O.C. shooting suspect identified as college student with no record

Orange County sheriff's officials on Tuesday identified the suspect in series of fatal shootings and carjackings as Ali Syed, a 20-year-old community college student with no criminal record.

Authorities don't have a motive for the shootings, which began with the slaying of a woman at Syed's  south Orange County home, spread north in a series of random and deadly carjackings, and ended with his suicide in the city of Orange.

Syed was described as an unemployed man who was taking a class at Saddleback College. He had no criminal record and was living with his parents on Red Leaf Lane in Ladera Ranch, Amormino said.

PHOTOS: Shootings at multiple locations in O.C.

Deputies were called to their home about 4:45 a.m. after his parents reported a shooting, Amormino said. Responding deputies found a woman dead inside who had been shot multiple times.

The relationship between the woman and Syed was not yet known, Amormino said, although she was not related to the suspect. The woman has not yet been identified.

Family members, including children, were at the home at the time of the shooting, Amormino said, but no other injuries were reported.

MAP: Orange County shootings

Syed fled the area and headed toward Tustin, where Amormino said "multiple incidents" occurred.

The first, authorities said, occurred near Red Hill Avenue and the 5 Freeway, where authorities received a report of a man with a gun about 5:10 a.m. The suspect attempted a carjacking, Tustin police Lt. Paul Garaven said, opened fire and wounded a bystander.

About five minutes later, the suspect stopped the BMW near the 55 Freeway in Santa Ana, officials said.

TIMELINE: Deadliest U.S. mass shootings

Around that time, authorities also received reports about a man shooting at moving vehicles on the 55 Freeway. Officials believe the man fired either while driving or after he stopped and got out of his vehicle. At least three victims have reported minor injuries or damage to their cars, and investigators asked that others who believe they may have been fired upon to contact police.

Shortly after, another shooting and carjacking was reported on Edinger Avenue near the Micro Center computer store in Tustin, Garaven said. One person was killed and another was taken to a hospital.

Co-workers identified the men as plumbers who were working at the under-construction Fairfield Inn on Edinger Avenue.

Officers spotted the suspect in a stolen vehicle, followed him into the city of Orange and initiated a traffic stop near the intersection of East Katella Avenue and North Wanda Road, Garaven said.

The suspect then shot and killed himself, authorities said. A shotgun was recovered, but officials said other weapons might have been involved earlier. 

In Orange, financial planner Kenneth Caplin said he had a clear view of the gruesome drama that unfolded Tuesday on the street outside his office.

Although the street had been blocked, Caplin parked farther away and persuaded an officer to let him walk to his office. He arrived shortly before 7 a.m., about an hour after the shooting.

From a conference room window, Caplin saw the police investigators at work, a white work truck up on a curb, and the suspect lying dead on the ground, with blood streaked across the pavement.

"It's scary.... This just happened right here," Caplin said hours later, as a team in biohazard suits scrubbed away at the street in an afternoon drizzle. "It's ludicrous."

Caplin, 71, said he is a pistol instructor for the NRA. What happened Tuesday only affirmed for him the need to stay armed.

Read More..

Police say NY TV anchor threatened wife with death

A New York City TV anchorman issued a death threat against his wife as he was being arrested on charges of attacking her at their Connecticut home, according to a court document released Tuesday.

New York City police, meanwhile, disclosed that they were called 11 times to the couple's home when they lived in Manhattan. One call resulted in an arrest, but the case was sealed, they said.

In the Connecticut case, a Darien police officer wrote that Rob Morrison, who works for WCBS-TV, "threatened that if he was released from police custody, he would kill his wife."

The document was offered in Superior Court in Stamford, in support of an order of protection against Morrison. Judge Kenneth Povadator ordered Morrison to stay 100 yards away from Ashley Morrison except when they're both at work.

She works for "CBS Moneywatch."

Rob Morrison, 44, was charged Sunday with strangulation, threatening and disorderly conduct. Officers had been called by his mother-in-law to the couple's home in Darien. They said Morrison had been belligerent toward his wife throughout the night and had wrapped his hands around her neck, leaving red marks.

Morrison's lawyer, Robert Skovgaard, did not enter a plea at the arraignment. He said afterward a plea would come "at the appropriate time."

Skovgaard said Monday that the allegations had been exaggerated and on Tuesday he referred to his previous statement.

Outside the courthouse, Morrison said: "I did not choke my wife. I've never raised my hands to my wife."

The NYPD said it was called 11 times between 2004 and 2009 to the couple's home on West 90th Street. In the 10 cases that did not result in an arrest, the calls involved verbal disputes and harassment, with no allegations of physical violence, the police said.

It was not clear if violence was alleged in the case that was sealed. Skovgaard did not immediately return a call about the New York incidents.

Morrison was released Tuesday on the $100,000 bond he posted Sunday. He is due back in court in Stamford on March 26.

Morrison, who has been a combat correspondent and was a reporter and anchor for WNBC-TV, anchors WCBS-TV's news programs "This Morning" and "News at Noon." Ashley Morrison worked for Bloomberg Television before joining "CBS MoneyWatch."

The couple has a young son.

Skovgaard said that because of the order of protection, Morrison "will not be going home tonight."

___

Associated Press writer Colleen Long in New York contributed to this report.

Read More..

DNA Analysis, More Accessible Than Ever, Opens New Doors

Matt Roth for The New York Times

Sam Bosley of Frederick, Md., going shopping with his daughter, Lillian, 13, who has a malformed brain and severe developmental delays, seizures and vision problems. More Photos »

Debra Sukin and her husband were determined to take no chances with her second pregnancy. Their first child, Jacob, who had a serious genetic disorder, did not babble when he was a year old and had severe developmental delays. So the second time around, Ms. Sukin had what was then the most advanced prenatal testing.

The test found no sign of Angelman syndrome, the rare genetic disorder that had struck Jacob. But as months passed, Eli was not crawling or walking or babbling at ages when other babies were.

“Whatever the milestones were, my son was not meeting them,” Ms. Sukin said.

Desperate to find out what is wrong with Eli, now 8, the Sukins, of The Woodlands, Tex., have become pioneers in a new kind of testing that is proving particularly helpful in diagnosing mysterious neurological illnesses in children. Scientists sequence all of a patient’s genes, systematically searching for disease-causing mutations.

A few years ago, this sort of test was so difficult and expensive that it was generally only available to participants in research projects like those sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. But the price has plunged in just a few years from tens of thousands of dollars to around $7,000 to $9,000 for a family. Baylor College of Medicine and a handful of companies are now offering it. Insurers usually pay.

Demand has soared — at Baylor, for example, scientists analyzed 5 to 10 DNA sequences a month when the program started in November 2011. Now they are doing more than 130 analyses a month. At the National Institutes of Health, which handles about 300 cases a year as part of its research program, demand is so great that the program is expected to ultimately take on 800 to 900 a year.

The test is beginning to transform life for patients and families who have often spent years searching for answers. They can now start the grueling process with DNA sequencing, says Dr. Wendy K. Chung, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Columbia University.

“Most people originally thought of using it as a court of last resort,” Dr. Chung said. “Now we can think of it as a first-line test.”

Even if there is no treatment, there is almost always some benefit to diagnosis, geneticists say. It can give patients and their families the certainty of knowing what is wrong and even a prognosis. It can also ease the processing of medical claims, qualifying for special education services, and learning whether subsequent children might be at risk.

“Imagine the people who drive across the whole country looking for that one neurologist who can help, or scrubbing the whole house with Lysol because they think it might be an allergy,” said Richard A. Gibbs, the director of Baylor College of Medicine’s gene sequencing program. “Those kinds of stories are the rule, not the exception.”

Experts caution that gene sequencing is no panacea. It finds a genetic aberration in only about 25 to 30 percent of cases. About 3 percent of patients end up with better management of their disorder. About 1 percent get a treatment and a major benefit.

“People come to us with huge expectations,” said Dr. William A. Gahl, who directs the N.I.H. program. “They think, ‘You will take my DNA and find the causes and give me a treatment.' ”

“We give the impression that we can do these things because we only publish our successes,” Dr. Gahl said, adding that when patients come to him, “we try to make expectations realistic.”

DNA sequencing was not available when Debra and Steven Sukin began trying to find out what was wrong with Eli. When he was 3, they tried microarray analysis, a genetic test that is nowhere near as sensitive as sequencing. It detected no problems.

“My husband and I looked at each other and said, ‘The good news is that everything is fine; the bad news is that everything is not fine,' ” Ms. Sukin said.

In November 2011, when Eli was 6, Ms. Sukin consulted Dr. Arthur L. Beaudet, a medical geneticist at Baylor.

“Is there a protein missing?” she recalled asking him. “Is there something biochemical we could be missing?”

By now, DNA sequencing had come of age. Dr. Beaudet said that Eli was a great candidate, and it turned out that the new procedure held an answer.

A single DNA base was altered in a gene called CASK, resulting in a disorder so rare that there are fewer than 10 cases in all the world’s medical literature.

“It really became definitive for my husband and me,” Ms. Sukin said. “We would need to do lifelong planning for dependent care for the rest of his life.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An article on Tuesday about the use of DNA sequencing to identify rare genetic diseases misstated the name of a medicine taken by two teenagers who have a rare gene mutation. The drug is 5-hydroxytryptophan, not 5-hydroxytryptamine.

Read More..

Google hits a milestone as it quietly grows its market value

SAN FRANCISCO — While Wall Street obsesses over Apple Inc.'s free fall and Facebook Inc.'s face plant, a global Internet giant is quietly growing ever more valuable.

Google Inc.'s stock topped $800 for the first time Tuesday.

The all-time high for Google is largely symbolic — and analysts say the stock could retreat in future trading sessions. But it underscored the dramatic resurgence of the undisputed king of online advertising.

It's also vindication for the search giant that some had predicted would quickly be overshadowed by Facebook's meteoric rise and the spectacular growth of Apple's iPhone and iPad.

"Bottom line: It seems like Google is doing a lot of things right," S&P Capital IQ analyst Scott Kessler said.

That wasn't always the case, especially during the recession. Google's stock plunged to as low as $247.30 at the end of 2008. Even as the economy shook off its doldrums, Google was still hobbled by concerns that it was a slow-moving technology giant that had lost its competitive edge and drive.

But Google has recently emerged as the company to beat. Analysts say it's gaining a big head of steam as it expands into Apple's consumer electronics territory and aims to invent a whole new category of wearable computers with Google glasses, its Internet-connected eyewear.

In sharp contrast, Apple shares have plummeted 35% from their record high of $705.05 in September as investors have grown increasingly worried that the company is losing its edge with consumers and has yet to come up with its next breakthrough product. And since its disastrous initial public stock offering, Facebook has struggled to convince investors it can successfully make the leap to a company that caters to users on mobile devices instead of personal computers.

Wall Street is crediting Google Chief Executive Larry Page's ambitious vision for the rise in the stock and the company's fortunes.

The Google co-founder took back the helm nearly two years ago. Under his leadership, Google is seeing payoffs from its investment in two key areas that are generating even more opportunities to sell ads: the world's most popular video site, YouTube, and the ubiquitous Android mobile software that powers more than 600 million smartphones and tablet computers. And it's testing new technology such as driverless cars.

"It marked a transition point in the way that Google positioned itself and executed," Kessler said.

Page took swift action to streamline decision-making and refocus the company by closing dozens of services. He engineered the $12.5-billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility and pushed for Google to enter social networking with the rollout of Google+.

Now Google is reportedly considering opening up its own retail stores as it makes even more of its own hardware such as smartphones and tablets. The company has already experimented with pop-up stores in airports and mini-stores inside Best Buy stores, taking a page from Apple's playbook.

One of its biggest achievements takes aim at Apple. Google gives away Android, its popular mobile software, to Samsung Electronics Co., HTC Corp. and other mobile device makers that compete with Apple's iPhone and iPad.

Also renewing investors' confidence: Google addressed many of the challenges that had weighed on the stock, such as the specter of a federal government antitrust lawsuit and the effect of the Motorola Mobility acquisition, BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis said.

Now investors are asking a question that once would have been unthinkable: Is Google the next Apple?

Analysts say it's too soon to tell. Google hit a 12-month low of $559.05 in June. It closed up $13.96, or 1.8%, at $806.85 on Tuesday. Based on historical trading patterns, it could easily dip again.

"Google is certainly positioning itself for new growth streams," Gillis said. "That doesn't mean there are not negatives. And that doesn't mean the stock is not going to fall below $800 again."

The U.S. ended its antitrust investigation into Google's search business in January, saying there was no evidence that its business practices harmed consumers. But Google is still trying to settle a European Union probe. Google also continues to face privacy scrutiny in Europe, where it's under fire for the privacy policy it rolled out a year ago that combines user data from all of its services, including Gmail and YouTube.

Google is on the hook if digital video recording company TiVo Inc. wins a patent infringement lawsuit against Motorola Home, which makes TV set-top boxes. As part of its agreement to sell Motorola Home to Arris Group Inc. in December for nearly $2.4 billion, Google agreed to indemnify Arris in the case.

And Google still plays second fiddle to Apple, which is the most valuable U.S. company with a market value of $432 billion. Google is No. 3 with a market value of $266 billion, behind Exxon Mobil Corp.

But analysts say far and away the biggest challenge for Google is the slowdown in its core business of selling ads on personal computers as people's attention shifts to mobile devices, on which ads command lower prices.

Google makes a fraction of the money from mobile ads that it does from online ads. Google is attempting to boost those prices by pushing advertisers to buy mobile ads when they are creating campaigns for personal computers.

"It remains to be seen how advertisers will react to higher prices," Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu said.

Wu initiated coverage of Google with a "neutral" rating this month because of concerns about "mobile monetization."

"With Android, the company is clearly building a very large base of mobile users but like many of its technology peers, the big question is whether it can monetize in a big way, which only Apple and Samsung so far have been able to do," Wu wrote in a research report. "Our key concern is that this mobile transition may be tougher and take longer than consensus thinking."

Page told analysts last month that Google this year will generate more than $8 billion in revenue from mobile ads, apps and video content, compared with about $2.5 billion from mobile ads last year.

"I am not worried about this in terms of our business at all," Page said, referring to the challenge of making money from mobile ads.

jessica.guynn@latimes.com

Read More..

Jerry Buss dies at 80; Lakers owner brought 'Showtime' success to L.A.

Longtime Lakers owner Jerry Buss has died at the age of 80. Last week, it was revealed that he was hospitalized with an undisclosed form of cancer.

When Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in 1979, he wanted to build a championship team. He also wanted to put on a show.

The new owner gave courtside seats to movie stars. He hired pretty women to dance during timeouts. He spent freely on big stars and encouraged a fast-paced, exuberant style of play.

As the Lakers sprinted to one NBA title after another, Buss cut an audacious figure in the stands, an aging playboy in bluejeans, often with a younger woman by his side.

PHOTOS: Jerry Buss through the years

"I really tried to create a Laker image, a distinct identity," he once said. "I think we've been successful. I mean, the Lakers are pretty damn Hollywood."

Buss, 80, died Monday of complications of cancer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Lakers fans will remember Buss for bringing extraordinary success — 10 championships in three-plus decades — but equally important to his legacy was a sense of showmanship that transformed pro basketball from sport to spectacle.

Live discussion at 10:30: The legacy of Jerry Buss

"Jerry Buss helped set the league on the course it is on today," NBA Commissioner David Stern said. "Remember, he showed us it was about 'Showtime,' the notion that an arena can become the focal point for not just basketball, but entertainment. He made it the place to see and be seen."

His teams featured the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal and Dwight Howard. He was also smart enough to hire Hall of Fame-caliber coaches in Pat Riley and Phil Jackson.

"I've worked hard and been lucky," Buss said. "With the combination of the two, I've accomplished everything I ever set out to do."

A Depression-era baby, Jerry Hatten Buss was born in Salt Lake City on Jan. 27, 1933, although some sources cite 1934 as his birth year. His parents, Lydus and Jessie Buss, divorced when he was an infant.

His mother struggled to make ends meet as a waitress in tiny Evanston, Wyo., and Buss remembered standing in food lines in the bitter cold. They moved to Southern California when he was 9, but within a few years she remarried and her second husband took the family back to Wyoming.

His stepfather, Cecil Brown, was, as Buss put it, "very tight-fisted." Brown made his living as a plumber and expected his children (one from a previous marriage, another son and a daughter with Jessie) to help.

TIMELINE: Jerry Buss' path

This work included digging ditches in the cold. Buss preferred being a bellhop at a local hotel and running a mail-order stamp-collecting business that he started at age 13.

Leaving high school a year early, he worked on the railroad, pumping a hand-driven car up and down the line to make repairs. The job lasted just three months.

Until then, Buss had never much liked academics. But he returned to school and, with a science teacher's encouragement, did well enough to earn a science scholarship to the University of Wyoming.

Before graduating with a bachelor's degree in chemistry, when he was 19 he married a coed named JoAnn Mueller and they would eventually have four children: John, Jim, Jeanie and Janie.

The couple moved to Southern California in 1953, when USC gave Buss a scholarship for graduate school. He earned a doctorate in physical chemistry in 1957. The degree brought him great pride — Lakers employees always called him "Dr. Buss."

Read More..

Fergie, Josh Duhamel expecting their 1st child

NEW YORK (AP) — Her hump, her hump, her lovely lady lump: Fergie is pregnant with her first child.

A representative for the Black Eyed Peas singer confirmed the news Monday. Fergie's actor husband Josh Duhamel tweeted about the news with joy, saying: "Fergie and Me and BABY makes three."

The 37-year-old Fergie and 40-year-old Duhamel married in 2009. She joined the Black Eyed Peas when the group released its third album, "Elephunk," in 2003. The foursome is known for its pop-inspired hip-hop tunes like "My Humps," ''I Gotta Feeling" and "Boom Boom Pow."

Fergie launched her solo debut, "The Duchess," to much success in 2006. It featured five Top 5 hits, including "Fergalicious" and "Big Girls Don't Cry."

Duhamel has appeared in the "Transformer" films and most recently in "Safe Haven."

Read More..

Personal Health: Health Effects of Smoking for Women

The title of a recent report on smoking and health might well have paraphrased the popular ad campaign for Virginia Slims, introduced in 1968 by Philip Morris and aimed at young professional women: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Today that slogan should include: “. . . toward a shorter life.” Ten years shorter, in fact.

The new report is one of two rather shocking analyses of the hazards of smoking and the benefits of quitting published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine. The data show that “women who smoke like men die like men who smoke,” Dr. Steven A. Schroeder, a professor of health and health care at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

That was not always the case. Half a century ago, the risk of death from lung cancer among men who smoked was five times higher than that among women smokers. But by the first decade of this century, that risk had equalized: for both men and women who smoked, the risk of death from lung cancer was 25 times greater than for nonsmokers, Dr. Michael J. Thun of the American Cancer Society and his colleagues reported.

Today, women who smoke are even more likely than men who smoke to die of lung cancer. According to a second study in the same journal, women smokers face a 17.8 times greater risk of dying of lung cancer, than women who do not smoke; men who smoke are at 14.6 times greater risk to die of lung cancer than men who don’t. Women who smoke now face a risk of death from lung cancer that is 50 percent higher than the estimates reported in the 1980s, according to Dr. Prabhat Jha of the Center for Global Health Research in Toronto and his colleagues.

After controlling for age, body weight, education level and alcohol use, the new analysis found something else: men and women who continue to smoke die on average more than 10 years sooner than those who never smoked.

Dramatic progress has been made in reducing the prevalence of smoking, which has fallen in the United States from 42 percent of adults in 1965 (the year after the first surgeon general’s report on smoking and health) to 19 percent in 2010. Yet smoking still results in nearly 200,000 deaths a year among people 35 to 69 years old in this country. A quarter of all deaths in this age group would not occur if smokers had the same risk of death as nonsmokers.

The risks are even greater among men 55 to 74 and women 60 to 74. More than two-thirds of all deaths among current smokers in these age groups are related to smoking. Over all, the death rate from all causes combined in these age groups “is now at least three times as high among current smokers as among those who have never smoked,” Dr. Thun’s team found.

While lung cancer is the most infamous hazard linked to smoking, the habit also raises the risk of death from heart disease, stroke, pulmonary disease and other cancers, including breast cancer.

Furthermore, changes in how cigarettes are manufactured may have increased the dangers of smoking. The use of perforated filters, tobacco blends that are less irritating, and paper that is more porous made it easier to inhale smoke and encouraged deeper inhalation to achieve satisfying blood levels of nicotine.

The result of deeper inhalation, Dr. Thun’s report suggests, has been an increased risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or C.O.P.D., and a shift in the kind of lung cancer linked to smoking. Among nonsmokers, the risk of death from C.O.P.D. has declined by 45 percent in men and has remained stable in women, but the death rate has more than doubled among smokers.

But there is good news, too: it’s never too late to reap the benefits of quitting. The younger you are when you stop smoking, the greater your chances of living a long and healthy life, according to the findings of Dr. Jha’s international team.

The team analyzed smoking and smoking-cessation histories of 113,752 women and 88,496 men 25 and older and linked them to causes of deaths in these groups through 2006.

Those who quit smoking by age 34 lived 10 years longer on average than those who continued to smoke, giving them a life expectancy comparable to people who never smoked. Smokers who quit between ages 35 and 44 lived nine years longer, and those who quit between 45 and 54 lived six years longer. Even quitting smoking between ages 55 and 64 resulted in a four-year gain in life expectancy.

The researchers emphasized, however, that the numbers do not mean it is safe to smoke until age 40 and then stop. Former smokers who quit by 40 still experienced a 20 percent greater risk of death than nonsmokers. About one in six former smokers who died before the age of 80 would not have died so young if he or she had never smoked, they reported.

Dr. Schroeder believes we can do a lot better to reduce the prevalence of smoking with the tools currently in hand if government agencies, medical insurers and the public cooperate.

Unlike the races, ribbons and fund-raisers for breast cancer, “there’s no public face for lung cancer, even though it kills more women than breast cancer does,” Dr. Schroeder said in an interview. Lung cancer is stigmatized as a disease people bring on themselves, even though many older victims were hooked on nicotine in the 1940s and 1950s, when little was known about the hazards of smoking and doctors appeared in ads assuring the public it was safe to smoke.

Raising taxes on cigarettes can help. The states with the highest prevalence of smoking have the lowest tax rates on cigarettes, Dr. Schroeder said. Also helpful would be prohibiting smoking in more public places like parks and beaches. Some states have criminalized smoking in cars when children are present.

More “countermarketing” of cigarettes is needed, he said, including antismoking public service ads on television and dramatic health warnings on cigarette packs, as is now done in Australia. But two American courts have ruled that the proposed label warnings infringed on the tobacco industry’s right to free speech.

Health insurers, both private and government, could broaden their coverage of stop-smoking aids and better publicize telephone quit lines, and doctors “should do more to stimulate quit attempts,” Dr. Schroeder said.

As Nicola Roxon, a former Australian health minister, put it, “We are killing people by not acting.”

Read More..

California fishing industry showing signs of rebound

The California fishing industry appears to be on the upswing.

After overfishing and conservation efforts limited the catch for fishermen in recent years, those who ply the seas are now enjoying bigger hauls and raking in more profits, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Some fishermen who were initially skeptical of tighter regulations say they now see the benefit of the curbs, and towns along the Pacific Coast that depend on fishing are enjoying a rebound, the Associated Press reported.

The West Coast groundfish fishery yielded $54 million in 2011, according to federal regulators, compared with a average of $38 million in the preceding five years.

A big part of those new regulations is a quota system known as "catch shares" that caps the number of fish that can be harvested without harming an area. The cap is divided into quotas for individual fishermen or fishing companies, who are allowed to catch their quota any time during the year.

That was a big departure from the previous system, when commercial fishermen were allowed to go fishing between certain dates but generally did not cap the amount they could catch.

ALSO:

Reaction mixed to Obama's bid to hike minimum wage

Texas Gov. Rick Perry tries to woo California businesses

Meat shortage could be triggered by sequestration, White House warns

Follow Shan Li on Twitter @ShanLi

Read More..

New look at Apollo moon rocks reveals signs of 'native' water

Scientists picking up signs of water on the moon's surface typically attribute them to deposits left by comets, asteroids and other heavenly objects. But a new analysis of lunar samples brought back to Earth by Apollo astronauts in the early 1970s indicates that the moon's interior may have been a little damp in its early days.

The findings, published online Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience, support mounting evidence that the moon once contained some "native" water — throwing a wrench into current beliefs about how Earth's companion formed.

Prevailing theories hold that the moon was created when a Mars-sized body crashed into the young Earth and broke off debris that eventually coalesced into a new entity. In the process, much of the water would have evaporated into space, leaving Earth's new satellite quite arid.

PHOTOS: Images of space

"It's thought that the moon's formation involved the materials getting very hot," said Paul Warren, a UCLA cosmochemist who was not involved in the new study. "It's usually assumed that little water would have survived through that."

Indeed, the samples returned by the Apollo missions that visited the lunar highlands seemed to confirm that Earth's cold, rocky companion was bone-dry, said University of Notre Dame geologist Hejiu Hui, who led the new analysis.

But work in the last five years has challenged that notion, as scientists have used more advanced methods to look for increasingly tiny concentrations of water in glass beads that are thought to have been formed by volcanic eruptions in the moon's early days.

Some experts have argued that those glass beads could have been exposed to alien water sources after they had been ejected from the moon's interior. So Hui and his colleagues decided to look at a type of rock called plagioclase, which is thought to have formed in a magma ocean inside the moon. Although the rocks later floated to the surface to form the crust, they contain a chemical time capsule from inside the young moon.

To further rule out any outside source of water, Hui's team looked past the surface of these rocks and into their centers.

After examining the samples under a microscope equipped with a spectrometer, the researchers found that the rocks contained 6 parts per million of water. That’s drier than an Earth desert, but far more than expected to survive in a rock from the moon's once-molten center.

The samples should have been bone-dry, Hui said, but "somehow we still detect this amount of water, so that makes things interesting."

Based on their measurements, the researchers estimated that the early moon's magma ocean could have contained up to 320 parts per million of water. Once that ocean mostly crystallized, the remaining residues could have had as much as 1.4% water. That could explain the measured water content in lunar rocks, Hui said.

The findings could have interesting implications for theories about how the moon came to be, Warren said.

"It's thought that the moon's formation involved the materials getting very hot, and it's usually assumed that little water would have survived through that," he said. If the new study is right, "It opens up quite a mystery as to how the moon came through what we think was a very hot genesis process with this much water."

The findings also have implications for the moon's geological evolution, Warren said. Researchers have reconstructed the history of the moon's crustal formation while assuming there were negligible amounts of water involved. Now scientists may need to reevaluate some of those ideas.

Knowing how much water there is could be handy for future explorers. "Someday, when we put men on the moon in a more permanent way, we might need that water," Warren said.

amina.khan@latimes.com

Read More..

Willis' new 'Die Hard' scores with $25M debut

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Bruce Willis remains a die-hard at the box office.

Willis' action sequel "A Good Day to Die Hard" debuted as the weekend's top draw with a $25 million debut from Friday to Sunday. The 20th Century Fox release raised its domestic total to $33.2 million since opening Thursday for Valentine's Day to get a jump on the long President's Day weekend.

The movie comes 25 years after the original "Die Hard" and six years after "Live Free or Die Hard," the hit that resurrected the franchise centered on Willis' relentless New York City cop John McClane.

The previous weekend's No. 1 movie, Universal's comedy "Identity Thief" starring Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, was a close second with $23.4 million to lift its haul to $70.7 million.

Debuting at No. 3 with $21.4 million was Relativity Media's romance "Safe Haven," starring Julianne Hough and Josh Duhamel in an adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks novel about a woman who flees her abusive husband and takes up with a sensitive widower. Since opening on Valentine's Day, "Safe Haven" has taken in $30.3 million.

The Weinstein Co. animated tale "Escape from Planet Earth" opened at No. 4 with $16.1 million. With a voice cast that includes Brendan Fraser, Jessica Alba, Sarah Jessica Parker and Rob Corddry, the movie follows the adventures of aliens captured by the U.S. military.

Making a weak debut at No. 6 was the Warner Bros. teen fantasy "Beautiful Creatures," which pulled in $7.5 million for the weekend and $10 million since opening Thursday. The movie is based on the first in the best-selling series about a Southern misfit (Alden Ehrenreich) who falls under the spell of a teen witch (Alice Englert).

"A Good Day to Die Hard" did solid business despite bad reviews for the latest installment, which sends Willis' McClane to Moscow in search of his estranged son, an undercover spy who winds up teaming with the old man against Russian bad guys.

The movie's success follows notable flops from two other holdovers of the 1980s action scene, Sylvester Stallone with "Bullet to the Head" and Arnold Schwarzenegger with "The Last Stand."

"There's still life left in the 'Die Hard' franchise. Given the fact that pretty much every other R-rated action movie that's come out this year has completely fallen flat, this is a pretty good showing," said Paul Dergarabedian, an analyst for box-office tracker Hollywood.com. Willis is "one of the old-guard action stars who still has a solid career going, whereas a lot of these aging action heroes, unless they're in an ensemble cast, they're not able to draw audiences the way they used to."

Overall Hollywood business remained slow, with revenues off for the fourth-straight weekend compared to the same period last year. Domestic business from Friday to Sunday totaled $141 million, down 9.4 percent from the same weekend a year ago, when "Safe House" and "The Vow" led the way with about $23 million each.

A bright spot this year has been strong business for top Academy Awards contenders leading up to next Sunday's Oscars. The weekend's top-20 films included eight of the nine best-picture nominees, seven of which have either topped $100 million domestically or are close.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Where available, latest international numbers are included. Final domestic figures will be released Tuesday.

1. "A Good Day to Die Hard," $25 million ($61.5 million international).

2. "Identity Thief," $23.4 million ($180,000 international).

3. "Safe Haven," $21.4 million ($2.6 million international).

4. "Escape from Planet Earth," $16.1 million.

5. "Warm Bodies," $9 million ($4.9 million international).

6. "Beautiful Creatures," $7.5 million ($5.4 million international).

7. "Side Effects," $6.3 million.

8. "Silver Linings Playbook," $6.1 million ($6.5 million international).

9. "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters," $3.5 million ($9.5 million international).

10. "Zero Dark Thirty," $3.1 million ($2.9 million international).

___

Estimated weekend ticket sales at international theaters (excluding the U.S. and Canada) for films distributed overseas by Hollywood studios, according to Rentrak:

1. "A Good Day to Die Hard," $61.5 million.

2. "Django Unchained," $13.7 million.

3. "Wreck-It Ralph," $11.5 million.

4. "Les Miserables," $10 million.

5. "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters," $9.5 million.

6. "Miracle in Cell. No. 7," $8.8 million.

7. "Flight," $7 million.

8. "Lincoln," $6.6 million.

9. "Silver Linings Playbook," $6.5 million.

10. "Jack Reacher," $5.7 million.

___

Universal and Focus are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of Comcast Corp.; Sony, Columbia, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount is owned by Viacom Inc.; Disney, Pixar and Marvel are owned by The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is owned by Filmyard Holdings LLC; 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a group of former creditors including Highland Capital, Anchorage Advisors and Carl Icahn; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC is owned by AMC Networks Inc.; Rogue is owned by Relativity Media LLC.

Read More..