Danny Puff

On Wednesday, Apple posted quarterly net income that was flat from a year earlier, as a flood of new products meant high start-up costs for new production lines. The iPad Mini made its debut during the just-ended quarter, and the iPhone 5 came out in the closing days of the previous quarter. Here are details on the number of iPhones and iPads that Apple shipped in recent quarters, with percentage change from same period a year earlier.

Quarter ending Dec. 29, 2012: 47.8 million iPhones (up 29 percent), 22.9 million iPads (up 49 percent)

Quarter ending Sept. 29, 2012: 26.9 million iPhones (up 58 percent), 14.0 million iPads (up 26 percent)

Quarter ending June 30, 2012: 26.0 million iPhones (up 28 percent), 17.0 million iPads (up 84 percent)

Quarter ending March 31, 2012: 35.1 million iPhones (up 88 percent), 11.8 million iPads (increase of about 2.5 times)

Quarter ending Dec. 31, 2011: 37 million iPhones (more than double), 15.4 million iPads (more than double)

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SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc reported quarterly revenue that slightly missed Wall Street expectations as sales of its flagship iPhone came in below target, sending its shares down more than 4 percent.

The world's largest technology company shipped 47.8 million iPhones, lower than the roughly 50 million that Wall Street analysts had predicted. Sales of the iPad came in at 22.9 million in the fiscal first quarter, about in line with forecasts.

Sources this month have pointed to production cutbacks at Apple's component suppliers as a sign that demand may be waning for the iPhone, which accounts for half of the company's sales, and the iPad.

The disappointing numbers come after Apple undershot revenue targets in the previous two quarters. The results will prompt more questions on what Apple has in its product pipeline, and what it can do to attract new sales and maintain its growth trajectory.

Apple said on Wednesday its fiscal first quarter revenue rose to $54.5 billion, below the average analyst estimate of $54.73 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

For the fiscal first quarter it posted net income of $13.07 billion, or $13.81 a diluted share, compared to $13.06 billion, or $13.87 a share, a year earlier.

(Reporting By Poornima Gupta; Editing by Bernard Orr)

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NEW YORK (AP) -- It can store the information from a million CDs in a space no bigger than your little finger, and could keep it safe for centuries.

Is this some new electronic gadget? Nope. It's DNA.

The genetic material has long held all the information needed to make plants and animals, and now some scientists are saying it could help handle the growing storage needs of today's information society.

Researchers reported Wednesday that they had stored all 154 Shakespeare sonnets, a photo, a scientific paper, and a 26-second sound clip from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. That all fit in a barely visible bit of DNA in a test tube.

The process involved converting the ones and zeroes of digital information into the four-letter alphabet of DNA code. That code was used to create strands of synthetic DNA. Then machines "read" the DNA molecules and recovered the encoded information. That reading process took two weeks, but technological advances are driving that time down, said Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Hinxton, England. He's an author of a report published online by the journal Nature.

DNA could be useful for keeping huge amounts of information that must be kept for a long time but not retrieved very often, the researchers said. Storing the DNA would be relatively simple, they said: Just put it in a cold, dry and dark place and leave it alone.

The technology might work in the near term for large archives that have to be kept safe for centuries, like national historical records or huge library holdings, said study co-author Nick Goldman of the institute. Maybe in a decade it could become feasible for consumers to store information they want to have around in 50 years, like wedding photos or videos for future grandchildren, Goldman said in an email.

The researchers said they have no intention of putting storage DNA into a living thing, and that it couldn't accidentally become part of the genetic machinery of a living thing because of its coding scheme.

Sriram Kosuri, a Harvard researcher who co-authored a similar report last September, said both papers show advantages of DNA for long-term storage. But because of its technical limitations, "it's not going to replace your hard drive," he said.

Kosuri's co-author, Harvard DNA expert George Church, said the technology could let a person store all of Wikipedia on a fingertip, and all the world's information now stored on disk drives could fit in the palm of the hand.

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Online:

Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature

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Malcolm Ritter can be followed at http://twitter.com/malcolmritter

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WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) Gareth Morgan has a simple dream: a New Zealand free of pet cats that threaten native birds. But the environmental advocate has triggered a claws-out backlash with his anti-feline campaign.

Morgan called on his countrymen Tuesday to make their current cat their last in order to save the nation's unique bird species. He set up a website, called Cats To Go, depicting a tiny kitten with red devil's horns. The opening line: "That little ball of fluff you own is a natural born killer."

He doesn't recommended people euthanize their current cats "Not necessarily but that is an option" are the site's exact words but rather neuter them and not replace them when they die. Morgan, an economist and well-known businessman, also suggests people keep cats indoors and that local governments make registration mandatory.

Morgan's campaign is not sitting well in a country that boasts one of the highest cat ownership rates in the world.

"I say to Gareth Morgan, butt out of our lives," Bob Kerridge, the president of the Royal New Zealand Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told the current affairs television show Campbell Live. "Don't deprive us of the beautiful companionship that a cat can provide individually and as a family."

For thousands of years, New Zealand's native birds had no predators and flourished. Some species, like the kiwi, became flightless. But the arrival of mankind and its introduction of predators like cats, dogs and rodents have wiped out some native bird species altogether and endangered many others.

"Imagine a New Zealand teeming with native wildlife, penguins on the beach, kiwis roaming about in your garden," Morgan writes on his website. "Imagine hearing birdsong in our cities."

But many New Zealanders are against the campaign. Even on Morgan's website, about 70 percent of respondents were voting against making their current cat their last.

Morgan could not be reached for comment.

And the science remains unclear. Some argue that cats may actually help native birds by reducing the population of rodents, which sometimes feed on bird eggs.

Morgan's separate personal blog, in fact, has a separate campaign to raise $1 million to eradicate mice from the remote Antipodes Islands, where rodents are the only predators.

A 2011 survey by the New Zealand Companion Animal Council found that 48 percent of households in New Zealand owned at least one cat, a significantly higher rate than in other developed nations. The survey put the total cat population at 1.4 million.

In the U.S., 33 percent of households own at least one cat for a total of 86 million domestic cats, according to a 2012 survey by the American Pet Products Association.

Scientist David Winter said cats are indeed a problem in New Zealand, having contributed to the extinction of at least half a dozen New Zealand bird species. Writing on his blog "The Atavism," Winter said Morgan's campaign appeared designed to "start conversations."

Still, he added, "What hope is there for environmentalists in conversation where our side wants to take people's kittens away?"

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Online:

http://garethsworld.com/catstogo/

http://theatavism.blogspot.com/2013/01/cats-arent-evil-but-they-are-problem.html

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PARK CITY, Utah (AP) Roger Corman has been to the Cannes and Venice film festivals. But for some reason, the independent filmmaker who has nearly 400 movies to his credit has missed the Sundance Film Festival until now.

The video-game tale "Virtually Heroes" is the first Corman production to premiere at the indie-cinema showcase, appropriately playing Sundance's midnight-movie program of way-out horror, comedy and action.

True to Corman's low-budget approach, "Virtually Heroes" was made for less than $500,000 by blending combat footage from the producer's previous Vietnam war movies with a new story about two self-aware video-game characters (Robert Baker and Brent Chase) battling the Vietcong.

"I thought if I could find a way to use the big battle scenes from all of these pictures and put it together in a new picture and shoot just a short period of time to tie them all together, I could get a big-looking picture for very little money," Corman, 86, said in an interview alongside "Virtually Heroes" director G.J. Echternkamp.

Corman's films usually are considered schlock that falls somewhere well below B-movie grade. In fact, he's been called the "Orson Welles of the Z-movie."

But Corman felt director Echternkamp had come up with a clever twist that made "Virtually Heroes" right for Sundance. So he contacted festival officials, who agreed.

The movie's heroes come to question the reason for their existence in a world where they keep fighting the same battles and die over and over. It also features "Star Wars" hero Mark Hamill as an Obi-Wan Kenobi-style mentor dispensing wisdom to one of the soldiers.

While "Virtually Heroes" is his first Sundance premiere, Corman was the subject of the 2011 festival documentary "Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel," examining the nearly 60-year career of the maverick who helped launch the directing careers of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard and James Cameron.

Corman's films include such cult hits as "The Little Shop of Horrors," ''Grand Theft Auto," ''Piranha" and "Death Race 2000." In 2009, he received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement in independent film.

Echternkamp got the "Virtually Heroes" directing job with a little help from his mom, who was Corman's assistant. A documentary filmmaker making his narrative feature debut, Echternkamp likes the sound of it when Corman calls him the latest in a line of filmmakers who got their start in the prolific producer's camp.

"I'd love to be the next of those guys. But there's also guys you've hired who haven't become one of those guys," Echternkamp told Corman. "So I hope I'm one of the good ones and not one of the bad ones."

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PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) - In a world where men rule the voice-over industry, actress Lake Bell brings a tale of women versus men and old versus new in her directorial debut comedy.

"In A World," which premiered at the Sundance Film festival this week, follows voice-over artist Carol (Bell) attempting to follow in the daunting footsteps of her father (Fred Melamed), a famous and respected voice who is struggling to stay relevant as new talent emerges.

Written and directed by Bell, 33, who is best known for supporting roles in movies such as "No Strings Attached" and "What Happens in Vegas," "In A World" is a quirky comedy with an unlikely heroine.

Bell talked to Reuters about the struggles of being in the voice-over world, her disdain for women with "sexy baby" voices, and what her superhero power would be.

Q: What drew you to the voice-over world for your film?

A: "I always envisioned that I was going to be one of the great voice-over artists. I thought I was going to kill it when I got to Hollywood. Since I was a kid, I loved accents, I collected them ... I would manipulate my voice to make people laugh all the time. I liked this idea of being a blind voice - you could be any ethnicity, you could be from any country, you could be any race. I thought it was so cool that you wouldn't be judged by who you are."

Q: Your character, Carol, has to struggle with being a woman trying to break into the male-dominated world. Is that echoing the real-life industry?

A: "I started getting into the idea of the omniscient voice, the people who announce and tell you what to buy or how you should think about things, they help form your opinions. These random people from the sky, they always were male, and I thought it was an interesting subject to attack because why aren't there any ladies? What are we, not omniscient? Are we not God?"

Q: How much of your own career struggles are reflected in Carol's story?

A: "What's interesting about Carol's message is that she is a woman trying to find her voice, literally and also figuratively. As a filmmaker, I'm definitely embarking on this really beautiful journey of finding what my comedic voice is or what my filmic voice is.

"I'm lucky enough to have friends who took a chance on me and be in this film with me and respect me enough to let me direct them to do something different than maybe they've ever done before. There's definitely parallels in feeling like I'm finding my own voice."

Q: Was this an autobiographical film for you?

A: "It's not anymore. Draft one is autobiographical, but by draft 25, it's something else after so many rewrites, it takes on its own life. That's what's so cool about writing, you never know where it's going to lead. I often like to write when I'm acting in something else because then I can show up and be part of the machine and be around creative people, and then come home and go off into different worlds in my head."

Q: What do you want people to take away from watching this?

A: "I would hope in a fantasy world that the message is, people would somehow become aware of their own voice and respect it, because it's a privilege. Women are plagued by the "sexy baby" vocal virus that is taken on, that is rampant in this nation. I just think that people should take themselves more seriously and give themselves a little more credit."

Q: Do you have a dream role you'd like to play?

A: "The dream role is that I'm a superhero. I want to be a superhero ... I want to have a superhero outfit because I like dressing up a lot. That would be fun."

Q: What would your superhero power be?

A: "Right now, it'd be quelling the 'sexy baby' (voices) of the world and extinguishing them."

(Reporting By Piya Sinha-Roy, editing by Jill Serjeant and Christopher Wilson)

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TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion has released a new system to allow its biggest customers to use its new line of BlackBerry 10 smartphones on their own networks, paving the way for the January 30 launch of the make-or-break devices.

RIM said on Wednesday that the new device management system - BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES 10)- is now available to government agencies and corporate clients. The system lets clients support both corporate-and employee-owned devices and provides a single platform to manage BlackBerry, Android and Apple's iOS-based devices.

The Blackberry smartphones, powered by an all-new operating system, are pivotal to the future of RIM, which has ceded market share to Apple Inc's iPhone and devices powered by Google Inc's market-leading Android operating system.

RIM is now betting that its re-engineered new line of touch-screen and keyboard devices will help it win back consumers and market share.

The fate of the new smartphones could well be determined by the reception from RIM's major clients, many of whom have, so far, only stuck by RIM because of the strong security features that BlackBerry devices offer.

The new mobile device management system builds on RIM's core strength of security, but it offers a range of innovations that allow it to cater to the latest needs of IT departments, said Peter Devenyi, RIM's senior head of enterprise software.

"We definitely anticipate that (enterprise) customers will be making the switch to BB10 rapidly," said Devenyi, describing the feedback from government agencies and the business community as remarkably positive.

Both BES 10 and the new Blackberry 10 devices have already secured Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 certification, a coveted U.S. government security clearance that will allow government agencies to deploy the new devices as soon as they are launched.

BLACKBERRY BALANCE

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM said BES 10 also supports RIM's BlackBerry Balance technology, which allows IT departments and users to separate work applications and data on BlackBerry devices from personal content.

"BlackBerry Balance is a truly differentiated feature that's built into the core of BlackBerry 10," said Devenyi. "This opens up the world of personally owned devices in a way that make IT departments and corporations comfortable, because they can truly manage the corporate side of the device, while not inhibiting the use of the device by the individual who actually owns it."

This means private pictures, music and emails are safe, even if a company decides to wipe corporate content from a device.

Scotiabank analyst Gus Papageorgiou believes that this one feature alone is likely to be a big factor in swaying enterprise customers to upgrade to RIM's BlackBerry 10 devices.

"We believe BlackBerry Balance is the key feature which will drive enterprise demand," Papageorgiou said in a note to clients on Tuesday. "The BB10's ability to segment between corporate and personal settings will be a hit with enterprise IT departments and users alike."

RIM said its new platform will also offer a new corporate app store for BlackBerry 10 devices, allowing organizations to manage the deployment of in-house applications on employee-owned devices.

"We've been testing BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 in our environment and we're pleased with the manageability, security and reliability," said Peter Lesser, the head of global technology at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, in a statement issued by RIM.

(Reporting by Euan Rocha; Editing by Janet Guttsman and Andrew Hay)

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, signaled on Tuesday that despite earlier indications to the contrary, he may allow a vote on a possible ban on assault weapons.

Reid, a longtime gun-rights advocate from Nevada, recently indicated he would not permit a vote because the Republican-led House of Representatives was unlikely to go along with such a prohibition.

But after a weekly meeting with fellow Senate Democrats, Reid told reporters he expects "to have a free amendment process" on gun legislation.

That process could result in other Democrats proposing a possible resurrection of a 10-year ban on semi-automatic assault weapons that expired in 2004.

A series of shootings in the last two months, including one at an elementary school in Connecticut in which 20 children and six staff were killed, has triggered a renewed debate on gun control.

President Barack Obama proposed a package of measures last week to combat gun violence that includes a ban on assault weapons, limits on high-capacity ammunition clips, expanded mental health treatments and improved school security.

Powerful gun-rights groups oppose a ban on assault weapons and could seek to unseat any lawmaker who backs it, as they have tried to do in the past.

Reid said he expects the Senate Judiciary Committee, which opens hearings next week on proposals by Obama and others, to produce a bill. It is unclear if the measure will include a ban on assault weapons.

"It may not be everything everyone wants. But I hope it has stuff that is really important," Reid told reporters.

In a speech in Reno, Nevada, on Tuesday night, Wayne LaPierre, executive director of the National Rifle Association gun lobby, accused Obama of trying to take away fundamental rights and freedoms guaranteed to Americans under the U.S. Constitution.

"They are God-given freedoms. They belong to us in the United States of America as our birthright. No government gave them to us and no government can ever take them away," he told a hunting and conservation convention.

"That means we believe in our right to defend ourselves and our families with semi-automatic firearms technology. We believe that if neither the criminal nor the political class and their bodyguards and their security people are limited by magazine capacity, we should not be limited in our capacity either."

LaPierre also repeated opposition to expanded background checks for purchases of firearms proposed by Obama.

(Reporting By Thomas Ferraro and David Brunnstrom; editing by Fred Barbash and Christopher Wilson)

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Even when night blankets the land, some clouds high in the atmosphere may still glow, as seen in this photograph taken by a crewmember aboard the International Space Station on Jan. 5, looking down over French Polynesia in the South Pacific.

Known as polar mesospheric or noctilucent clouds, these formations have been spotted from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres on ground, in airplanes and on spacecraft, according to the NASA Earth Observatory.

The clouds, also called "night-shining" clouds, form about 47 to 53 miles (76 to 85 kilometers) above the Earth's surface, according to the Earth Observatory. They form near the boundary between two layers of the atmosphere called the mesosphere and the thermosphere, in a region called the mesopause.

The combination of low temperatures at this height and the cloud's position relative to the sun explains the glowing. At these altitudes, temperatures can drop below minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 130 degrees Celsius). Any water present in the atmosphere freezes into ice crystals. These sky-high crystals may then be illuminated by the sun, which has set from the point of view of people on the ground but can still backlight the clouds, the Earth Observatory reports.

The clouds are sensitive to changes in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, as well as high-altitude temperatures. They may also be getting brighter as a result of climate change, according to a recent study, which suggests that the upper atmosphere is more humid, resulting in more and brighter clouds.

Such clouds are most often seen in the far northern and southern latitudes (above 50 degrees) in the summer when, counter-intuitively, the mesosphere is coldest.

The orange band below the clouds in the astronaut's photo is the atmospheric layer known as the stratosphere, according to the Earth Observatory. Below the stratosphere is the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere nearest the ground, in which the bulk of Earth's weather occurs.

Reach Douglas Main at dmain@techmedianetwork.com. Follow him on Twitter @Douglas_Main. Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

In Images: Mysterious Night-Shining Clouds Image Gallery: Curious Clouds Image Gallery: Crazy Cloud Patterns Copyright 2013 OurAmazingPlanet, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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(Reuters) - Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber with his hordes of fans known of Beliebers became the King of Twitter on Tuesday, topping fellow pop star Lady Gaga as the user with the most followers.

Data from TwitterCounter.com showed that the 18-year-old Canadian singer jumped into the lead with 33.33 million followers, topping Lady Gaga's 33.32 million and ending her two-and-a-half year rule of the microblogging site.

A spokesman from TwitterCounter.com said Lady Gaga has held the top slot on Twitter since August 2010 when she overtook U.S. pop star Britney Spears.

Bieber rose to fame as a baby-faced pop star singing love songs such as "Baby" after being discovered on YouTube in 2008. He has released two No. 1 albums in the past 18 months - the holiday-themed "Under the Mistletoe" and "Believe."

Bieber was named by Forbes magazine in 2012 as the third-most powerful celebrity in the world and his huge following on Twitter was cited as a reason why marketers need to take notice of the 140-character micro-blogging site.

Lady Gaga has dropped to second in Twitter followed by singer Katy Perry in third with 31.49 million followers then Rihanna and Barack Obama with 26.17 million followers. Britney Spears has slipped to sixth place.

(Reporting by Belinda Goldsmith; editing by Patricia Reaney)

(You can see the Twitter top 100 list http://twittercounter.com/pages/100)

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