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ROME, May 26 (Xinhua) -- African swine fever, a viral disease deadly to pigs but harmless to human beings, is spreading beyond Russia and the Caucasus region into Europe, the United Nations' food agency said Thursday."African swine fever is fast becoming a global issue," said Juan Lubroth, chief veterinary officer for the Food and Agriculture Organization."It now poses an immediate threat to Europe and beyond. Countries need to be on the alert and to strengthen their preparedness and contingency plans," he said.The disease, for which there is currently no vaccine, was introduced into Georgia from southern Africa late in 2006. It entered through the Black Sea port of Poti, where garbage from a ship was taken to a dump where pigs came to feed, the FAO said.Strategies to tackle African swine fever include quarantine, on-farm security and other measures aimed at minimizing the risk of introduction and establishing of the disease.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 6 (Xinhua) -- Bud Tribble, Apple's vice president of software technology, will testify at the Congressional hearings on mobile privacy next week, according to the witness list released on Friday.Tribble will represent Apple at the hearings of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. The hearings, entitled "Protecting Mobile Privacy: Your Smartphones, Tablets, Cell Phones and Your Privacy," is scheduled to take place next Tuesday in the wake of an iPhone location database controversy.Tribble is one of the industry's top experts in software design and object-oriented programming, known for helping to design the Mac OS and user interface. He is considered as the right-hand man of Apple CEO Steve Jobs and has been with Jobs since they developed the original Macintosh. When Jobs was forced to resign from Apple in 1985, Tribble followed Jobs and co-founded another computer company NeXT Computer. He rejoined Apple and Jobs in 2002.At the upcoming Congressional hearing, Tribble will be joined by Alan Davidson, Google's director of public policy for the Americas.Apple has been under heavy fire after it was alleged last month that its iphones and other smart phones had been collecting customers' location information. In the wake of the controversy, U. S. senator Al Franken, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, scheduled the mobile privacy hearing and asked representatives from Apple and Google to testify.Apple has denied the alleged practice and released software updates to make iPhone store less location information to quell public concerns over privacy.

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Those childhood music lessons could pay off decades later -- even for those who no longer play an instrument -- by keeping the mind sharper as people age, according to a preliminary study published by the American Psychological Association (APA).The study recruited 70 healthy adults age 60 to 83 who were divided into groups based on their levels of musical experience. The musicians performed better on several cognitive tests than individuals who had never studied an instrument or learned how to read music, according to the research findings published Wednesday online in the APA journal Neuropsychology."Musical activity throughout life may serve as a challenging cognitive exercise, making your brain fitter and more capable of accommodating the challenges of aging," said lead researcher Brenda Hanna-Pladdy, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center. "Since studying an instrument requires years of practice and learning, it may create alternate connections in the brain that could compensate for cognitive declines as we get older."The three groups of study participants included individuals with no musical training; with one to nine years of musical study; or with at least 10 years of musical training. All of the participants had similar levels of education and fitness and didn' t show any evidence of Alzheimer's disease.All of the musicians were amateurs who began playing an instrument at about 10 years of age. More than half played the piano while approximately a quarter had studied woodwind instruments such as the flute or clarinet. Smaller numbers performed with stringed instruments, percussion or brass instruments.The high-level musicians who had studied the longest performed the best on the cognitive tests, followed by the low-level musicians and non-musicians, revealing a trend relating to years of musical practice. The high-level musicians had statistically significant higher scores than the non-musicians on cognitive tests relating to visuospatial memory, naming objects and cognitive flexibility, or the brain's ability to adapt to new information.The brain functions measured by the tests typically decline as the body ages and more dramatically deteriorate in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. The results "suggest a strong predictive effect of high musical activity throughout the lifespan on preserved cognitive functioning in advanced age," the study stated.Half of the high-level musicians still played an instrument at the time of the study, but they didn't perform better on the cognitive tests than the other advanced musicians who had stopped playing years earlier. This suggests that the duration of musical study was more important than whether musicians continued playing at an advanced age, Hanna-Pladdy says."Based on previous research and our study results, we believe that both the years of musical participation and the age of acquisition are critical," Hanna-Pladdy says. "There are crucial periods in brain plasticity that enhance learning, which may make it easier to learn a musical instrument before a certain age and thus may have a larger impact on brain development."The preliminary study was correlational, meaning that the higher cognitive performance of the musicians couldn't be conclusively linked to their years of musical study. More research is needed to explore that possible link.

WASHINGTON, April 4 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on Monday that following discussions among the International Space Station partners on Sunday, it is delaying the launch of space shuttle Endeavour's STS- 134 mission to April 29 from April 19.The new launch time is set for 3:47 p.m. EDT (1947 GMT) on Friday, April 29."The delay removes a scheduling conflict with a Russian Progress supply vehicle scheduled to launch April 27 and arrive at the station April 29," NASA said in a statement.NASA managers will hold a Flight Readiness Review on Tuesday, April 19, to assess the team's readiness to support launch. An official launch date will be selected at the conclusion of the meeting.Endeavour will deliver to the space station a 2-billion-dollar, multinational particle detector known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.

WASHINGTON, April 6 (Xinhua) -- U.S. researchers have discovered two genes in which variation affects intake of caffeine, the most widely consumed stimulant in the world, according to a report described Wednesday in the open-access journal PLoS Genetics.A team of investigators from the National Cancer Institute, Harvard School of Public Health, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill examined genetic variation across the entire genome of more than 47,000 individuals from the U.S.They found the genes -- CYP1A2, which has previously been implicated in the metabolism of caffeine, and AHR, involved in the regulation of CYP1A2, played roles in regulating intake of caffeine. Individuals with the highest-consumption genotype for either gene consumed 40 mg more caffeine than those with the lowest-consumption genotype, equivalent to the amount of one-third cup of caffeinated coffee, or one can of cola.Caffeine is implicated in numerous physiological and medical conditions; it affects sleep patterns, energy levels, mood, and mental and physical performance. The identification of genes that have an impact on daily consumption offers opportunities to better understand these conditions. Further exploration of the identified genetic variants may provide insight into the speed of caffeine metabolism, how long caffeine circulates in the blood, or how strong the physiological effects of consuming a given amount of caffeine are.

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