which was a significant discovery. “Now, we build on that finding by offering a more comprehensive understanding of TNO surfaces” she says. “One of the big realizations is that water ice, previously thought to be the most abundant surface ice, is not as prevalent as we once assumed. Instead, carbon dioxide (CO2) — a gas at Earth’s temperature — and other carbon oxides, such as the super volatile carbon monoxide (CO), are found in a larger number of bodies.” The new study’s findings are only the beginning, Harvison says. “Now that we have general information about the identified compositional groups, we have much more to explore and discover,” she says. “As a community, we can start exploring the specifics of what produced the groups as we see them today.” The research was supported by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Astrobiology, Astrochemistry,BEIJING , Nov. 23, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- On November 22, 2024 , the " Global Gen Z Views on Beijing " event organized by China Daily New Media Center and 21st Century Media and Education officially launched. The event will spotlight three key themes: Beijing's cultural legacy, technological innovation, and environmental conservation. During the event, over 20 international influencers will visit notable sites including the Capital Museum and the Zhoukoudian Site Museum to explore the Beijing's rich history. They will also visit Beijing's leading tech enterprises and innovation hubs to experience the city's technological advancements. Additionally, the influencers will visit iconic locations such as the Yanqing Ecological Civilization Exhibition and the Beijing Wild Duck Lake National Wetland Park, gaining a firsthand perspective on the integration of environmental conservation and industrial development in the city. Through dynamic and youthful storytelling, the event aims to showcase Beijing's rich cultural heritage and its achievements in sustainable, high-quality development to audiences worldwide. During the first day of the event, Veronica, an Italian exchange student at Tsinghua University, expressed her excitement, saying, "I am delighted to be part of this event. My deep interest in Chinese culture brought me to China for my studies, and I have gained a lot from this experience." This event serves not only as a cultural exploration but also as a key platform for sharing Beijing's historical and modern development with audiences worldwide. Through the influencers' firsthand experiences, Beijing's rich cultural heritage and contemporary achievements will be vividly showcased to worldwide audiences. This event offers an international stage for Beijing to highlight its unique appeal, while promoting cultural exchange and fostering global understanding. View original content to download multimedia: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-gen-z-views-on-beijing-a-journey-through-the-citys-culture-innovation-and-ecology-302314744.html SOURCE China Daily
