Let’s Close Out 2013 With This: The 20 Smartest Things Jeff Bezos Has Ever Said. (You’re Welcome.)

Gold has become the most hated commodity lately. What happened to the days when everyone had to own the precious metal? After all, more and more centr…

Gold has become the most hated commodity lately. What happened to the days when everyone had to own the precious metal? After all, more and more central banks around the world are printing money faster than ever. The Federal Reserve (U.S. central bank) is still creating $85 billion a month out of thin air. Other central banks in England, Japan, Asia, and Europe continue to do the same thing. So why has gold struggled so much? It seems that gold is now trading inversely to the USD/JPY (U.S. Dollar vs the Japanese Yen). Today, the USD/JPY is falling sharply and this is causing gold futures to rally. Currently, the USD/JPY chart remains in an up-trend on the daily chart. Up-trending markets are very tough to fight since that is where the momentum is. Should the USD/JPY chart start to fall gold should start to trade higher. Traders and investors might need to take a wait and see approach, but I would say that you shouldn’t get too bearish on gold at this stage of the game. Gold could be setting up to make a sharp move higher very soon if that up-trend in the USD/JPY chart starts to reverse. Nicholas Santiago InTheMoneyStocks.com

Why is your credit card APR so high? Yahoo Finance’s Lauren Lyster explains in this new #JustExplainIt video: http://yhoo.it/19kQhaC

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Greece must step up efforts to reach an agreement with international lenders on how to close a 2 billion euro ($2.68 billion) financing gap in its 2014 budget, the head of euro zone finance ministers Jeroen Dijsselbloem said on Thursday.

Continued

With everyone’s attention turning to the debt ceiling X-Date of October 17 (or sooner now that the Pentagon is once again spending money like a drunken sailor following the recall of 400,000 workers or half of the total number fuloughed), some are wondering why is the stock market not reacting more violently. The generic response that has formed is that despite all the feamongering by Obama and the Treasury, even crossing the X-Date will hardly result in the apocalyptic outcome that so many predict as the Treasury can “prioritze payments”, i.e., paying some bills and not others, which as we explained before, means paying down debt obligations first, and everything else - whose non-payment does not constitute an event of default under US debt - last. In other words, if the US were to merely live within its means, it should have no problem remaining current on its interest expense even if that means slashing most other government programs.

Continued

Researchers Re-Engineer E-Coli DNA to Make it Programmable

A team of synthetic biologists led by Farren Isaacs at Yale University [has taken] Escherichia coli cells and replaced all of the UAG stop codons with UAAs. They also deleted the instructions for making the release factor that usually binds to UAG, effectively rendering UAG meaningless…

The next step was to assign a new meaning to UAG during protein production. The team did this by designing molecules called transfer RNAs and accompanying enzymes that would attach an unnatural amino acid – fed to the cell – wherever they spotted the UAG codon…

By reintroducing UAGs at specific locations, as the Yale team have done, unnatural amino acids can be added into proteins at will.

"We now have an organism that has a new code, and we can reliably and efficiently open up the chemical diversity of proteins," says Isaacs.

For example, artificial amino acids could be added that give proteins unusual properties, such as the ability to bind to metals – resulting in novel adhesives. Or enzymes could be developed that are activated only in the presence of other molecules – which could be useful for drugs. “The genetic code is conserved for all of life, so this is a fundamental step forward,” says Philipp Holliger of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK. He says that because so much of the genetic code is redundant, there might be other codons that could be reassigned to expand the chemistry of living organisms.

(via Reprogrammed bacterium speaks new language of life - life - 23 October 2013 - New Scientist)

US Olympic CEO: Russian bombings ‘a preview of what could happen’ in Sochi

(Photo via TODAY)

With just over a month to go before the Winter Olympics get underway in Russia, a top U.S. Olympic official addressed the pair of deadly attacks during a 24-hour period this week in the Russian city of Volgograd. 

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New Technology to Watch as phones and audio devices expand into the watch world. 

Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy Gear: A Review

The Galaxy Gear smartwatch, with a 1.67-inch OLED display, serves as a watch, a pedometer, a voice recorder, and a 2-megapixel camera/camcorder. When paired with the Note 3 via Bluetooth 4.0, this wrist-strapped device can make and take phone calls, send and receive text messages, and access Samsung’s Siri-like S-Voice assistant to make appointments, dictate messages, and more.

The Note 3 offers significant improvements over its successor: a larger, higher-definition display; a faster processor; a higher-capacity battery; and all of the advanced wireless sharing and gesture controls available on the Galaxy S 4. 

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