MOSCOW (Reuters) - Up-and-coming artists competing for Russia's top contemporary art prize kicked off a marathon of exhibits in the Russian capital, which hosts the fourth Moscow Biennale.

A studio strewn with musty books, pages rustling in an artificial breeze; a multicolored play-dough cube squeezed into a cage; and a sphere made out of hundreds of plastic bags were among the 40 art works contesting the prestigious Kadinsky prize.

Named after abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1904), the award hands out cash-prizes of up to $55,100 to modern artists featured at Moscow's Central House of Artists.

"This exhibit cuts across Russia's contemporary art and art forms of today," said Shalva Breus, who founded the award in 2007.

Breus hailed an increase in the number of younger participants and avant-guard ideas alongside a steady decline in Soviet symbolism in Russian art.

"If three years ago, artists widely addressed imperial symbolism, be it of the Russian empire or the Soviet empire, there is no more of that today," he told Reuters at the opening. "There are many more abstract installations."

The fading references to Soviet symbolism in contemporary art highlights that award nominees are getting younger each year, with today's art students born at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The trend may also be market-driven, as younger collectors emerge in Russia, demanding art that speaks to post-Communist era, participants said.

"The buyers of Russian modern art are mostly Russians, and the new emerging trend is that there are a lot more younger collectors nowadays: The so-called 'Progressive Youth'," said Mikhail Molochnikov, a Russian artist working in Moscow, Berlin and Zurich galleries.

Globalization is also erasing the focus on local politics and history, experts said. Nevertheless, a few artists waxed nostalgic for Soviet times and one work -- "First Grade" -- depicted the legs of schoolchildren in traditional Soviet gear.

While themes are changing, Russian contemporary artists lagged behind their Western peers in the use of innovative materials, Breus said.

"We are trying to catch up with the West and we are copying European artists but we are definitely still falling behind," he said.

A jury will vote on the winners by the end of the exhibit, which is on until October 7. There are three categories in which to win: "Project of the Year," "Best Young Artist," and "Media-art Project of the Year."

The fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art opens on Thursday, lighting up galleries across the city until November.

($1 = 0.725 Euros)

(Reporting By Nastassia Astrasheuskaya; editing by Alissa de Carbonnel and Paul Casciato)

GENEVA (AP) — A startling find at one of the world's foremost laboratories that a subatomic particle seemed to move faster than the speed of light has scientists around the world rethinking Albert Einstein and one of the foundations of physics.

Now they are planning to put the finding to further high-speed tests to see if a revolutionary shift in explaining the workings of the universe is needed — or if the European scientists made a mistake.

Researchers at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva, who announced the discovery Thursday are still somewhat surprised themselves and planned to detail their findings on Friday.

If these results are confirmed, they won't change at all the way we live or the way the universe behaves. After all, these particles have presumably been speed demons for billions of years. But the finding will fundamentally change our understanding of how the world works, physicists said.

Only two labs elsewhere in the world can try to replicate the results. One is Fermilab outside Chicago and the other is a Japanese lab put on hold by the March tsunami and earthquake. Fermilab officials met Thursday about verifying the European study and said their particle beam is already up and running. The only trouble is that their measuring systems aren't nearly as precise as the Europeans' and won't be upgraded for a while, said Fermilab scientist Rob Plunkett.

"This thing is so important many of the normal scientific rivalries fall by the wayside," said Plunkett, a spokesman for the Fermilab team's experiments. "Everybody is going to be looking at every piece of information."

Plunkett said he is keeping an open mind on whether Einstein's theories need an update, but he added: "It's dangerous to lay odds against Einstein. Einstein has been tested repeatedly over and over again."

Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity — the one made famous by the equation E equals mc2. The speed of light — 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) — has long been considered a cosmic speed limit.

"We'd be thrilled if it's right because we love something that shakes the foundation of what we believe," said famed Columbia University physicist Brian Greene. "That's what we live for."

The claim is being greeted with skepticism inside and outside the European lab.

"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN.

CERN provided the particle accelerator to send neutrinos on a breakneck 454-mile (730-kilometer) trip underground from Geneva to Italy. France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research collaborated with Italy's Ran Sass National Laboratory for the experiment, which has no connection to the atomic-smashing Large Hadron Collider, which is also located at CERN.

Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that "they are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail."

That will be necessary, because Einstein's special relativity theory underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now." And part of that theory is that nothing is faster than the speed of light.

CERN reported that a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant.

Given the enormous implications of the find, they spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there were no flaws in the experiment.

A team at Fermilab had similar faster-than-light results in 2007. But that experiment had such a large margin of error that it undercut its scientific significance.

If anything is going to throw a cosmic twist into Einstein's theories, it's not surprising that it's the strange particles known as neutrinos. These are odd slivers of an atom that have confounded physicists for about 80 years.

The neutrino has almost no mass, it comes in three different "flavors," may have its own antiparticle and even has been seen shifting from one flavor to another while shooting out from the sun, said physicist Phillip Schewe, communications director at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland.

Fermilab team spokeswoman Jenny Thomas, a physics professor at the University College of London, said there must be a "more mundane explanation" for the European findings. She said Fermilab's experience showed how hard it is to measure accurately the distance, time and angles required for such a claim.

Nevertheless, the Fermilab team, which shoots neutrinos from Chicago to Minnesota, will go back to work immediately to try to verify or knock down the new findings, Thomas said.

Drew Baden, chairman of the physics department at the University of Maryland, said it is far more likely that there are measurement errors or some kind of fluke. Tracking neutrinos is very difficult, he said.

"This is ridiculous what they're putting out," Baden said. "Until this is verified by another group, it's flying carpets. It's cool, but..."

So if the neutrinos are pulling this fast one on Einstein, how can it happen?

Stephen Parke, head theoretician at the Fermilab, said there could be a cosmic shortcut through another dimension — physics theory is full of unseen dimensions — that allows the neutrinos to beat the speed of light.

Indiana University theoretical physicist Alan Kostelecky says there may be situations when the background is different in the universe, not perfectly symmetrical as Einstein says. Those changes in background may change both the speed of light and the speed of neutrinos.

But that doesn't mean Einstein's theory is ready for the trash heap, he said.

"I don't think you're going to ever kill Einstein's theory. You can't. It works," Kostelecky said, adding there are just times when an additional explanation is needed.

If the European findings are correct, "this would change the idea of how the universe is put together," Columbia's Greene said.

But he added: "I would bet just about everything I hold dear that this won't hold up to scrutiny."

___

Borenstein reported from Washington.

Article: HERE

DUNEDIN, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand's premier naked rugby team has been exposed.

The Dunedin-based Nude Blacks lost for the first time Saturday, beaten 25-20 by a clothed women's team from Spain.

The Nude Blacks — named for the country's elite All Blacks rugby team — played the exhibition hours ahead of Saturday's World Cup match between Argentina and England at the city's 30,000-seat Otago Stadium.

A more modest crowd of about 1,500 watched the all-male team get outclassed at the less prestigious Kettle Park by the visiting Spanish Conquistadores, who count a pole dancer, a teacher and a student among their number.

The Nude Blacks play an invitational side before every international rugby game in Dunedin.

Article: HERE

EL PASO, Texas (Reuters) - A female tiger has killed her mate at a West Texas zoo, authorities said on Friday, in a rare attack that came after months of simmering jealousy in a feline love triangle.

Three-year-old Malayan tiger Seri killed 6-year-old Wzui at about 4 p.m. on Thursday in an enclosure at El Paso Zoo, zoo spokeswoman Karla Martinez said on Friday,

As soon as the incident was reported, zookeepers closed the tiger exhibit and veterinary staff were called. They examined Wzui, and found he was dead.

"Tragic incidents such as this are not unheard of but we don't consider this common," zoo Director Steve Marshall said. Marshall described the deceased tiger as very down to earth and loving and said it would "be greatly missed."

Malayan tigers are a critically endangered species, with just 500 or so of the animals remaining in the wilds of Thailand and Malaysia, according to the World Wide Fund For Nature.

Both Seri and Wzui were on loan from other zoos as part of the American Zoo Association's Species Survival Plan to aid in their conservation through captive breeding.

Marshall said keepers had not observed any signs of aggression leading up to the attack, and that the two cats had been seen playing affectionately at the exhibit earlier in the day.

However, in June, zoo authorities reported what they called a "tiger love triangle" between Seri, Wzui and a 15-year-old female called Meli, who was transferred to El Paso from a zoo in Fresno, California, in 2001.

"The male tiger Wzui likes both females, but the two females don't like each other," the zoo said in a press release dated June 14. "The girls are jealous of each other," collections Supervisor Griselda Martinez said.

Staff expect that another tiger will be transferred to the El Paso Zoo to replace Wzui for breeding purposes.

(Editing by Tim Gaynor and Cynthia Johnston)

Article: HERE

Second article:

LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists have identified a gene responsible for regulating chronic pain, called HCN2, and say their discovery should help drug researchers in their search for more effective, targeted pain-killing medicines.

Scientists from Cambridge University said that if drugs could be designed to block the protein produced by the gene, they could treat a type of pain known as neuropathic pain, which is linked to nerve damage and often very difficult to control with currently available drugs.

"Individuals suffering from neuropathic pain often have little or no respite because of the lack of effective medications," said Peter McNaughton of Cambridge's pharmacology department, who led the study.

"Our research lays the groundwork for the development of new drugs to treat chronic pain by blocking HCN2."

Pain is an enormous health burden worldwide, estimated to cost more than 200 billion euros ($281 billion) a year in Europe and around $150 billion a year in the United States.

Studies show that around 22 percent of people with chronic pain become depressed and 25 percent go on to lose their jobs. A 2002/03 survey by a group called Pain in Europe estimated that as many as one in five Europeans suffers chronic pain.

Scientists have known about the HCN2 gene, which is found in pain-sensitive nerve endings, for several years, but had not yet fully understood its role in regulating pain.

Because a related gene called HCN4 plays a critical role in controlling electrical activity in the heart, McNaughton's team suspected that HCN2 might have a similar function and regulate electrical activity in pain-sensitive nerves.

For the study, published in the journal Science on Thursday, the researchers engineered the removal of the HCN2 gene from pain-sensitive nerves and then used electrical stimuli on these nerves in lab dishes to find out how the nerves had been changed by the removal of HCN2.

The scientists then studied genetically modified mice in which the HCN2 gene had been deleted. By measuring the speed the mice withdrew from different types of painful stimuli, the scientists were able to show that deleting the HCN2 gene took away neuropathic pain.

They also found that deleting HCN2 appeared to have no effect on normal acute pain -- such as the type of pain caused by accidentally cutting yourself or biting your own tongue -- a factor they said was important since this type of pain acts as a useful warning signal to the body.

"What is exciting about the work on the HCN2 gene is that removing it -- or blocking it pharmacologically -- eliminates neuropathic pain without affecting normal acute pain," McNaughton said in a statement about this work. "This finding could be very valuable clinically because normal pain sensation is essential for avoiding accidental damage."

Neuropathic pain, which is distinguished from inflammatory pain, is seen in patients with diabetes -- a condition which affects an estimated 280 million people around the world -- and as a painful after-effect of shingles and of chemotherapy in cancer patients. It is a also common factor in lower back pain and other chronic painful conditions.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, Editing by Sitaraman Shankar)

Article: HERE