Daily iPhone App: Sleepwalker's Journey

Sleepwalker's Journey is a game that arrived a few months ago from 11 Bit Studios, the creators of the popular Anomaly: Warzone Earth (that's set for a sequel very soon). But while that game is a reverse tower defense title with military stylings and lots of gunfire and explosions, Sleepwalker's Journey is very different. It's a physics puzzle game, of sorts, with a cute, sleepy character and some gorgeous storybook picture graphics.

The idea is that the sleepwalker is traveling along a 2D stage, and it's your job to lift up platforms and pull down switches as it goes, allowing him to grab stars and moons to be collected for points. The game is actually very similar to Anomaly, in that you don't have any direct control over the players, but instead you put various things in or out of their path to guide them.

Sleepwalker's Journey is fun, but the aesthetic is the real draw here -- the graphics and the music are really top-notch. I think the upcoming Anomaly Korea will be very impressive as well, but if you want a taste of 11 Bit's work before that one arrives, Sleepwalker's Journey is available right now for 99 cents.


Share

Source: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/12/18/daily-iphone-app-sleepwalkers-journey/

eagles nfl schedule 2012 Fox News Suicide Google Ryder Cup Standings Dexter Season 7 Ryder Cup 2012

Molten gold signals revival in California?s Mother Lode

Sutter Gold Mining Company mill superintendent Paul Skinner pours the first thin stream of glowing molten gold into a mold, forming a shiny one-inch pyramid near Sutter Creek, Calif. Photo by The Associated Press.

SUTTER CREEK, Calif. (AP) ? The gold miners who made California famous were the rugged loners trying to shake nuggets loose from streams or hillsides. The ones who made the state rich were those who worked for big mining companies that blasted gold from an underground world of dust and darkness.

The last of the state?s great mines closed because mining gold proved unprofitable after World War II. But with the price of the metal near historic highs, hovering around $1,700 an ounce, the first large-scale hard rock gold mining operation in a half-century is coming back to life.

Miners are digging again where their forebears once unearthed riches from eight historic mines that honeycomb Sutter Gold Mining Co.?s holdings about 50 miles southeast of Sacramento. Last week, mill superintendent Paul Skinner poured the first thin stream of glowing molten gold into a mold.

?Nothing quite like it,? murmured Skinner, who has been mining for 65 years.

It was just four ounces, culled from more than eight tons of ore, but it signaled the end of $20 million worth of construction and the pending start of production. The company announced the ceremonial first pour before financial markets opened Monday, marking the mine?s official reincarnation.

By spring, the company?s 110 employees expect to be removing 150 tons of ore a day from a site immediately north of the old Lincoln Mine, enough to produce nearly 2,000 ounces of gold each month.

The company projects reserves of more than 682,000 ounces of gold worth more than $1 billion at today?s prices. Company officials say they are confident there is far more in their historically rich section of the 120-mile-long Mother Lode region of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Reopening the mine has been anything but a gold rush, however.

It took three decades for the mine?s operators to obtain more than 40 environmental permits. By contrast, the old Wild West miners wreaked such devastation that they prompted some of the nation?s first conservation efforts nearly 130 years ago.

?We?ve gone from no regulation to probably the other extreme,? said Bob Hutmacher, the company?s chief financial officer.

In recent decades, most of California?s gold has come from the state?s desert regions. However, high gold prices recently spurred what authorities say was a rogue surface gold mine in El Dorado County, east of Sacramento. The owners now face criminal charges.

Farther north, several mines have started the process to reopen. Most of these kinds of hard rock mines have recently been known more as tourist destinations, including the Empire Mine, which was once the state?s largest hard rock mine. It became a state historic site after it closed in 1956.

Sutter Gold?s mine also hosted underground tours featuring gold mining history until about a year ago. A half-million people took the tours before they were halted for insurance reasons as the company scrambled to begin production.

Miners have now burrowed more than a half-mile underground and are digging another half-mile network of tunnels to reach the milky white quartz deposits that contain the gold.

Six-hundred vertical feet underground, Keith Emerald was soaking wet in a T-shirt, rubber boots and bib overalls in the damp, chilly mine.

The only light came from his battery-operated hardhat headlamp as he leaned into a deafening 135-pound jackleg pneumatic drill, driving an 8 1/2-foot-long bit repeatedly into a wall of solid rock. The more than 30 holes he drilled were packed with explosives to reduce a head-high archway to rubble.

?Fire in the hole,? came a disembodied voice over the mine?s radio system hours later.

The miners are using tools like the jackleg drill that have changed little in a century because they are searching for relatively narrow bands of quartz, averaging 2.4 feet wide. That makes it too costly to use modern mechanized equipment that would churn out tons of worthless rock.

?This harkens back to the 19th century where you follow the gold veins,? said chief operating officer Matt Collins. ?We?re throwbacks.?

Their predecessors pried 3.5 million ounces of gold from the ground underlying the company?s holdings before the last mine, the Eureka, closed in 1958.

The company has mining rights under about 4.5 miles of the Mother Lode between the quaint Gold Rush communities of Sutter Creek, population 2,500, and Amador City, with 200 residents. The mining area roughly parallels Highway 49, named after the miners who rushed to California from around the globe after gold was discovered in 1849.

Sutter Creek is the namesake of John Sutter of gold discovery fame. The nearby mines once made Hetty Green the nation?s richest woman and propelled the success of railroad baron Leland Stanford, who went on to become governor and found Stanford University.

Now the towns boast more about their proximity to foothill wineries and the restaurants, boutiques and antique stores that line their historic main streets.

?(Highway) 49 is known as the Gold Rush road. If there?s gold to be found, I think it should be mined,? said Jan Hicks, who lives in nearby Jackson but clerks in an 1869 Amador City building that once housed a general store catering to miners.

Source: http://www.newstribune.com/news/2012/dec/19/molten-gold-signals-revival-californias-mother-lod/

us soccer bobby brown arrested the happening black panthers mauritania obama open mic jefferson county colorado

Fitch to US: Fix 'fiscal cliff' or risk credit downgrade

Fitch, a leading credit ratings agency, warned Wednesday that the US is likely to lose its top-notch debt rating if lawmakers cannot agree to a solution that prevents the economy from going over the 'fiscal cliff' at the end of 2012. Fitch called the resolution of the fiscal cliff and an increase in the debt ceiling 'pressing issues.'

By The Associated Press / December 19, 2012

The Fitch Ratings building is seen in New York in this 2010 file photograph. Fitch warned Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012 that failure to reach a deal on the fiscal cliff could result in a credit downgrade for the US.

Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters/File

Enlarge

?Fitch?warned on Wednesday that the U.S. was more likely to lose its top-notch "AAA" debt?rating?if lawmakers and President Barack Obama cannot agree on how to cut the deficit and avoid the deep government spending cuts and tax increases that automatically would go into effect next year.

Skip to next paragraph

' + google_ads[0].line2 + '
' + google_ads[0].line3 + '

'; } else if (google_ads.length > 1) { ad_unit += ''; } } document.getElementById("ad_unit").innerHTML += ad_unit; google_adnum += google_ads.length; return; } var google_adnum = 0; google_ad_client = "pub-6743622525202572"; google_ad_output = 'js'; google_max_num_ads = '1'; google_feedback = "on"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_adtest = "on"; google_image_size = '230x105'; google_skip = '0'; // -->

But the?credit?ratings?agency said in a report that if a deficit-cutting plan is reached, the U.S. would likely keep its "AAA"?rating.?Fitch would then raise its outlook to stable from negative.

"Resolution of the fiscal cliff and an increase in the debt ceiling are pressing issues that the President and Congress must address if the U.S. is to avoid a fiscal and economic crisis," the report said.

In November,?Fitch?Ratings?said Obama must work toward a credible plan to avoid the fiscal cliff or risk the U.S. losing its "AAA"rating.?Fitch?changed its outlook for the U.S.?rating?to negative last year after Congress and the Obama administration failed to meet a deadline for a plan.

In the first-ever downgrade of U.S. government debt, Standard & Poor's last year cut its?rating?from "'AAA" to "AA+" after the government failed to come up with a plan to reduce the deficit.

The U.S. has never failed to meet its debt obligations. The battle over raising the debt limit in August 2011 went to the last minute before a compromise was reached.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/HhrHvS8jdDQ/Fitch-to-US-Fix-fiscal-cliff-or-risk-credit-downgrade

lsu game beezow doo doo zopittybop bop bop cordova demaryius thomas transtar 316 william daley

HitmanPro 3.7

If you've got a malware infestation that interferes with installing regular antivirus protection, or ransomware that keeps you from booting Windows at all, it may be time to call in a hit man. HitmanPro 3.7 is specifically designed to clear out this kind of resistant malware, and its new Kickstart module foils malware that holds your computer for ransom.

Vendors frequently offer cleanup-only tools like HitmanPro for free. You don't have to pay to run a scan with HitmanPro, but if you want to remove malware found by the scan you'll have to pay for it ($19.95 per year for one license, $29.95 for three) or register for a 30-day free trial. On the plus side, you don't have to start that 30-day trial if the scan came up clean.

Easy Launch, Easy Scan
By default, the tiny HitmanPro executable installs a local copy on the PC you're scanning and sets it to scan at each reboot. However, you can also choose to just run a one-time scan without installing anything. In testing, I had no trouble installing this product on my twelve malware-infested test systems. That's refreshing, considering that getting some products installed has required hours of tech support intervention via phone and live chat.

Like Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware Free 1.51, HitmanPro has a user interface that's focused on the singular task at hand. Most users will just launch it and immediately click Next to initiate the scan. Yes, there are a few configuration settings, but leaving them at their default values will ensure maximum security.

The time required for a scan depends strongly on the number of suspicious unknown files found, because HitmanPro uploads such files for cloud-based analysis. On my standard clean test system, a full scan took just four minutes and a repeat scan came in barely over a minute. The average for recent antivirus products is over 30 minutes, so HitmanPro is definitely fast!

Scanning the infested systems took longer, in some cases much longer. A couple of times I noticed in the scan results that the connection with the cloud had failed. I rescanned those systems to ensure the best result.

At the end of a scan, HitmanPro lists all the malware, suspicious files, and tracking cookies that it found. Its scan relies on technology from five antivirus companies: Dr. Web, IKARUS, G Data, Emsisoft, and Bitdefender. Clicking on any of the found items displays which of the antivirus engines detected it and what name each used to describe it.

Some list items will include little rectangular notes that the company calls "chevrons." For a running process, the chevron displays the process ID. HitmanPro use chevrons to flag drivers, files that launch at startup, and files protected by Windows File Protection, among other things.

Double-clicking an item in the results list brings up an extraordinarily detailed list of attributes noted by HitmanPro. The average user won't necessarily want to deal with this level of detail, but I found it fascinating.

The list also indicates HitmanPro's recommended action for each found item. I saw no need to change the defaults except in one particular case. On every test system HitmanPro identified the well-known security tool RootkitRevealer as a Trojan. It's not, so I chose the option to report this file as safe.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/-rDpHKkDTNM/0,2817,2413295,00.asp

lamar d antoni fashion star andrew bird lizzie borden lizzie borden iona

Healthy lifestyle during menopause may decrease breast cancer risk later on

[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 19-Dec-2012
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Garth Sundem
garth.sundem@ucdenver.edu
University of Colorado Denver

Combination of diet and exercise may be as beneficial as drugs

Obese, postmenopausal women are at greater risk for developing breast cancer and their cancers tend to be more aggressive than those in lean counterparts. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the December issue of the journal Cancer Research shows how this risk might be prevented.

"By using nutrient tracers for fat and sugar, we tracked where the body stored excess calories. In lean models, excess fat and glucose were taken up by the liver, mammary and skeletal tissues. In obese models, excess fat and glucose were taken up by tumors, fueling their growth," says Erin Giles, PhD, postdoctoral researcher at the CU Cancer Center and the paper's lead author.

In short, if you are lean, excess calories go to healthy tissue. If you are obese, excess calories feed the tumor.

"This implies that the menopausal window may be an opportunity for women to control their breast cancer risk through weight management," Giles says.

In this study, Giles worked with a team of scientists including postdoctoral fellows Elizabeth Wellberg and Sonali Jindal, as well as faculty members Steve Anderson, Pepper Schedin, Ann Thor and Paul Maclean. Their study also showed that tumors from obese animals had increased levels of the progesterone receptor, and this receptor appears to give tumors a metabolic advantage for growth. To extend their findings to humans, they recruited gene analysis experts David Astling and Aik-Choon Tan who analyzed 585 human breast cancers and found that human tumors expressing the progesterone receptor had the same metabolic advantage.

"Basically, we saw an abnormal metabolic response to fat and sugar in the obese that, in many ways, mirrors the response to fat and sugar in Type II diabetes," Giles says. Noticing this similarity, the group tested the use of the common Type II diabetes drug, Metformin, in their model of postmenopausal breast cancer.

"With treatment, tumor size was dramatically decreased in the obese, and tumors showed reduced expression of the progesterone receptor," Giles says.

Using a pre-clinical model, the investigators found that weight gain during menopause is particularly bad for those who are obese when entering menopause. Together, the results of this study suggest that the combination of obesity and weight gain during menopause can impact breast cancer in two ways. First, tumors that arise in obese women appear to have a metabolic advantage, and second, the inability to store excess calories in healthy tissues may further fuel tumor growth.

"While drugs may be useful in controlling breast cancer risk in obese, postmenopausal women, our results imply that a combination of diet and exercise may be equally if not more beneficial," Giles says.

The group's ongoing studies are testing whether interventions such as diet and exercise, during the period of menopausal weight gain, can improve tumor outcomes.

###



[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


[ Back to EurekAlert! ] Public release date: 19-Dec-2012
[ | E-mail | Share Share ]

Contact: Garth Sundem
garth.sundem@ucdenver.edu
University of Colorado Denver

Combination of diet and exercise may be as beneficial as drugs

Obese, postmenopausal women are at greater risk for developing breast cancer and their cancers tend to be more aggressive than those in lean counterparts. A University of Colorado Cancer Center study published in the December issue of the journal Cancer Research shows how this risk might be prevented.

"By using nutrient tracers for fat and sugar, we tracked where the body stored excess calories. In lean models, excess fat and glucose were taken up by the liver, mammary and skeletal tissues. In obese models, excess fat and glucose were taken up by tumors, fueling their growth," says Erin Giles, PhD, postdoctoral researcher at the CU Cancer Center and the paper's lead author.

In short, if you are lean, excess calories go to healthy tissue. If you are obese, excess calories feed the tumor.

"This implies that the menopausal window may be an opportunity for women to control their breast cancer risk through weight management," Giles says.

In this study, Giles worked with a team of scientists including postdoctoral fellows Elizabeth Wellberg and Sonali Jindal, as well as faculty members Steve Anderson, Pepper Schedin, Ann Thor and Paul Maclean. Their study also showed that tumors from obese animals had increased levels of the progesterone receptor, and this receptor appears to give tumors a metabolic advantage for growth. To extend their findings to humans, they recruited gene analysis experts David Astling and Aik-Choon Tan who analyzed 585 human breast cancers and found that human tumors expressing the progesterone receptor had the same metabolic advantage.

"Basically, we saw an abnormal metabolic response to fat and sugar in the obese that, in many ways, mirrors the response to fat and sugar in Type II diabetes," Giles says. Noticing this similarity, the group tested the use of the common Type II diabetes drug, Metformin, in their model of postmenopausal breast cancer.

"With treatment, tumor size was dramatically decreased in the obese, and tumors showed reduced expression of the progesterone receptor," Giles says.

Using a pre-clinical model, the investigators found that weight gain during menopause is particularly bad for those who are obese when entering menopause. Together, the results of this study suggest that the combination of obesity and weight gain during menopause can impact breast cancer in two ways. First, tumors that arise in obese women appear to have a metabolic advantage, and second, the inability to store excess calories in healthy tissues may further fuel tumor growth.

"While drugs may be useful in controlling breast cancer risk in obese, postmenopausal women, our results imply that a combination of diet and exercise may be equally if not more beneficial," Giles says.

The group's ongoing studies are testing whether interventions such as diet and exercise, during the period of menopausal weight gain, can improve tumor outcomes.

###



[ Back to EurekAlert! ] [ | E-mail | Share Share ]

?


AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.


Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/uocd-hld121912.php

sopa and pipa bills censoring the internet blackout blackout congress censored jerry yang

Blame bacteria if you start putting on weight

WEIGHT gain bugging you? Evidence is mounting for the central role that bacteria play in causing obesity.

Liping Zhao and his team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China put a morbidly obese man on a diet of whole grains, traditional Chinese medicines, probiotics and non-digestible carbohydrates for 23 weeks. The diet was designed to inhibit the bacteria thought to be associated with weight gain by increasing the pH in the colon.

The 175-kilogram volunteer lost 51 kg, despite not exercising. People who have had weight-loss surgery lose on average 49 kg.

To see if the bacteria present also changed, the team looked at what species were prevalent in the volunteer's gut before and after the diet. Before the regime, Enterobacter - a toxin-producing pathogen - was most abundant, accounting for 35 per cent of the gut bacteria. After the diet, it was reduced to undetectable levels.

The researchers fed mice samples of this bacterium from the volunteer's gut to determine whether the pathogen was a cause or a result of his obesity. They found that the mice with the new bacteria gained significantly more weight on a high fat diet than control mice, also on a high fat diet (International Society for Microbial Ecology, doi.org/jz9).

Previous work has shown a link between gut bacteria and obesity, but Zhao describes this as "the last missing piece of evidence that bacteria cause obesity". Treatment with an appropriate diet could be cheaper and more effective than surgery, he says.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Have your say

Only subscribers may leave comments on this article. Please log in.

Only personal subscribers may leave comments on this article

Subscribe now to comment.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/26c02507/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Carticle0Cmg216289640B70A0A0Eblame0Ebacteria0Eif0Eyou0Estart0Eputting0Eon0Eweight0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

BLK Water ESPYs daniel tosh kate upton Jason Kidd All Star Game 2012 directv

Industrial chemicals: A new breed of stable anti-aromatic compound

Dec. 18, 2012 ? By synthesizing a stable "antiaromatic" compound, as well as a never before seen intermediate version of that compound, chemists at The University of Texas at Austin have written an important new chapter in the story of modern chemistry.

The research was done in collaboration with an international roster of colleagues from Yonsei University in Korea, the University of Hyderbad in India, and Osaka University in Japan. The results were published this week in Nature Chemistry.

This particular story began in 1825, when English scientist Michael Faraday first isolated benzene from gas lights. Benzene would later be identified as one of a class of compounds known as aromatics, which have immense importance in both biological function and industrial production.

In humans, for instance, all five nucleotides that constitute DNA and RNA are aromatic. In industry, aromatics derived from oil and coal tar are precursors to, among other things, plastics, solvents, lubricants, rubber, dyes, herbicides, and textiles.

"Benzene is probably the most famous aromatic compound," said Jonathan Sessler, the Rowland Pettit Centennial Chair in Chemistry in the College of Natural Sciences. "But there are many other critically important aromatic species. The heme in hemoglobin, which is what gives blood its red color, is one of a group of aromatics known as porphyrins. Without them we'd have either a very different or no existence."

Aromatic compounds have a ring-like structure that enables electrons to be shared amongst the different bonds between the atoms. This results, among other things, in an extraordinary degree of stability. They tend to persist in their structure under conditions that would cause other molecules to react.

"That's one of the reasons why they're so useful in industry," said Sessler. "It's also why they tend to be pro-carcinogenic. They're very hard for us to metabolize or catabolize, and the results of that are usually not benign. One of the first class of tumors ever observed was testicular cancer. It was highly prevalent among 18th century chimney sweeps, who were exposed to aromatic compounds found in coal tar."

Sessler made his name as a chemist synthesizing new classes of porphyrins, including Texaphyrin, a very large porphyrin, which is being developed as a key element in a potential new approach to treating cancer.

What he and his colleagues have now done is taken an already existing molecule, which was first synthesized by Sessler in 1992, and found a way to stabilize it in its so-called antiaromatic form. Antiaromatic systems are the evil twins of aromatics. Compounds that are antiaromatic have two additional or two fewer electrons than aromatic compounds.

"They don't want to exist in a planar form without giving up or adding the two electrons that distinguish them from their aromatic analogues," said Sessler, "so they tend to twist around, to a lower energy state. That destroys their antiaromaticity. The net result is that bona fide antiaromatic compounds are elusive. What we have done, by rational design, is put big buttressing groups around the compounds, basically clamping them into place."

The resulting compounds are antiaromatic -- with two electrons gone -- and an intermediate something, with both aromatic and antiaromatic properties, that doesn't have a common name yet because it hasn't been seen before.

"When you have to struggle for the words to describe what's being done, you know that it's cutting edge," said Christian Brueckner, a fellow porphyrin chemist and a professor at The University of Connecticut. "Twenty years ago when I was a graduate student I was told simply that you can't make large antiaromatics like this. Later the idea was that you can make them but you can't do much with them. Now you can do it, and it can switch between states, and it can exist in the intermediate state. It's just a beautiful progression of scholarship, a beautiful example of how the ability of chemists to manipulate matter is advancing."

In their natural state antiaromatics are as unstable as aromatics are stable. As a result they have only been stabilized a few times in the history of the field. The antiaromatic that Sessler has made, working with colleagues in Korea, Japan, and India, is significant simply for joining this elite group. As significant is the synthesis of the intermediate state, a scientific first, as well as the capacity of the system to be toggled back and forth between the three different electron states.

"It's the first time you can really do a Coke vs. Pepsi taste test," said Sessler. "We've had very sophisticated theory for a long time, but you need positive and negative controls in science to reach a really robust conclusion. Now we finally have a detailed, controlled comparison of what aromaticity really does, how it changes interactions with light, how it affects color, what an excited state does to the lifetime, and so on."

Sessler's compounds also have potential implications in the field of information storage.

"We are very good as humans at manipulating electrons," said Sessler, "and although this isn't my game at the moment, it's not hard to imagine how a system that has three different electron states, and is reversible, could provide an opportunity to store information in a way we couldn't previously. Binary gives us computers. Ternary could give us even more power."

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Other social bookmarking and sharing tools:


Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Texas at Austin, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/OqFcJTLnJ6Q/121218081917.htm

London 2012 shot put London 2012 Track And Field Jordyn Wieber michael phelps Kerri Strug Ledecky Nadia Comaneci

Fewest states in 20 years executed inmates in 2012: report

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Nine states executed inmates in 2012, the fewest number in 20 years, as several Southern states that usually carry out executions did not put any inmates to death, according to a report released Tuesday by a nonprofit that tracks death penalty data.

"There are still 33 states with the death penalty, but very few are actually regularly carrying out executions," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center and author of the report.

Forty-three inmates were executed this year, the same number as 2011, according to the report by the Washington, D.C.-based organization. Last year, 13 states executed inmates. No more executions are scheduled for this year.

Four states - Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi - accounted for more than three-quarters of the executions. Texas executed 15 people, and Arizona, Oklahoma and Mississippi each executed six. Ohio and Florida each executed three inmates. South Dakota executed two, and Delaware and Idaho each executed one. All of the executions were by lethal injection.

Several states that allow the death penalty and have traditionally had high numbers of executions did not carry out any in 2012. Among those was Virginia, which is second to Texas in the number of executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Missouri also had no executions in 2012.

"Even in the traditional death penalty areas, the death penalty is not being used as much," Dieter said.

"It's not seen as a normal or regular punishment for a crime," he added. "It's very expensive, it takes a long time to get to a death sentence, many are overturned and executions take place 20 years after the sentence. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to invest in something so speculative and far off."

But in Texas, Governor Rick Perry's office has said the governor "supports the death penalty as a fitting and constitutional punishment for the most heinous crimes."

Connecticut this year repealed the death penalty, bringing to 17 the number of states without the punishment. Illinois repealed its death penalty last year, while New York, New Jersey and New Mexico also did so recently.

This year in California, which has not carried out an execution in nearly seven years, voters declined to repeal the death penalty.

Next, Dieter said he expects to see efforts to repeal the death penalty in Maryland, Colorado and New Hampshire.

The number of new death sentences in 2012 was projected to be 78, the second-lowest since 1976. The lowest year since the reinstatement was 2011, with 76 sentences.

(Reporting By Corrie MacLaggan; Editing by Greg McCune)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/fewest-states-20-years-executed-inmates-2012-report-050342858.html

open marriage department of justice doj dept of justice weather chicago swizz beatz mpaa