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Gotta admit, as a Milwaukee kid there is something about the throaty roar of a Harley Davidson that warms the cockles.
But the all-electric Light Cycle modeled after the machines in Tron makes a head-snapping case for whisper-quiet technology.
It is the creation of Parker Brothers Choppers out of Texas and Evolve Motorcycles, a made-in-America startup building electric scooters that are actually a zippy good time.
Since the latest Lithium ion batteries are so small (thanks, cell phone engineers!), motorcycle designers can go nuts with new concepts and this $55,000 baby is proof.
But the Parker Brothers still love their internal combustion, so we also checked out their grown-up Green Machine, a modern spin on the old Big Wheel rival built around a Harley Davidson engine.
Popeye might want to consider switching to broccoli. British scientists unveiled a new breed of the vegetable that experts say packs a big nutritional punch.
The new broccoli was specially grown to contain two to three times the normal amount of glucoraphanin, a nutrient believed to help ward off heart disease.
“Vegetables are a medicine cabinet already,” said Richard Mithen, who led the team of scientists at the Institute for Food Research in Norwich, England, that developed the new broccoli. “When you eat this broccoli … you get a reduction in cholesterol in your blood stream,” he told Associated Press Television.
An AP reporter who tasted the new broccoli found it was the same as the regular broccoli. Scientists, however, said it should taste slightly sweeter because it contains less sulphur.
Glucoraphanin works by breaking fat down in the body, preventing it from clogging the arteries. It is only found in broccoli in significant amounts.
To create the vegetable, sold as “super broccoli,” Mithen and colleagues cross-bred a traditional British broccoli with a wild, bitter Sicilian variety that has no flowery head, and a big dose of glucoraphanin. After 14 years, the enhanced hybrid was produced, which has been granted a patent by European authorities. No genetic modification was used.
It’s been on sale as Beneforte in select stores in California and Texas for the last year, and hit British shelves this month. Later this fall, the broccoli will be rolled out across the U.S.
The super vegetable is part of an increasing tendency among producers to inject extra nutrients into foods, ranging from calcium-enriched orange juice to fortified sugary cereals and milk with added omega 3 fatty acids. In Britain, the new broccoli is sold as part of a line of vegetables that includes mushrooms with extra vitamin D, and tomatoes and potatoes with added selenium.
Not enough data exists to know if anyone could overdose on glucoraphanin, but vitamin D and selenium in very high quantities can be toxic.
Mithen and colleagues are conducting human trials comparing the heart health of people eating the super broccoli to those who eat regular broccoli or no broccoli. They plan to submit the data to the European Food Safety Agency next year so they can claim in advertisements the broccoli has proven health benefits.
“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that points to (glucoraphanin and related compounds) as the most important preventive agents for (heart attacks) and certain cancers, so it’s a reasonable thing to do,” said Lars Ove Dragsted, a professor in the department of human nutrition at the University of Copenhagen. He previously sat on panels at the International Agency for Research on Cancer examining the link between vegetables and cancer.
Dragsted said glucoraphanin is a mildly toxic compound used by plants to fight insects. In humans, glucoraphanin may stimulate our bodies’ natural chemical defenses, potentially making the body stronger at removing dangerous compounds.
Other experts said eating foods packed with extra nutrients would probably only have a minimal impact compared with other lifestyle choices, like not smoking and exercising.
“Eating this new broccoli is not going to counteract your bad habits,” said Glenys Jones, a nutritionist at Britain’s Medical Research Council. She doubted whether adding the nutrients in broccoli to more popular foods would work to improve people’s overall health.
“If you added this to a burger, people might think it’s then a healthy food and eat more burgers, whereas this is not something they should be eating more of,” Jones said. She also thought the super broccoli’s U.K. price — it costs about a third more than regular broccoli — might discourage penny-pinching customers.
But that wasn’t enough to deter Suzanne Johnson, a 43-year-old mother of two young children in London.
“I’m very concerned about the food they eat and would happily pay a bit more to buy something that has an added benefit,” Johnson said.
But for her children, taste is ultimately more important than any nutritional value. “Broccoli is one of the vegetables they actually like, so I’m glad it’s the one (scientists) have been working on,” she said. “This wouldn’t work if it had been mushrooms or asparagus.”
TSA Agent Leaves Wild Note After Finding Sex Toy in Luggage
A TSA agent leaves a wild note after finding a sex toy in a passenger’s luggage. An alert Transportation Security Administration screener at New Jersey’s Newark Airport apparently spotted a “sex toy” stuffed inside a passenger’s luggage Saturday and offered the traveler some encouragement.
“Get your freak on girl” was found written in black ink on the back of a TSA notice, passenger Jill Filipovic revealed on her Twitter page.
“Just unpacked my suitcase and found this note from TSA,” she tweeted. “Guess they discovered a ‘personal item’ in my bag. Wow.” Jill Filipovic says she received an unexpected note from a TSA agent on a recent trip.
She identified the item in an email to New York Magazine:
“It was a $15 bullet vibe from Babeland, about the most basic sex toy you can imagine. It has now been officially retired, since I have no idea if the TSA agents manhandled it.”
Jill Filipovic discovered the note on Sunday after she landed in Dublin, she said. She wrote on her blog, Feministe, that the message was “wildly inappropriate” but she “died laughing” about it in her hotel room.
But she told FoxNews.com in an email Monday evening that she’s transitioning to being “pretty disturbed” by the note. She said these agents are given a lot of authority with little oversight.
She wrote that she suspects “whoever left the note felt comfortable doing so (I also suspect that they believed most women would be embarrassed to be “caught” with personal items and wouldn’t file a complaint),” she wrote in the email. “That is certainly cause for concern.”
TSA said in a statement to FoxNews.com that there is no evidence to suggest one of its agents was behind the note.
Greg Soule, a TSA spokesman, said Filipovic has not filed a complaint about the incident, but the TSA “takes all allegations of inappropriate conduct seriously and is investigating this claim.”
Filipovic said she is not looking to get anyone fired over the incident, but she received a lot of feedback from others with other stories of public humiliation at the hands of TSA. She said she hopes the TSA addresses the larger issue, not just this one case.
Filipovic reportedly will file a complaint with the TSA when she returns to the U.S.
More than 800,000 subscribers fled Netflix in the third quarter amid rising prices and growing anger at the company’s flip-flopping business model.
Alongside of those customers went a lot of goodwill with investors, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Netflix shares traded around $75 for the first time in 18 months, a 36 percent plunge Tuesday that continued a dramatic tumble that has erased about $12 billion from the company’s market value in just 104 days.
In other words, if you owned 1,000 shares of NFLX stock on Friday, it was worth $118,840. As of 11:48 a.m., that same stock was worth $77,690 — a loss of $41,150 on paper.
The video-rental company was haunted by its decision to raise prices and its admittedly botched effort to divorce rentals of DVDs from streaming video services, admitted Reed Hastings, Netflix’s chief executive officer.
“We made a couple of big mistakes this year,” Hastings said. “It’s up to us to own up to those mistakes and to move forward.”
Before moving ahead, further retreats may still be required. Netflix added to investor concerns by projecting that it would begin losing money for a few quarters starting in the first period of 2012, because of costs associated with an expansion in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Following the company’s quarterly report Monday evening, Netflix shares were down 36 percent in Tuesday morning trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market, to $76. The stock is down more than 75 percent from its all-time high of $304.79 on July 13, the day after the company announced the price changes.
Family Stations’ End Time prophet, Harold Camping, has been unusually silent since his May 21 rapture prediction failed to materialize in the terrifying manner he envisioned.
At that time, he rationalized the anticlimactic event as a “spiritual rapture,” in which sinners were placed on God’s naughty list while those slated for salvation were duly noted on His nice list. “More than ‘thy rod and thy staff,’ it seems that the Lord operates more bureaucratically,” said a spokesperson for Family Stations. “I guess you could look at it more from the perspective of ‘thy clipboard and thy form in triplicate.’ God may not play dice, as they say, but it seems that He’s a stickler for lists, process optimization and organizational best practices.”
Back in May, Camping described a very corporeal apocalypse, featuring angels with bloody wings and a landscape strewn with carnage: “Judgment Day is feared by the world and is the day that God will destroy the world because of the sins of mankind.
There’s no greater expression of the Lord’s undying love than tearing apart billions of men, women, and children through a series of excruciating terrors, drawn out over a five-month period of ongoing torture. As warrior angels descend from the heavens to feast on the entrails of your babies, take comfort in knowing that after their bones have been picked clean, and their screams of anguish have turned to gurgles of blood and despair, a better life awaits them.”
Now, however, Camping has replaced some of his original fire and brimstone with bankruptcy and metaphor. Like the poet T.S. Eliot, Camping feels the world may end in a whimper. He cited the ruin of economies in Greece, the United States, Spain, Italy and other “sodomite” nations where homosexuality runs rampant. Like it or not, Camping explained, more devout regions in the Middle East enjoy solid financial positions “because, as Iran’s president said, they have no gays there. I mean, Greece practically invented gay. And America’s political system is based on the ramblings of Plato, so our entire foundation is gay.” He also mentioned the minor earthquake that shook Berkeley, Calif., this morning, noting its proximity to San Francisco.
Critics again dismissed Camping’s prophesies, illustrating that Camping suffered a stroke in June but was not taken to Heaven, calling into doubt his own credentials with the Almighty.
Still, adopting a “better safe than sorry” mentality, Piers Addleson’s Pea House will be offering a “last meal” special until the world ends this evening (“Get Your Last Meal Here — It’s Your Last Rite”). Local retailers will also be selling their remaining Rapture Kits left over from May, at discounted prices.
And although skeptical, principals at the Westboro Baptist Church decided to hedge their bets by releasing a call for supporters to gather this evening and organize a protest for the six billion funerals likely to take place should the Lord decide to end the world. The controversial church also erected a giant pole outside its Kansas headquarters to count down the End Time in a fashion similar to the glowing ball over Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Their structure features a life-sized crucifix with an effigy of Harold Camping in drag that will begin its descent around 6:00 p.m. local time.
Longtime dictator of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, has been killed following the capture of his hometown of Sirte.
There were confusing reports of Gaddafi’s capture and death, and questions remained over exactly how he was killed.
Arab broadcasters showed graphic images of the balding, goateed Gaddafi – wounded, with a bloodied face and shirt – but alive. Later video showed fighters rolling Gaddafi’s lifeless body over on the pavement, stripped to the waist and a pool of blood under his head.
While he was still alive, the fighters drove him around lying on the hood of a truck, perhaps to parade him in public. One fighter held him down, pressing on his thigh with a pair of shoes in a show of contempt.
Standing upright, he is shoved along a Sirte road by fighters who chanted “God is great.”
Gaddafi appears to struggle against them, stumbling and shouting as the fighters push him onto the hood of a pickup truck.
“We want him alive. We want him alive,” one man shouted before Gaddafi is dragged away, some fighters pulling his hair, toward an ambulance.
Most accounts agreed Gaddafi had been holed up with heavily armed supporters in the last few buildings held by regime loyalists in the Mediterranean coastal town, furiously battling revolutionary fighters. The battle for Sirte has been raging for more than a month.
At one point, a convoy tried to flee and was hit by NATO airstrikes, carried out by French warplanes. France’s Defense Minister Gerard Longuet said the 80-vehicle convoy was carrying Gaddafi and was trying to escape the city. The strikes stopped the convoy but did not destroy it, and then revolutionary fighters moved in on the vehicle carrying Gaddafi.
One fighter who said he was at the battle told AP Television News that the final fight took place at an opulent compound. Adel Busamir said the convoy tried to break out but after being hit, it turned back and re-entered the compound. Several hundred fighters attacked.
“We found him there,” Busamir said of Gaddafi. “We saw them beating him (Gaddafi) and someone shot him with a 9mm pistol … then they took him away.”
Military spokesman Col. Ahmed Bani in Tripoli told Al-Jazeera TV that a wounded Gaddafi “tried to resist (revolutionary forces) so they took him down.”
Fathi Bashaga, spokesman for the Misrata military council, whose forces were involved in the battle, said fighters encircled the convoy and exchanged fire. In one vehicle, they found Gaddafi, wounded in the neck, and took him to an ambulance. “What do you want?” Gaddafi asked the approaching revolutionaries, Bashaga said, citing witnesses.
Gaddafi bled to death from his wounds a half-hour later, he said. Fighters said he died in the ambulance en route to Misrata, 120 miles from Sirte.
Abdel-Jalil Abdel-Aziz, a doctor who accompanied the body in the ambulance and examined it, said Gaddafi died from two bullet wounds – to the head and chest.
“You can’t imagine my happiness today. I can’t describe my happiness,” he told The Associated Press. “The tyranny is gone. Now the Libyan people can rest.”
In the United States, President Obama addressed the death of Gaddafi in a press conference. “The Transitional National Council informed the United States of Gaddafi’s death shortly before Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril’s announcement to his nation that the moment so many had waited for had come, a U.S. official said. The White House and State Department were expected to release official responses later Thursday,” Obama said, according to the Associated Press. “You have won your revolution,” he continued, “One of the world’s longest-serving dictators is no more.”
In Tripoli, celebrations are already underway with gunfire and honking. “We’ve heard quite a lot of celebratory gunfire,” Caroline Hawley reports for the BBC.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Libya on Tuesday to offer a new aid package. She told students during a gathering in Tripoli, “We hope [Gaddafi] can be captured or killed soon so that you don’t have to fear him any longer.”
Gaddafi was ousted from power in August, and his whereabouts have been unknown for months. The Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, accused Libya’s former ruler of crimes against humanity.
Reuters is also reporting that an official from the National Transitional Council, Libya’s interim government, has confirmed the death of Abu Bakr Yunis Jabr, Gaddafi’s Minister of Defense.
At least that was the approach taken by a Massachusetts family Tuesday after they lost their way amidst seven acres of nine-foot corn stalks and became scared.
Fearing for the safety of their 5-year-old and 3-week-old children, the couple, whose names were not released, used a cellphone to call 911 just after dusk on Tuesday night.
“We came in during the day time and we got completely lost and we have no idea where we are,” the caller told the 911 operator. “I’m really scared. It’s really dark and we’ve got a 3-week-old baby with us.”
The family was trying to find their way through the maze at Connors Farm in Danvers, Mass.
“We thought this could be fun. Instead it’s a nightmare,” the couple told 911.
Police quickly alerted farm management of the family’s situation, and sent a rescue team, K-9 unit and all, to the farm.
“They responded so fast,” Bob Connor, the farm’s owner, told “Good Morning America.” “It was unbelievable how fast they came up.”
The quick-thinking 911 dispatcher instructed the parents to yell out, “Hello K-9!” until they were finally escorted out to safety.
The entire search, and rescue, took all of about five minutes, according to Connor.
It turns out the family was just 25 feet from the exit when they were found by a police officer.
“They were in the heart of the maze,” Connor said of the family’s location. “Bridge, hanging out by bridge, right in the center of the horse.”
Connor said the family is the first this year to get stuck in the maze, which features maps and signs along the way to help people find their way.
The maze path has been a part of the Connor Farm for the past five years.
“We designed the maze for people to get lost but it’s all about family fun and it’s unfortunate that the family got stuck,” he said. “That’s not our goal. We want a positive experience for all.”
While the family, who declined an offer of free tickets from the farm’s management to give the maze another try, is probably hoping to erase the experience from their family scrapbook, Connors Farm is not.
“We are going to put a mark in the area where the family got lost,” Connor told “GMA.” “We’re going to say ‘This is the famous point where the family got lost.’”
The online dating pros and cons are numerous. As more and more people try to find love online, some sites are getting more clever. They doing some pretty cool things to make sure people have a great online dating experience.
We’re moving more of our social lives online and updating these sites at the speed of technology, but what about our romantic lives? Do we update our partner-seeking strategy as often as our cell phones?
As online dating becomes increasingly common, the ways people are meeting via the Internet are becoming more diverse.
Laurie Davis met her boyfriend on Twitter two years ago and is the founder and CEO of eFlirtexpert.com. She told FoxNews.com, “Dating is evolving… The niche sites that are popping up now are much more exciting because they’re giving you access to a much more select group of people.”
With the addition of creative themes, the latest in mobile technology and novel payment plans, these new dating sites are challenging the domination of the big three: Match.com, eHarmony and LavaLife. These sites rely on their marketing and vast user bases to lure in flummoxed potential daters.
However, it turns out jumping into such a gigantic pool of singles isn’t the personalized experience some users crave. To capture the niche user, these sites are thinking differently about how to connect their users with a date (or a group of dates).
Company: HowAboutWe Stats: 400,000 dates posted. $28/month Founded by: Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout Big Idea: Focus on proposing a creative date
Schechter and Schildkrout realized answering lots of questions, filling profiles with information and having a vast pool to choose from wasn’t why people joined dating sites. Instead, users simply wanted to go on a good date!
From this idea sprang the title of the site and the execution of the idea all in one. Logging on, the singles finish the phrase “How About We…” with an activity for their date. Once posted other singles can browse and click if they’re “intrigued.”
Davis feels “Their new formula helps singles connect in a more natural way.” She goes on to add the idea is actually innovative in the world of online dating. “Proposing a date gives singles an immediate topic of conversation for emails and way to connect, and it’s a simple transition to dating offline.”
Company: Sparkology Stats: Not open to the general public. Women: $15/month. Men: $15 to contact 5 women. Founded by: Alex Furmansky Big Idea: Invite-only. Men paying for packs and women pay monthly to eliminate spamming
Sparkology wanted to stop the downfalls of online dating, the copycat generic messages, the fake profiles, and accounts that have sat without an update for years. Founder Alex Furmansky solved the problem by making the site more exclusive. This way the site filter users that don’t fit the community.
Furmanskey spoke to FoxNews.com about Sparkology, “The opportunity lies in focusing on a specific demographic and offering them a superior experience that a middle-market behemoth could never match.”
On Sparkology, the men must be verified graduates of “top universities” with the site “focusing on the unique needs of young professionals in major cities.” The gamechanger has to do with the contact system. On Sparkology, men buy a “Spark Pack” to initiate conversations. The site says this method “eliminates unwanted impersonal e-mails. Women receive meaningful interactions from men that are genuinely interested, while men no longer need to spam dozens of profiles to get a response.”
Additionally, Sparkology uses behavioral monitoring; following you through the site and tailoring your matches based on the actions you take while logged in. They equate the service to Pandora or Netflix, but instead of media they use the monitoring to “help you find your perfect match.”
Company: OKCupid Stats: 7 million members. Free for Basic service. $9.95/month for Premium. Founded by: Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan, Christian Rudder and Max Krohn Big Idea: Use data mining to match singles interests/activities.
While OKcupid isn’t exactly a new site, it was founded in 2004, its using some novel ideas concerning data-mining. Data-mining involves using computers to sort through massive amounts of data to find patterns that wouldn’t be apparent by browsing one profile at a time.
These datasets went viral around the internet and caught the attention of many around the internet — including Match.com who bought OKCupid for $50 million in September 2010.
“Part of what makes the site brilliant is the incorporation of social networking aspects and gaming schematics. But at the end of the day, it is still undeniably a site to meet your next date,” Davis told FoxNews.com.
Company: Ignighter Stats: 2 million members. Range of prices from $10 to $45/year Founded by: Kevin Owocki, Daniel Osit, and Adam Sachs Big Idea: Group dating
Ignighter started in Manhattan back in 2008, but didn’t readily catch on. On their about page, it says, “90 percent of the time meeting someone one-on-one is more awkward than a junior high dance.” Their goal was to get groups of friends together to meet and mingle. The idea being with the group people would feel less awkward and enjoy each other’s company without the pressure of one-on-one interaction.
While the site didn’t take off domestically, it has a large following internationally in places where singles dating is discouraged. In India, cultural traditions bar one-on-one dates, but group dating through Ignighter is accepted and the site has flourished.
According to FoxNews.com, “The focus on India has encouraged many U.S. entrepreneurs to explore the national territory by creating sites like DuoDater, FourTonight and DatingInGroups.”
Company: Meexo Stats: Unknown Founded by: Dav Yaginuma and Romain David Big Idea: Social gaming and mobile access to create a fun mobile app.
Meexo takes the dating site mobile. According to Meexo, “The more you use Meexo, the more Meexo becomes relevant to you,” similar to the behavioral monitoring of other sites. While Meexo has yet to launch, it made a splash at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference back in September. Meexo will hit the iPhone “soon” according to their site.
“Meexo … is attempting to bridge the gap between location-based gaming and romance,” Davis said. “Armed with their research into ‘what women want,’ the app could be the next best thing.”
When he was 8 years old, Gabriel See got a score on the math part of the SAT that would be the envy of most high-school seniors.
When he was 9, he galloped through high-school Advanced Placement math and science classes — calculus, statistics, physics, chemistry and biology — scoring a perfect 5 in each subject.
When he was 10, he worked on T-cell receptor research at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
When he was 11, he won a silver medal at a competition on synthetic biology for undergraduate college students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Last month, at 13, Gabriel was named one of the top 10 high-school inventors in the country by Popular Science magazine, even though, technically, he’s attending a junior-high school.
Ernest Henley, physics professor, dean emeritus at the University of Washington and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has never met a student quite like him. “Frankly, I have never seen a boy of his age who displays as much intelligence and aptitude for learning,” Henley said. “He is one of a kind.”
That kind of off-the-charts intelligence comes with a conundrum, though: Because he’s only 13, Gabriel is not emotionally ready to handle programs designed for older students. His intellectual abilities raise the question: How do you map out an education for a boy at the extreme end of the gifted population?
“Honestly, I don’t know what’s next for Gabriel,” said Dan Phelan, who oversees accelerated programs for the Lake Washington School District. “All of us are puzzling a bit right now … He’s doing work that’s way beyond what I can understand. But socially, he’s not ready to be set loose in the adult world.”
Gabriel’s father, Jason See, said: “Trying to find the right program for him is very difficult. There is no program that caters to his level. He is out of the norm for the supergifted.”
Educating Gabriel See
His parents, Jason and Valerie, want him to have a normal teenage upbringing, so for half the day Gabriel attends a small, arts-oriented junior-high school in the Lake Washington School District called Renaissance School of Art and Reasoning, where he takes dance, drama and language arts.
He started taking upper-level math classes at the UW in 2009, and in 2010 began taking graduate math classes; this quarter, he’s taking applied linear algebra. He’s on the YMCA Sammamish Swim Team, takes music classes and plays Ultimate Frisbee on Fridays.
Quiet and reserved, Gabriel is most comfortable discussing advanced mathematics or molecular biology. He’s not good with questions about typical teenage pursuits, but he will explain to you the concepts he is studying in applied linear algebra this fall, if you are smart enough to understand him.
When he’s not in class, he’s working through a stack of books at home; he keeps a list of everything he has read. He’s absorbed 52 textbooks on science and math: read the physics lectures of Richard Feynman, and books on robot programming, systems biology, immunobiology, fractals, Latin (a new passion), music theory and the work of Fibonacci, René Descartes, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, among others.
He’s studied chaos theory, string theory, quantum mechanics and nuclear science. Along the way, he’s also devoured popular fiction and classic literature — Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia and most of the works of William Shakespeare (“Not all of them,” he notes, modestly).
He has a younger brother, Michael, 10, and the two boys are especially close, his mother said.
Gabriel has a laser focus on math and science, but the UW’s Robinson Center program for early-entrance students — those younger than 15 — is not a good fit because he has already skipped over so much undergraduate work, his dad says.
“Keeping him engaged is critical, and so far, reasonably successful,” said William Monahan, Gabriel’s Advanced Placement (AP) biology teacher at Eastlake High.
A unique experience
In elementary school, Gabriel was placed in the district’s program for highly capable students, but it wasn’t until third grade that the adults around him started to realize the depths of his intellectual abilities.
At age 8, he began teaching himself calculus and physics from sources he found on the Internet. Curious to know how much he was learning, his parents signed him up for the SAT; he scored a 720 out of 800 on the math portion, placing him in the 95th percentile for college-bound high-school students.
That score plus Gabriel’s math notations — he had written out pages and pages of solutions to math and physics problems — sent the Sees to Elizabeth Sirjani, who was then the math chair at Eastlake. She confirmed that Gabriel had taught himself AP-level math and physics work on his own.
“We started scrambling then,” said Phelan, of the Lake Washington district’s accelerated program.
Gabriel began taking math and science at Eastlake, while remaining in elementary school for music, gym class, recess and library. When he was 9, he joined Monahan’s biology class, a college-level course usually taken by high-school juniors and seniors.
Too small to see what was going on while sitting in a regular chair, Gabriel often ended up perched on a table, his short legs swinging in space, Monahan said. By November, he had finished reading the AP biology textbook on his own. He grasped the science quicker than students twice his age, and when it was time to do a biology lab, “he would get in there and tell the seniors, ‘Let me get it done,’ ” Monahan said.
“It’s been, almost at every turn in the road, a unique experience,” he added. “It’s like a beautiful mind — we’re talking about something that’s pretty unique here.”
His teachers say Gabriel is capable of digesting and storing information in great gulps, and then making connections with other things he had already learned.
“Everything I threw at him, he just got,” said Melissa Nivala, who was a graduate student in the applied math department at the UW in 2007 when she began tutoring Gabriel in graduate-level math. “And he loved it. We would work until I was mentally exhausted. I would tell him, ‘OK, we need to stop, because I’m tired of thinking.’ ”
Nivala would give Gabriel a textbook on a subject — say, chaos theory — and Gabriel would read the book in a few days. He could then answer specific questions and open-ended questions on the subject. He even remembered the exact page number in the book where certain formulas first appeared, Nivala said, hinting at a photographic-like memory.
For any parent whose child has unusual intellectual gifts, finding the right program is a challenge; for Gabriel’s parents, it’s been that process on steroids. In 2008, Jason See found a way for Gabriel to do research at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
And in 2009, he persuaded professors in the UW’s Department of Bioengineering to let Gabriel join a team that was assembling an entry for MIT’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition for undergraduates.
Jason See keeps a thick folder, filled with letters of recommendation from professors, test scores and transcripts, to help reinforce the somewhat hard-to-fathom story of his son’s accomplishments.
“Gabriel’s dad is a pretty good advocate for him,” Phelan said.
The iGEM competition has been Gabriel’s most public success, and it’s what caught the eye of Popular Science’s editors.
“We originally had some other undergraduates interested in the project,” said postdoctoral student Sean Sleight. “He (Gabriel) pretty much intimidated them, because he was so brilliant. We kind of joke that he did more in one summer than a team of undergraduates.”
With occasional help from bioengineering professor Herbert Sauro, Gabriel built a prototype model of a robot that could disperse small amounts of fluid into a plate of 96 wells. The greatest challenge was getting the robot to make tiny, precise movements in space — requiring Gabriel to puzzle out math formulas, and then write original computer programming that would allow the robot to move in three dimensions.
Gabriel is quick to point out that he wasn’t successful right away: “The first one failed mostly because it was unstable.”
The project required him to do three-dimensional trigonometry, which “is not elementary stuff — you do that in university,” Sauro said. “And he worked it out himself.”
The project won a silver medal. “There was quite a bit of buzz that year at iGEM,” Sleight said. “Here’s this 11-year-old that turns everything on its head.”
Gabriel’s machine could be built for about $750, much less than the $10,000 price tag for such machines, which would make it more affordable to startup companies and small universities. Because the interface is not user-friendly, though, it’s not a product that could be built for the mass market, Sauro said. Still, it hints at Gabriel’s potential — an intellect so powerful already that he can see unique solutions, or possibly find ways around problems that stump other researchers.
“Maybe nobody will ever stamp his diploma, but he will be doing research that far exceeds what most people can comprehend,” Monahan said.
“Gabriel See will probably find a cure for cancer,” Sleight said. “Or something bigger.”
Steve Jobs saw the future and led the world to it. He moved technology from garages to pockets, took entertainment from discs to bytes and turned gadgets into extensions of the people who use them.
Jobs, who founded and ran Apple, told us what we needed before we wanted it.
“To some people, this is like Elvis Presley or John Lennon. It’s a change in our times. It’s the end of an era,” said Scott Robbins, 34, a barber and an Apple fan. “It’s like the end of the innovators.”
Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011, after a long battle with cancer and other health issues.
Steve Jobs, the Apple founder and former CEO who invented and masterfully marketed ever-sleeker gadgets that transformed everyday technology, from the personal computer to the iPod and iPhone, has died at age 56.
FBN’s Shibani Joshi on how Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs’ innovations have impacted people globally.
Fortune Magazine Senior Editor-at-Large Adam Lashinsky on the death of Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs and how he turned Apple around after his return in 1997.
Apple announced his death without giving a specific cause. He died peacefully on Wednesday, according to a statement from family members who were present. He was 56.
“Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives,” Apple’s board said in a statement. “The world is immeasurably better because of Steve.”
President Barack Obama said in a statement that Jobs “exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity.”
“Steve was among the greatest of American innovators — brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world and talented enough to do it,” he said.
Jobs had battled cancer in 2004 and underwent a liver transplant in 2009 after taking a leave of absence for unspecified health problems. He took another leave of absence in January — his third since his health problems began — and resigned in August. Jobs became Apple’s chairman and handed the CEO job over to his hand-picked successor, Tim Cook.
Outside Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, three flags — an American flag, a California state flag and an Apple flag — were flying at half-staff late Wednesday.
“Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor.” Cook wrote in an email to Apple’s employees. “Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”
The news Apple fans and shareholders had been dreading came the day after Apple unveiled its latest iPhone, a device that got a lukewarm reception. Perhaps, there would have been more excitement had Jobs been well enough to show it off with his trademark theatrics.
Jobs started Apple with a high school friend in a Silicon Valley garage in 1976, was forced out a decade later and returned in 1997 to rescue the company. During his second stint, it grew into the most valuable technology company in the world with a market value of $351 billion. Almost all that wealth has been created since Jobs’ return.
Cultivating Apple’s countercultural sensibility and a minimalist design ethic, Jobs rolled out one sensational product after another, even in the face of the late-2000s recession and his own failing health.
He helped change computers from a geeky hobbyist’s obsession to a necessity of modern life at work and home, and in the process he upended not just personal technology but the cellphone and music industries.
For transformation of American industry, he has few rivals. He has long been linked to his personal computer-age contemporary, Bill Gates, and has drawn comparisons to other creative geniuses such as Walt Disney. Jobs died as Walt Disney Co.’s largest shareholder, a by-product of his decision to sell computer animation studio Pixar in 2006.
Perhaps most influentially, Jobs in 2001 launched the iPod, which offered “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Over the next 10 years, its white earphones and thumb-dial control seemed to become more ubiquitous than the wristwatch.
In 2007 came the touch-screen iPhone, joined a year later by Apple’s App Store, where developers could sell iPhone “apps” which made the phone a device not just for making calls but also for managing money, editing photos, playing games and social networking. And in 2010, Jobs introduced the iPad, a tablet-sized, all-touch computer that took off even though market analysts said no one really needed one.
By 2011, Apple had become the second-largest company of any kind in the United States by market value. In August, it briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the most valuable company.
Under Jobs, the company cloaked itself in secrecy to build frenzied anticipation for each of its new products. Jobs himself had a wizardly sense of what his customers wanted, and where demand didn’t exist, he leveraged a cult-like following to create it.
When he spoke at Apple presentations, almost always in faded blue jeans, sneakers and a black mock turtleneck, legions of Apple acolytes listened to every word. He often boasted about Apple successes, then coyly added a coda — “one more thing” — before introducing its latest ambitious idea.
In later years, Apple investors also watched these appearances for clues about his health. Jobs revealed in 2004 that he had been diagnosed with a very rare form of pancreatic cancer — an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. He underwent surgery and said he had been cured. In 2009, following weight loss he initially attributed to a hormonal imbalance, he abruptly took a six-month leave. During that time, he received a liver transplant that became public two months after it was performed.
He went on another medical leave in January 2011, this time for an unspecified duration. He never went back and resigned as CEO in August, though he stayed on as chairman. Consistent with his penchant for secrecy, he didn’t reference his illness in his resignation letter.
Steven Paul Jobs was born Feb. 24, 1955, in San Francisco to Joanne Simpson, then an unmarried graduate student, and Abdulfattah Jandali, a student from Syria. Simpson gave Jobs up for adoption, though she married Jandali and a few years later had a second child with him, Mona Simpson, who became a novelist.
Steven was adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs of Los Altos, California, a working-class couple who nurtured his early interest in electronics. He saw his first computer terminal at NASA’s Ames Research Center when he was around 11 and landed a summer job at Hewlett-Packard before he had finished high school.
Jobs enrolled in Reed College in Portland, Ore., in 1972 but dropped out after six months.
“All of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it,” he said at a Stanford University commencement address in 2005. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.”
When he returned to California in 1974, Jobs worked for video game maker Atari and attended meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club — a group of computer hobbyists — with Steve Wozniak, a high school friend who was a few years older.
Wozniak’s homemade computer drew attention from other enthusiasts, but Jobs saw its potential far beyond the geeky hobbyists of the time. The pair started Apple Computer Inc. in Jobs’ parents’ garage in 1976. According to Wozniak, Jobs suggested the name after visiting an “apple orchard” that Wozniak said was actually a commune.
Their first creation was the Apple I — essentially, the guts of a computer without a case, keyboard or monitor.
The Apple II, which hit the market in 1977, was their first machine for the masses. It became so popular that Jobs was worth $100 million by age 25.
During a 1979 visit to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Jobs again spotted mass potential in a niche invention: a computer that allowed people to control computers with the click of a mouse, not typed commands. He returned to Apple and ordered his engineering team to copy what he had seen.
It foreshadowed a propensity to take other people’s concepts, improve on them and spin them into wildly successful products. Under Jobs, Apple didn’t invent computers, digital music players or smartphones — it reinvented them for people who didn’t want to learn computer programming or negotiate the technical hassles of keeping their gadgets working.
“We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” Jobs said in an interview for the 1996 PBS series “Triumph of the Nerds.”
The engineers responded with two computers. The pricier Lisa — the same name as his daughter — launched to a cool reception in 1983. The less-expensive Macintosh, named for an employee’s favorite apple, exploded onto the scene in 1984.
The Mac was heralded by an epic Super Bowl commercial that referenced George Orwell’s “1984″ and captured Apple’s iconoclastic style. In the ad, expressionless drones marched through dark halls to an auditorium where a Big Brother-like figure lectures on a big screen. A woman in a bright track uniform burst into the hall and launched a hammer into the screen, which exploded, stunning the drones, as a narrator announced the arrival of the Mac.
There were early stumbles at Apple. Jobs clashed with colleagues and even the CEO he had hired away from Pepsi, John Sculley. And after an initial spike, Mac sales slowed, in part because few programs had been written for it.
With Apple’s stock price sinking, conflicts between Jobs and Sculley mounted. Sculley won over the board in 1985 and pushed Jobs out of his day-to-day role leading the Macintosh team. Jobs resigned his post as chairman of the board and left Apple within months.
“What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating,” Jobs said in his Stanford speech. “I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”
He got into two other companies: Next, a computer maker, and Pixar, a computer-animation studio that he bought from George Lucas for $10 million.
Pixar, ultimately the more successful venture, seemed at first a bottomless money pit. Then in 1995 came “Toy Story,” the first computer-animated full-length feature. Jobs used its success to negotiate a sweeter deal with Disney for Pixar’s next two films, “A Bug’s Life” and “Toy Story 2.” Jobs sold Pixar to The Walt Disney Co. for $7.4 billion in stock in a deal that got him a seat on Disney’s board and 138 million shares of stock that accounted for most of his fortune. Forbes magazine estimated Jobs was worth $7 billion in a survey last month.
With Next, Jobs came up with a cube-shaped computer. He was said to be obsessive about the tiniest details, insisting on design perfection even for the machine’s guts. The machine cost a pricey $6,500 to $10,000, and he never managed to spark much demand for it.
Ultimately, he shifted the focus to software — a move that paid off later when Apple bought Next for its operating system technology, the basis for the software still used in Mac computers.
By 1996, when Apple bought Next, Apple was in dire financial straits. It had lost more than $800 million in a year, dragged its heels in licensing Mac software for other computers and surrendered most of its market share to PCs that ran Windows.
Larry Ellison, Jobs’ close friend and fellow Silicon Valley billionaire and the CEO of Oracle Corp., publicly contemplated buying Apple in early 1997 and ousting its leadership. The idea fizzled, but Jobs stepped in as interim chief later that year.
He slashed unprofitable projects, narrowed the company’s focus and presided over a new marketing push to set the Mac apart from Windows, starting with a campaign encouraging computer users to “Think different.”
Apple’s first new product under his direction, the brightly colored, plastic iMac, launched in 1998 and sold about 2 million in its first year. Apple returned to profitability that year. Jobs dropped the “interim” from his title in 2000.
He changed his style, too, said Tim Bajarin, who met Jobs several times while covering the company for Creative Strategies.
“In the early days, he was in charge of every detail. The only way you could say it is, he was kind of a control freak,” he said. In his second stint, “he clearly was much more mellow and more mature.”
In the decade that followed, Jobs kept Apple profitable while pushing out an impressive roster of new products.
Apple’s popularity exploded in the 2000s. The iPod, smaller and sleeker with each generation, introduced many lifelong Windows users to their first Apple gadget.
The arrival of the iTunes music store in 2003 gave people a convenient way to buy music legally online, song by song. For the music industry, it was a mixed blessing. The industry got a way to reach Internet-savvy people who, in the age of Napster, were growing accustomed to downloading music free. But online sales also hastened the demise of CDs and established Apple as a gatekeeper, resulting in battles between Jobs and music executives over pricing and other issues.
Jobs’ command over gadget lovers and pop culture swelled to the point that, on the eve of the iPhone’s launch in 2007, faithful followers slept on sidewalks outside posh Apple stores for the chance to buy one. Three years later, at the iPad’s debut, the lines snaked around blocks and out through parking lots, even though people had the option to order one in advance.
The decade was not without its glitches. In the mid-2000s, Apple was swept up in a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into stock options backdating, a practice that artificially raised the value of options grants. But Jobs and Apple emerged unscathed after two former executives took the fall and eventually settled with the SEC.
Jobs’ personal ethos — a natural food lover who embraced Buddhism and New Age philosophy — was closely linked to the public persona he shaped for Apple. Apple itself became a statement against the commoditization of technology — a cynical view, to be sure, from a company whose computers can cost three or more times as much as those of its rivals.
For technology lovers, buying Apple products has meant gaining entrance to an exclusive club. At the top was a complicated and contradictory figure who was endlessly fascinating — even to his detractors, of which Jobs had many. Jobs was a hero to techno-geeks and a villain to partners he bullied and to workers whose projects he unceremoniously killed or claimed as his own.
Unauthorized biographer Alan Deutschman described him as “deeply moody and maddeningly erratic.” In his personal life, Jobs denied for two years that he was the father of Lisa, the baby born to his longtime girlfriend Chrisann Brennan in 1978.
Few seemed immune to Jobs’ charisma and will. He could adeptly convince those in his presence of just about anything — even if they disagreed again when he left the room and his magic wore off.
“He always has an aura around his persona,” said Bajarin, who met Jobs several times while covering the company for more than 20 years as a Creative Strategies analyst. “When you talk to him, you know you’re really talking to a brilliant mind.”
But Bajarin also remembers Jobs lashing out with profanity at an employee who interrupted their meeting. Jobs, the perfectionist, demanded greatness from everyone at Apple.
Jobs valued his privacy, but some details of his romantic and family life have been uncovered. In the early 1980s, Jobs dated the folk singer Joan Baez, according to Deutschman.
In 1989, Jobs spoke at Stanford’s graduate business school and met his wife, Laurene Powell, who was then a student. When she became pregnant, Jobs at first refused to marry her. It was a near-repeat of what had happened more than a decade earlier with then-girlfriend Brennan, Deutschman said, but eventually Jobs relented.
Jobs started looking for his biological family in his teens, according to an interview he gave to The New York Times in 1997. He found his biological sister when he was 27. They became friends, and through her Jobs met his biological mother. Few details of those relationships have been made public.
But the extent of Apple secrecy didn’t become clear until Jobs revealed in 2004 that he had been diagonosed with — and “cured” of — a rare form of operable pancreatic cancer called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. The company had sat on the news of his diagnosis for nine months while Jobs tried trumping the disease with a special diet, Fortune magazine reported in 2008.
In the years after his cancer was revealed, rumors about Jobs’ health would spark runs on Apple stock as investors worried the company, with no clear succession plan, would fall apart without him. Apple did little to ease those concerns. It kept the state of Jobs’ health a secret for as long as it could, then disclosed vague details when, in early 2009, it became clear he was again ill.
Jobs took a half-year medical leave of absence starting in January 2009, during which he had a liver transplant. Apple did not disclose the procedure at the time; two months later, The Wall Street Journal reported the fact and a doctor at the transplant hospital confirmed it.
In January 2011, Jobs announced another medical leave, his third, with no set duration. He returned to the spotlight briefly in March to personally unveil a second-generation iPad and again in June, when he showed off Apple’s iCloud music synching service. At both events, he looked frail in his signature jeans and mock turtleneck.
Less than three months later, Jobs resigned as CEO. In a letter addressed to Apple’s board and the “Apple community” Jobs said he “always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”
In 2005, following the bout with cancer, Jobs delivered Stanford University’s commencement speech.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” he said. “Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”
Jobs is survived by his biological mother; his sister Mona Simpson; Lisa Brennan-Jobs, his daughter with Brennan; wife Laurene, and their three children, Erin, Reed and Eve.
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