Biogen Gives Up on Drug for Lou Gehrig’s Disease

A closely watched experimental drug to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease failed to work in a late-stage clinical trial, the drug’s developer, Biogen Idec, said Thursday. The company said it would discontinue further work on the drug.

Biogen said that the drug was not effective in either slowing the loss of muscular function or prolonging the lives of people with the disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S.

There were also no signs that the drug, dexpramipexole, worked in any subgroup of patients, Biogen said.

“As a physician who has treated people with A.L.S., I hoped with all my heart for a different outcome,'’ Dr. Douglas Kerr, director of neurodegeneration clinical research at Biogen, said in a statement.

A.L.S., which attacks the nerves that control muscles, causes gradual paralysis and typically results in death within a few years of diagnosis. There are about 30,000 Americans with the disease.

There is only one drug approved to treat it, Rilutek, made by Sanofi, which doctors say has only modest effectiveness. Many other drugs have failed in clinical trials, in part because scientists do not understand the cause of A.L.S. and therefore do not know how to treat it.

While expectations had not been that high that dexpramipexole would succeed in its phase 3 trial, they were higher than for many previous A.L.S. drugs, given what some doctors viewed as strong results in a smaller, phase 2 trial.

“I’m more excited about this compound than any compound I’ve ever tested in A.L.S.,'’ Dr. Robert Miller, director of A.L.S. research at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, said in April on a call with investors hosted by Deutsche Bank. Patients getting the highest dose had an almost a 50 percent slower decline in muscular function than those receiving a placebo.

Biogen had licensed dexpramipexole from Knopp Biosciences, a privately held company in Pittsburgh. Biogen’s trial included 943 patients in 11 countries. The main measurement of success was a composite that took into account both deaths from the disease and the decline of functionality. Patients in the trial were allowed to take Rilutek.

Dr. Jeffrey D. Rothstein, director of the Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said the results were disappointing but not surprising.

“We really, really need a new drug,'’ Dr. Rothstein, who was not involved in the phase 3 trial, said by e-mail. He said he thought the phase 2 results for dexpramipexole had been only “marginal,'’ so he was not surprised the latest trial did not succeed.

The reaction on Wall Street was somewhat muted because of the modest expectations for the trial to succeed. Biogen’s shares were down about 4 percent.

“We (and most of the Street) had characterized this trial as a high risk trial,'’ Mark Schoenebaum, an analyst at ISI Group, wrote in a research note Thursday.

Other companies are also developing drugs to treat A.L.S. Neuraltus Pharmaceuticals, a privately held company in Palo Alto, Calif., is preparing to enter the final stage of clinical trials for NP001.

The company announced in late October that its phase 2 trial, which involved 136 patients, failed to show a statistically significant benefit compared with a placebo. But the company said that 27 percent of patients getting the high dose of NP001 had no progression of their disease for six months, two and a half times as many as in the placebo group.

Cytokinetics, of South San Francisco, Calif., is in midstage testing of a compound, tirasemtiv, which might make muscles respond more forcefully to nerve signals.

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Enraged Chris Christie attacks Boehner, House GOP over Sandy aid

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie delivered a spirited condemnation of Republican House leadership for its reluctance to vote on a relief bill for Hurricane Sandy.

WASHINGTON – Enraged over Congress' failure to approve disaster relief for victims of Superstorm Sandy, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey unloaded Wednesday on House Speaker John A. Boehner and Republican lawmakers in Washington for putting "palace intrigue" ahead of their official responsibilities.

Washington politicians "will say whatever they have to say to get through the day," Christie said, adding that, as a governor, he had "actual responsibilities" -- "unlike people in Congress."

Christie, a potential 2016 GOP presidential contender, reserved his most blistering words for the Republican House speaker.  He described Boehner, variously, as selfish, duplicitous and gutless for reversing course at the last minute on Tuesday night and refusing to allow a vote on a $60-billion aid package before the current Congress adjourned.

PHOTOS: Scenes from the fiscal cliff

Christie said that as a result of "the speaker’s irresponsible action," there will be further delay in federal disaster aid to New Jersey, New York, Connecticut and other areas hit by the October storm. He pointed out that it had been 66 days since the storm hit and that areas struck by other hurricanes in recent years had received relief packages in far less time. 

However, as outrage continued to pour in from elected officials in the affected area, Boehner agreed to hold a vote Friday to direct needed resources to the National Flood Insurance Program. And on Jan. 15, the first full legislative day of the 113th Congress, the House will consider the remaining supplemental request for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.

But that came after Christie dished out his cold outrage on members of his own party. 

"Shame on you. Shame on Congress," Christie said at a news conference in Trenton, the state capital. "It's absolutely disgraceful, and I have to tell you, this used to be something that was not political. Disaster relief was something you didn't play games with." But "in this current atmosphere, [it's] a potential piece of bait for the political game.  It is why the American people hate Congress."

At another point, he said of Republicans in Congress: "We've got people down there who use the citizens of this country like pawns on a chessboard."

PHOTOS: 2016 presidential possibilities

"My party was responsible for this," Christie said, charging "one set of Republicans was trying to prove something to another set," and that Boehner was trying to "prove something. I hope he accomplished it."

Christie, whose disaster-relief-themed efforts to reach across partisan lines to President Obama in the days leading up to the election angered many Republicans, said he did not think that was a factor in Boehner's decision. 

But the governor, who delivered the keynote address at last summer's Republican National Convention and has helped raise money in recent years for fellow members of the party, did not rule out retaliating against his enemies in Washington.

"We'll see. Primaries are an ugly thing," he said.

[For the Record, 1:46 p.m. PST  Jan. 2: This post has been updated to include the House's new plan to vote on Sandy aid.]

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Why the Zipcar-Avis Deal Means You'll Finally Be Able to Give Up Your Car

While Zipcar investors count their cash from today’s half-billion-dollar acquisition by Avis, the rest of us can start counting the days until we can say good riddance to one of the least rewarding aspects of city life: car ownership.

Zipcar said Tuesday that Avis had agreed to purchase the Cambridge, Mass.-based company for $12.25 per share, or about $500 million. The deal brings Avis the most prominent brand name in what Zipcar describes as the $400 million car-sharing market. The question is, will the added muscle of Avis be enough to take car-sharing mainstream?

Though Americans prize individual car ownership as a birthright, the reality is that owning a car in the big city can be more hassle than help. In cities, insurance costs more. Gas and parking tickets cost more. Traffic stinks. New Yorkers pay more for parking spaces than other people pay in rent. The too-short gaps between San Francisco driveways taunt visitors who want to park at all.

A dozen years ago, Zipcar launched in Boston with the idea that many urban dwellers could get by without owning a car. Instead, we could just rent a car by the hour every now and then when we needed it. In the meantime, Zipcar takes care of insurance, maintenance and all the other headaches that accompany ownership.

While that might sound ideal to those of us who like oil changes about as much as root canals, the promise so far hasn’t panned out.

San Francisco, for example, has dozens of Zipcar pickup locations, many with multiple vehicles. But it’s still not enough to make last-minute car booking easy. You need to plan ahead. And most of the cars are stationed downtown, not located around the city’s farther reaches, where driving is more of a necessity.

For many of us, achieving the dream of not owning a car would necessitate near guaranteed access when we did need one. Zipcar, or a service like it, would have to approximate the “magic rental store” described by Kevin Kelly in his essay “Better Than Owning”:

Why own, when you get the same utility from renting, leasing, licensing, sharing? But more importantly why even possess it? Why take charge of it at all if you have instant, constant, durable, full access to it? If you lived inside of the world’s largest rental store, why would you own anything? If you can borrow anything you needed without possessing it, you gain the same benefits with fewer disadvantages. If this was a magic rental store, where most of the gear was stored “downstairs” in a virtual basement, then whenever you summoned an item or service it would appear at your command.

Reaching this point requires a ubiquity that Zipcar’s 10,000-vehicle fleet, spread out across more than 150 cities worldwide, simply doesn’t provide. In its press release announcing the Avis deal, Zipcar says that its new parent company’s bigger fleet will give it more cars to meet demand and, in the company’s words, “accelerate the revolution we began in personal mobility.”

Maybe seeing its rival take such a leap will goad Enterprise and Hertz into bulking up their own tepid offerings in rent-by-the-hour car-sharing. And maybe services like RelayRides that let individuals rent out their own cars by the hour will start to take off. In that scenario, the number of cars available to drive without having to own them grows. The magic rental store becomes less magical and more real.

The only thing better for the car-averse like myself will be the day that a Google-powered car shows up at my door ready to whisk me away to fulfill some minor errand or even better, transport me to some major party. Not only do I not own it, but neither me — nor anyone else — ever has to drive it at all.

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From “Les Misérables” to “The Hobbit,” holiday movies are getting longer

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Moviegoers rushing out to catch “Django Unchained” or “The Hobbit” over New Year’s should consider packing an overnight bag.

The average length of a holiday movie has been larded up by nearly 10 minutes since 2011, according to a survey of the running times of the top 10 box office films of the final weekend of the year. They ran well over two hours.

Moreover, the top 10 grossing holiday movies of 2012 were nearly 25 minutes longer than they were just two years ago.

Of the five top earners last weekend, only one film, the family flick “Parental Guidance,” clocks in at under two hours. In contrast, three of those movies, “Django Unchained,” “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and “Les Misérables,” eat up roughly 160 minutes of ticket-buyers’ time.

And that group doesn’t even take into account hits like “Skyfall” (143 minutes), “The Avengers” (143 minutes) and “The Dark Knight Rises” (165 minutes) or limited release films such as “Zero Dark Thirty” (160 minutes), all of which boast the kind of languorous pacing usually reserved for a David Lean epic.

The capacious running times are testing moviegoers’ patience, as well as bladders. In the Los Angeles Times Monday, Steven Zeitchik bemoaned the series of false endings in films like “Lincoln” and “Life of Pi.” He argued that several accomplished filmmakers are piling on the climaxes and prolonging the ending credits in a way that undermines the emotional impact of their word.

“Hollywood films are struggling to find the exit,” Zeitchik wrote. “Stories that seem to end, end again, and then end once more. Climactic scenes wind down, then wind up. Movies that appear headed for a satisfying resolution turn away, then try to stumble back.”

Also crying out for a bloodier approach in the editing suite was Variety’s Josh Dickey. The swollen run times aren’t just artistically necessary, he noted – they actually damage a film’s box-office take.

“It turns out that a long runtime causes no positive or negative reaction during a film’s marketing period,” Dickey wrote. “And for really big event movies, viewers sometimes feel a longer movie gave them their money’s worth (call it the TGI Friday’s portion-size effect). But once a film gets playing, social response suggests long length can stall its word-of-mouth momentum, usually emerging as secondary complaint – but a persistent one.”

It’s certainly true that exhibitors favor shorter running times for films, because it allows them to cram in more showings on a given day. Despite Dickey’s fears, however, the expansive lengths of movies like “Lincoln” (145 minutes) and “Les Misérables” (157 minutes) haven’t scared off moviegoers.

Both movies will likely gross more than $ 100 million domestically.

Overall, the domestic box office is poised to shatter records with $ 10.8 billion in revenue. Attendance will also likely be up 6 percent by the time 2012 wraps up.

Admittedly, surveying the top 10 grossing films of a particular calendar weekend is a small sample size, but it does appear that audiences and critics are noticing that they are checking their watches more frequently as they follow Bilbo’s adventures in Middle-Earth or Jean Valjean’s travails.

It’s not clear, however, that this is a seasonal anomaly. A decade ago, films like “Gangs of New York” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” similarly strained audience’s endurance. The average length of the top 10 films during 2002 was 126.6 minutes, just two minutes shorter than the average this year.

Movies News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Employers Must Offer Family Health Care, Affordable or Not, Administration Says

WASHINGTON — In a long-awaited interpretation of the new health care law, the Obama administration said Monday that employers must offer health insurance to employees and their children, but will not be subject to any penalties if family coverage is unaffordable to workers.

The requirement for employers to provide health benefits to employees is a cornerstone of the new law, but the new rules proposed by the Internal Revenue Service said that employers’ obligation was to provide affordable insurance to cover their full-time employees. The rules offer no guarantee of affordable insurance for a worker’s children or spouse. To avoid a possible tax penalty, the government said, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer affordable coverage to those employees. But, it said, the meaning of “affordable” depends entirely on the cost of individual coverage for the employee, what the worker would pay for “self-only coverage.”

The new rules, to be published in the Federal Register, create a strong incentive for employers to put money into insurance for their employees rather than dependents. It is unclear whether the spouse and children of an employee will be able to obtain federal subsidies to help them buy coverage — separate from the employee — through insurance exchanges being established in every state. The administration explicitly reserved judgment on that question, which could affect millions of people in families with low and moderate incomes.

Many employers provide family coverage to full-time employees, but many do not. Family coverage is much more expensive, and the employee’s share of the premium is typically much larger.

In 2012, according to an annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance averaged $5,615 a year for single coverage and $15,745 for family coverage. The employee’s share of the premium averaged $951 for individual coverage and more than four times as much, $4,316, for family coverage.

Starting in 2014, most Americans will be required to have health insurance. Low- and middle-income people can get tax credits to help pay their premiums, unless they have access to affordable coverage from an employer.

In its proposal, the Internal Revenue Service said, “Coverage for an employee under an employer-sponsored plan is affordable if the employee’s required contribution for self-only coverage does not exceed 9.5 percent of the employee’s household income.”

The rules, though labeled a proposal, are more significant than most proposed regulations. The Internal Revenue Service said employers could rely on them in making plans for 2014.

In writing the law, members of Congress often conjured up a picture of employees working year-round at full-time jobs. But in drafting the rules, the I.R.S. wrestled with the complex reality of part-time, seasonal and temporary workers.

In addition, the administration expressed concern that some employers might try to evade the new requirements by firing and rehiring employees, manipulating their work hours or using temporary staffing agencies. The rules include several provisions to prevent such abuse.

The law says an employer with 50 or more full-time employees may be subject to a tax penalty if it fails to offer coverage to “its full-time employees (and their dependents).”

Employers asked for guidance, and the Obama administration provided it, saying that a dependent is an employee’s child under the age of 26.

“Dependent does not include the spouse of an employee,” the proposed rules say.

Thus, employers must offer coverage to children of an employee, but do not have to make it affordable. And they do not have to offer coverage at all to the spouse of an employee.

The administration said that the rules — which apply to private businesses, nonprofit organizations and state and local government agencies — would require changes at many work sites.

“A number of employers currently offer coverage only to their employees, and not to dependents,” the I.R.S. said. “For these employers, expanding their health plans to add dependent coverage will require substantial revisions to their plans.”

In view of this challenge, the agency said it would grant a one-time reprieve to employers who fail to offer coverage to dependents of full-time employees, provided they take steps in 2014 to come into compliance. Under the rules, employers must offer coverage to employees in 2014 and must offer coverage to dependents as well, starting in 2015.

The new rules apply to employers that have at least 50 full-time employees or an equivalent combination of full-time and part-time employees. A full-time employee is a person employed on average at least 30 hours a week. And 100 half-time employees are considered equivalent to 50 full-time employees.

Thus, the government said, an employer will be subject to the new requirement if it has 40 full-time employees working 30 hours a week and 20 half-time employees working 15 hours a week.

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It's the Economy: What Will the Economy’s New ‘Normal’ Look Like in 2013?

Illustration by Jasper Rietman

Back in the mid-2000s, the U.S. consumer economy was undergoing a serious change. After decades of favoring low prices (even when they promised low quality), consumers began paying more for all sorts of premium features like single-serve packaging and pretty much anything “green” or “organic.” Then came the financial crisis and the drop in consumer demand.

Deep thoughts this week:

1. Consumption is back.

2. But many buying habits are changing.

3. Regardless, the habits of the U.S. middle class are becoming less important.

It’s the Economy

Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.

Despite a worse-than-expected holiday season, the Federal Reserve forecast that G.D.P. growth would approach the historic average of about 3 percent in 2013. The economy may be coming back, but the question for many businesses is what the new “normal” looks like. Will shoppers spend as they did in the credit-bubble years? Or has the Great Recession scared them into prolonged stinginess? Early evidence suggests a mix. What is clear is that the big changes are just beginning.

Waste More, Want More

From the 1970s through the 1990s, the dominant retail trend was toward cheap and big: shoppers drove long distances to buy large boxes of everything they needed in bulk. Starting in the last decade, though, this began to change. And the success of products like Tide Pods (premeasured balls of detergent that made Procter & Gamble an estimated $500 million last year) suggest that the era of premium conveniences isn’t going anywhere.

Somewhat counterintuitively, this trend is directly related to the downturn, says John N. Frank, an analyst at Mintel, a market-research firm. Fearful of losing their jobs, millions of workers coped with the crisis by putting in more time at the office — “doing at least two people’s jobs,” Frank says — even if it meant less time to shop for deals. Dollar General saw tremendous growth as a more convenient alternative to Sam’s Club. Duane Reade, now owned by Walgreen, is proving that no block in Manhattan should be without a drugstore that also carries basic grocery items at an upcharge. Frank says he expects that anxious, overtired workers will drive this trend well into this decade, too.

Housing Is Back

Now that at least one million households are looking to move somewhere better, investors are looking to buy houses on the cheap — not to flip, but to rent. (The Blackstone Group, the private-equity colossus, has spent more than $1 billion this year buying up thousands of single-family homes around the country.) New residential construction starts also came back strong last year, and much of the growth was from multiunit apartment buildings designed, yes, for renting.

Despite the fact that homeownership has been promoted as a universal economic good since the Depression, the trend toward rentals might be a good one. Renters are more able to follow the job market. Renting, as the housing bubble revealed, benefits the overall recovery, because fewer people have their money tied up in one asset.

Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile

In 2012, the average life of a car in the United States reached a historic high of 11.2 years. This was tied to the collapse of new-car sales during the recession, but it was also driven by several long-term shifts. After steady increases for decades, Americans are driving less. Total miles driven in the United States hit 3 trillion for the first time in 2006. It went up even further in 2007 but has generally fallen since.

For the first time in nine decades, according to census data, walkable cities are growing faster than suburbs. And wherever people happen to move, they are buying smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. Large- and some luxury-car segments are falling, says Tom Libby, an automotive research analyst at Polk, and the cheaper subcompact and emerging sub-subcompact classes are growing. All this means that autos — one of the biggest industries in the United States — will not soon regain the explosive growth of the early 2000s.

Debt and Taxes

In 2008, Americans owed a collective $12.7 trillion. Today, thanks in part to mortgage defaults, we are down to $11.3 trillion, which is about 95 percent of our disposable income. That’s progress, but it’s still higher than the 88 percent we owed 10 years ago.

Additional reporting by Jacob Goldstein

Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR’s “Planet Money,” a podcast and blog.

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Ruling over bumper-car injury supports amusement park

SAN FRANCISCO — The California Supreme Court, protecting providers of risky recreational activities from lawsuits, decided Monday that bumper car riders may not sue amusement parks over injuries stemming from the inherent nature of the attraction.

The 6-1 decision may be cited to curb liability for a wide variety of activities — such as jet skiing, ice skating and even participating in a fitness class, lawyers in the case said.

"This is a victory for anyone who likes fun and risk activities," said Jeffrey M. Lenkov, an attorney for Great America, which won the case.

But Mark D. Rosenberg, who represented a woman injured in a bumper car at the Bay Area amusement park, said the decision was bad for consumers.

"Patrons are less safe today than they were yesterday," Rosenberg said.

The ruling came in a lawsuit by Smriti Nalwa, who fractured her wrist in 2005 while riding in a bumper car with her 9-year-old son and being involved in a head-on collision. Rosenberg said Great America had told ride operators not to allow head-on collisions, but failed to ask patrons to avoid them.

The court said Nalwa's injury was caused by a collision with another bumper car, a normal part of the ride. To reduce all risk of injury, the ride would have to be scrapped or completely reconfigured, the court said.

"A small degree of risk inevitably accompanies the thrill of speeding through curves and loops, defying gravity or, in bumper cars, engaging in the mock violence of low-speed collisions," Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar wrote for the majority. "Those who voluntarily join in these activities also voluntarily take on their minor inherent risks."

Monday's decision extended a legal doctrine that has limited liability for risky sports, such as football, to now include recreational activities.

"Where the doctrine applies to a recreational activity," Werdegar wrote, "operators, instructors and participants …owe other participants only the duty not to act so as to increase the risk of injury over that inherent in the activity."

Amusement parks will continue to be required to use the utmost care on thrill rides such as roller coasters, where riders surrender control to the operator. But on attractions where riders have some control, the parks can be held liable only if their conduct unreasonably raised the dangers.

"Low-speed collisions between the padded, independently operated cars are inherent in — are the whole point of — a bumper car ride," Werdegar wrote.

Parks that fail to provide routine safety measures such as seat belts, adequate bumpers and speed controls might be held liable for an injury, but operators should not be expected to restrict where a bumper car is bumped, the court said.

The justices noted that the state inspected the Great America rides annually, and the maintenance and safety staff checked on the bumper cars the day Nalwa broke her wrist. The ride was functioning normally.

Reports showed that bumper car riders at the park suffered 55 injuries — including bruises, cuts, scrapes and strains — in 2004 and 2005, but Nalwa's injury was the only fracture. Nalwa said her wrist snapped when she tried to brace herself by putting her hand on the dashboard.

Rosenberg said the injury stemmed from the head-on collision. He said the company had configured bumper rides in other parks to avoid such collisions and made the Santa Clara ride uni-directional after the lawsuit was filed.

Justice Joyce L. Kennard dissented, complaining that the decision would saddle trial judges "with the unenviable task of determining the risks of harm that are inherent in a particular recreational activity."

"Whether the plaintiff knowingly assumed the risk of injury no longer matters," Kennard said.

maura.dolan@latimes.com

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The Future Is Now: What We Imagined for 2013 — 10 Years Ago

Predicting the future is hard, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. We’re Wired, after all.

Ten years ago, we boldly declared that we’d be living with phones on our wrists, data-driven goggles on our eyes and gadgets that would safety-test our food for us. Turns out, a lot of the things Sonia Zjawinski conceptualized in our “Living in 2013” feature way back in 2003 were remarkably close to what we’ve seen. We even got the iPhone right (sort of).

And so, as we look back on life in 2013 circa 2003, we’re going to spin it forward once again to tell you what life will be like in 2023.

Predicted for 2003 (above):

Apple redefined the desktop, laptop, and MP3 player. The next insanely great thing: an LCD arm cuff that includes a PDA, wireless Internet, a mini iPod, and, of course, a phone. The iPhone bracelet's motion sensor allows you to scroll through apps and files with the flick of a wrist, its clasp holds a digicam for use during video calls, and its wireless ear clip lets you listen and speak to callers. And everything can be done via voice recognition or touchscreen. Talk about the right call. Illustration: Kenn Brown.

Delivered in 2013:

Hey, it turns out, Apple gave us an iPhone after all! We got the name right, and even seemed to know about FaceTime. But the form factor details? Not so much. While you can wear an iPod nano as a watch, or make a call with your iPhone, if you want the watch-plus-phone combination that we teased you with 10 years ago, for now you'll need to pick up a secondary gadget that can transmit to your phone, like this Pebble. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired.

Looking ahead to 2023:

Here's the thing, the screen on a watch is simply too small to display lots of data. And as an input device? Forget it. Yet keeping your phone out of sight means you often can't interact with your data on the go. The obvious answer is a variable size display. Samsung has already demonstrated a pretty convincing foldable OLED display prototype. Given 10 more years, we can easily see one screen serving multiple purposes by taking on multiple form factors, depending on whether you wanted to simply glance at it to read a message, or unfold it to write your reply. Illustration: Simon Lutrin/Wired

Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired's Gadget Lab and the co-founder of the Knight-Batten award-winning Longshot magazine.

Read more by Mat Honan

Follow @mat on Twitter.

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Playboy Hugh Hefner marries his ‘runaway bride’

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hugh Hefner is celebrating the new year as a married man once again.

The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his “runaway bride,” Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year’s Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old “Playmate of the Month” in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.

Playboy said on Tuesday that the couple celebrated at a New Year’s Eve party at the mansion with guests that included comic Jon Lovitz, Gene Simmons of KISS and baseball star Evan Longoria.

The bride wore a strapless gown in soft pink, Hefner a black tux. Hefner’s been married twice before but lived the single life between 1959 and 1989.

Entertainment News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Study Suggests Lower Death Risk for the Overweight

A century ago, Elsie Scheel was the perfect woman. So said a 1912 article in The New York Times about how Miss Scheel, 24, was chosen by the “medical examiner of the 400 'co-eds'” at Cornell University as a woman “whose very presence bespeaks perfect health.”

Miss Scheel, however, was hardly model-thin. At 5-foot-7 and 171 pounds, she would, by today's medical standards, be clearly overweight. (Her body mass index was 27; 25 to 29.9 is overweight.)

But a new report suggests that Miss Scheel may have been onto something. The report on nearly three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.

The report, although not the first to suggest this relationship between B.M.I. and mortality, is by far the largest and most carefully done, analyzing nearly 100 studies, experts said.

But don’t scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers.

Experts not involved in the research said it suggested that overweight people need not panic unless they have other indicators of poor health and that depending on where fat is in the body, it might be protective or even nutritional for older or sicker people. But over all, piling on pounds and becoming more than slightly obese remains dangerous.

“We wouldn’t want people to think, ‘Well, I can take a pass and gain more weight,'” said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s nutrition division.

Rather, he and others said, the report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that B.M.I., a ratio of height to weight, should not be the only indicator of healthy weight.

“Body mass index is an imperfect measure of the risk of mortality,” and factors like blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar must be considered, said Dr. Samuel Klein, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Dr. Steven Heymsfield, executive director of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said that for overweight people, if indicators like cholesterol “are in the abnormal range, then that weight is affecting you,” but that if indicators are normal, there’s no reason to “go on a crash diet.”

Experts also said the data suggested that the definition of "normal" B.M.I., 18.5 to 24.9, should be revised, excluding its lowest weights, which might be too thin.

The study did show that the two highest obesity categories (B.M.I. of 35 and up) are at high risk. “Once you have higher obesity, the fat’s in the fire,” Dr. Blackburn said.

But experts also suggested that concepts of fat be refined.

"Fat per se is not as bad as we thought," said Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, professor of Medicine and Public Health at the University of California, Irvine. "What is bad is a type of fat that is inside your belly. Non-belly fat, underneath your skin in your thigh and your butt area — these are not necessarily bad." He added that, to a point, extra fat is accompanied by extra muscle, which can be healthy.

Still, it is possible that overweight or somewhat obese people are less likely to die because they, or their doctors, have identified other conditions associated with weight gain, like high cholesterol or diabetes.

“You’re more likely to be in your doctor’s office and more likely to be treated,” said Dr. Robert Eckel, a past president of the American Heart Association and a professor at University of Colorado.

Some experts said fat could be protective in some cases, although that is unproven and debated. The study did find that people 65 and over had no greater mortality risk even at high obesity.

“There’s something about extra body fat when you’re older that is providing some reserve,” Dr. Eckel said.

And studies on specific illnesses, like heart and kidney disease, have found an “obesity paradox,” that heavier patients are less likely to die.

Still, death is not everything. Even if "being overweight doesn't increase your risk of dying," Dr. Klein said, it "does increase your risk of having diabetes" or other conditions.

Ultimately, said the study’s lead author, Katherine Flegal, a senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “the best weight might depend on the situation you’re in.”

Take the perfect woman, Elsie Scheel, in whose "physical makeup there is not a single defect," the Times article said. This woman who "has never been ill and doesn't know what fear is" loved sports and didn't consume candy, coffee or tea. But she also ate only three meals every two days, and loved beefsteak.

Maybe such seeming contradictions made sense against the societal inconsistencies of that time. After all, her post-college plans involved tilling her father’s farm, but “if she were a man, she would study mechanical engineering.”

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