Blake Shelton has admitted that Usher and Shakira bring a different "chemistry" to The Voice than rested coaches Christina Aguilera and Cee Lo Green.

Usher and Shakira are joining Shelton and Adam Levine in the spinning Voice coaches chairs for the spring 2013 cycle as Aguilera and Green focus on musical projects.

WENN / Carsten Windhorst

Shelton has now revealed to Access Hollywood that Voice viewers are in for some major surprises next season.

"The chemistry is definitely different with Shakira and Usher replacing Christina and Cee Lo," he commented. "The show is still really good. It's still entertaining - it's just different personalities."

Shelton also tipped Shakira as his fiercest competition to win The Voice's next cycle.

"I tell ya, Shakira is not joking around about this. She is serious and she wants to win this thing," he quipped. "I don't know if I've seen anybody as committed - out of the six of us that have done this now - as she is to winning this thing."

He added of Usher: "Usher, he just kind of plays the cool card and he's real laid back. He doesn't have to sell himself too much - I mean, the guy found Justin Bieber. That's kind of the coaching/mentor role, right there."

Fellow Voice coach Levine recently revealed that he and Shelton resisted the urge to haze Usher and Shakira during their first day on-set.

The Voice continues its current season on Wednesday (November 7) at 8/7c on NBC.

Link:
'Voice' Blake Shelton: 'Usher, Shakira chemistry is very different'

Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith

ElementsDatabase.com offers new educational tools to help students and newcomers to chemistry to comprehend important concepts, making chemistry less daunting.

Toronto, Ontario (PRWEB) November 06, 2012

Created by the content development team at Art Branch, Inc., the new educational tools aim to add more textual and visual content, enriching the chemistry database published on ElementsDatabase.com. The website offers detailed descriptions of the most well known chemical elements. The addition of free educational tools has made it very popular among Facebook users.

The free educational tools offered by ElementsDatabase.com can help both students and teachers in their journey to knowledge, said John Williams, marketing consultant at Art Branch, Inc.

ElementsDatabase.com features printable periodic tables in PDF format, along with periodic table images and free chemistry and physics images that can help students with their projects and research. Visitors are offered a periodic table quiz with over 300 questions and a chemistry hangman game to test their knowledge of chemical elements from the periodic table.

The new educational tools aim to make the learning process more entertaining and enjoyable. The conceptual and mathematical nature of chemistry is a challenge for many students. Chemistry requires higher order thinking skills such as understanding, analysis, and evaluation. Not only is chemistry abstract, but it requires conceptual and qualitative analysis of phenomena. It is a natural science with real world and theoretical components, which students find hard to grasp. Students have to memorize notation conventions, names and symbols of chemical elements, etc. This is basic knowledge, but many students find memorization frustrating. Moreover, chemistry teachers use a lot of terms and jargon, which is boring for students and doesnt help them to master the subject. Some academic chemists teach the subject without bothering to explain important concepts and terms. The aim of the new educational tools is to help students to memorize names and chemical symbols, understand key concepts and phenomena, and enjoy the process all along.

About ElementsDatabase.com: ElementsDatabase.com is a free educational resource released by Art Branch Inc., offering chemistry tutorials.

About Art Branch: Art Branch, Inc., located in Toronto, Ontario, is the parent company of ElementsDatabase.com and has produced many educational websites targeting worldwide audience. The goal of Art Branch is to provide visitors to company sites with free, practical guides that help students and teachers and make the learning process easier.

Peter Todorov Art Branch Inc. (888) 824-2553 Email Information

Read more here:
Education Tools Help Students to Understand the Grammar and Syntax of Chemistry

Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith

MENLO PARK, Calif., Nov. 6, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (PACB) provider of the PacBio(R)RS High Resolution Genetic Analyzer, today announced the latest enhancements to its DNA sequencing system, the XL release featuring new chemistry and software for extraordinarily long read lengths that average 5,000 bases.

Pacific Biosciences' Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT(R)) sequencing generates reads an order of magnitude longer than other leading DNA sequencing technologies. With the latest advance, the average read length increases 67 percent from 3,000 to 5,000 bases, with some reads as long as 20,000 bases. Long reads are critical for resolving genetic complexity in applications such as the assembly and finishing of genomes, phasing genomic variation over long distances, understanding human nucleotide repeat disorders, and resolving the structure of alternatively spliced transcripts.

The new XL release provides increased read lengths through a combination of chemistry and software. The new chemistry includes a faster polymerase that reads more bases per second. This release also includes the Stage Start feature, which produces longer reads by enabling sequence data collection to begin when the polymerase is activated. Additionally, PacBio has increased the length of time the instrument can record data during the sequencing reaction, also contributing to an increase in read lengths.

"The XL release is an enhancement to our existing C2 chemistry to address applications that require the longest reads, like de novo assembly," said Dr. Jonas Korlach, Chief Scientific Officer of Pacific Biosciences. "A unique characteristic of our SMRT sequencing technology is the ability to tune the experimental design to maximize results for the project's application and goals. Through this flexibility and our continued performance enhancements, our customers can carry out their current research projects more efficiently, and engage in new applications to help resolve very complex genomes and transcriptomes."

The utility of the latest upgrade was demonstrated by scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who were trying to assemble the complex rice genome. The new chemistry produced 9x coverage with long reads -- 50% of the data came from reads 4,800 base pairs or longer. Commenting on the results, Assistant Professor Dr. Mike Schatz at Cold Spring Harbor said, "Adding the long reads from PacBio doubled the contig connectivity over the current state-of-the-art ALLPATHS-LG assembler and mate-pair recommendations."

Dr. Korlach will discuss the latest enhancements to the PacBio RS in a workshop at the American Society for Human Genetics (ASHG) Annual Meeting in San Francisco on November 8 at 12:45 p.m. Also speaking to share their successes using the PacBio RS are customers Dr. Paul Hagerman from UC Davis School of Medicine ("Sequencing the Unsequenceable: Expanded CGG-repeat Alleles of the Fragile X Gene"), Dr. Hagen Tilgner, Stanford University Department of Genetics ("Eukaryotic Transcriptome Analysis Using PacBio"), and Dr. David Witherspoon, University of Utah Department of Human Genetics Sequencing ("Mobile-Element Scanning (ME-Scan) of Active LINE-1 Elements in Humans using Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT) Sequencing").

Attendees at the ASHG Annual Meeting can visit any of the workshop sessions taking place from 12:45-2:15 p.m. and visit the PacBio booth (#610). Those not attending the meeting can register to view recordings of the workshop sessions on the company's website. For more information, please visit http://www.pacb.com.

About Pacific Biosciences

Pacific Biosciences of California, Inc. (PACB) offers the PacBio(R)RS High Resolution Genetic Analyzer to help scientists solve genetically complex problems. Based on its novel Single Molecule, Real-Time (SMRT(R)) technology, the company's products enable: targeted sequencing to more comprehensively characterize genetic variations; de novo genome assembly to more fully identify, annotate and decipher genomic structures; and DNA base modification identification to help characterize epigenetic regulation and DNA damage. By providing access to information that was previously inaccessible, Pacific Biosciences enables scientists to increase their understanding of biological systems.

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Pacific Biosciences Delivers Enhanced DNA Sequencing Chemistry and Software to Help Solve Complex Genetic Problems

Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith

The Food Chemistry and Inorganic Chemistry Sciences are two new key chemistry branches covered by the Sciences Social Network ScienceIndex.com. The users of the website monitor 146 scientific journals publishing in these two branches and submit the most recent and significant articles for inclusion in ScienceIndex.com. While the site currently contains a total of 1,880,000 posts, it features 25,000 articles in these two sections. ScienceIndex.com was established in 1998 to index the very latest news, headlines, references and resources in all fields of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geography, health, mathematics and society.

Mannheim, Germany (PRWEB) November 06, 2012

ScienceIndex.com's Chemistry Sciences Category covers the composition, structure, properties, and reactions of substances. Its seven sections include Biochemistry, Food, Inorganics, Materials, Organics, Physics and Toxicology. Users can receive alerts for newly published content in this category by subscribing to ScienceIndex.com's Chemistry Sciences Category RSS feed.

ScienceIndex.com's Food Chemistry Section covers production of materials of plant or animal origin, that are ingested and assimilated by an organism to produce energy, stimulate growth, and maintain life. It currently contains 16,091 articles derived from 81 scientific journals. The latest articles in this category are also available through a Food Chemistry Section RSS feed. One of the latest additions in this section covers a carotenoid database of commonly eaten Swiss vegetables and their estimated contribution to carotenoid intake. Based on the estimated consumption of the different vegetables in Switzerland, the authors estimate that 3.3 mg -carotene, 2.2 mg lycopene and 1.8 mg lutein are consumed daily from fresh vegetables in Switzerland. Another article in this section measures effects of red pepper powder on microbial communities and metabolites during kimchi fermentation. Results indicate that the addition of red pepper powder into kimchi results in the slowing of the kimchi fermentation process, especially during the early fermentation period and influences the microbial succession and metabolite production during the kimchi fermentation processes.

ScienceIndex.com's Inorganic Chemistry Section covers chemical reactions and properties of all elements in the periodic table and their compounds, except element carbon. It currently contains 8,916 articles derived from 65 scientific journals. The latest articles in this section are also available through a Inorganic Chemistry Section RSS feed. One recently included article in this section covers structure determination of -brass-related composite structures in the NiZn system. The aim of this study was to represent the structure of these phases in a coherent modulated description to make them more readily comparable to the previously reported Pd phases. The authors solved three incommensurately modulated -brass-related composite structures in the NiZn system from X-ray single crystal diffraction data using a 3+1 dimensional super space description. Another article investigates the evolution of morphology and microstructure in electrodeposited nanocrystalline AlMg alloy dendrites. Microstructural examinations revealed that the feather-like and rough globules possessed grain sizes of 42 and 36 nm respectively.

The Sciences Social Network currently contains over 1.88 million posts distributed among its' 75 categories. 81,773 users monitor 13,528 journals publishing within the scope of the site. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at ScienceIndex.com is no more than two days. The site provides an advanced search feature which suggests up to ten closely related articles for a search and every displayed post.

George Maine ScienceIndex.com +49-3-22241-78087 Email Information

More here:
New Food Chemistry and Inorganic Chemistry Sections Published at Sciences Social Network

Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith

It has been a strange thing to see barking and bickering among the tight chemistry of the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Its come up every game so far this season, Darnell Maryberry of the Oklahoman described Sundays incident in a loss to the Hawks.

At the end of the first quarter, Thabo Sefolosha and Russell Westbrook had to be separated from exchanging words as they walked to the bench. It was a show of anger that surprisingly was also seen from the same two as they walked off the court at halftime Friday night.

In other moments Kevin Durant has barked at Serge Ibaka, and Kendrick Perkins and Ibaka have pointed fingers.

Its odd because it wasnt something we saw the past few years as this team made its runs, eventually all the way to the NBA finals. Not that everything was puppy dogs and rainbows around the Thunder, but there was not a lot of public tension.

This isnt just about James Harden being traded, although that certainly is part of it because it was a big change to the chemistry of the team. Harden had grown up with the Thunder. It was a blow to Durant and Westbrook.

But you can add to that change the strain of expectations. Oklahoma City is no longer the young underdogs everyone wants to see succeed they are a team that has been to the NBA finals, a team people expect to return to the biggest NBA dance and win it this time.

A team that expects itself to succeed.

All that has led to some tension, some strain on the family feelings around the team.

But dont expect this to be a long-term concern. Not with Durant and Westbrook in charge there is no doubt whose team this is (and was even before Harden was sent away). That super duo is going to figure it out, the team will get over this bump.

Originally posted here:
PBT: Concerns about Thunder's chemistry

Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith