Culture influences brain function, study shows

Brain activity in East Asians and Americans as they make relative and absolute judgments. The arrows point to brain regions involved in attention that are engaged by more demanding tasks. Americans show more activity during relative judgments than absolute judgments, presumably because the former task is less familiar and hence more demanding for them. East Asians show the opposite pattern

People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.

Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns?

To find out, a team led by John Gabrieli, a professor at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, asked 10 East Asians recently arrived in the United States and 10 Americans to make quick perceptual judgments while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner--a technology that maps blood flow changes in the brain that correspond to mental operations.

The results are reported in the January issue of Psychological Science. Gabrieli's colleagues on the work were Trey Hedden, lead author of the paper and a research scientist at McGovern; Sarah Ketay and Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook; and Hazel Rose Markus of Stanford University.

Subjects were shown a sequence of stimuli consisting of lines within squares and were asked to compare each stimulus with the previous one. In some trials, they judged whether the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares (an absolute judgment of individual objects independent of context). In other trials, they decided whether the lines were in the same proportion to the squares, regardless of absolute size (a relative judgment of interdependent objects).

In previous behavioral studies of similar tasks, Americans were more accurate on absolute judgments, and East Asians on relative judgments. In the current study, the tasks were easy enough that there were no differences in performance between the two groups.

However, the two groups showed different patterns of brain activation when performing these tasks. Americans, when making relative judgments that are typically harder for them, activated brain regions involved in attention-demanding mental tasks. They showed much less activation of these regions when making the more culturally familiar absolute judgments. East Asians showed the opposite tendency, engaging the brain's attention system more for absolute judgments than for relative judgments.

"We were surprised at the magnitude of the difference between the two cultural groups, and also at how widespread the engagement of the brain's attention system became when making judgments outside the cultural comfort zone," says Hedden.

The researchers went on to show that the effect was greater in those individuals who identified more closely with their culture. They used questionnaires of preferences and values in social relations, such as whether an individual is responsible for the failure of a family member, to gauge cultural identification. Within both groups, stronger identification with their respective cultures was associated with a stronger culture-specific pattern of brain-activation.

How do these differences come about? "Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training," Gabrieli says. "It's fascinating that the way in which the brain responds to these simple drawings reflects, in a predictable way, how the individual thinks about independent or interdependent social relationships."

Gabrieli is the Grover Herman Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and holds an appointment at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and supported by the McGovern Institute.

For seawalls, beauty is in the eye of the holder

Maps of Cape Cod drawn over the last 150 years record major changes in the shoreline caused when storms pile up protective sand barriers or sweep them away. Without the sand spits (narrow barrier beaches) to absorb the energy of breaking waves, winter storms batter and erode the shoreline, sometimes carrying away buildings.

Focusing on the Cape Cod town of Chatham, Mass., Ole Madsen, the Donald and Martha Harleman Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, addressed this topic in a Jan. 7 IAP seminar titled "Seawalls: Are They Sons of Beaches or Not?" In January 1987, a fierce storm punched a hole in the sand spit protecting the town from the Atlantic Ocean. Waves that previously had pounded the sand barrier now traveled straight to the Chatham shoreline, eroding beaches and front yards. Within a year the beach had visibly diminished, and it continued to shrink for years until the northern end of the barrier island formed by the breach attached itself to the shore and the beach began to rebuild.

"As the beach retreats from erosion and your house threatens to collapse into the water, you may want a seawall, for example, constructed of large stones," said Madsen. "However, if you just protect your house, erosion will continue unabated or even increase on the neighbors' unprotected beach. For seawalls to offer good protection, everyone along the threatened coastline must agree to build a seawall, not just a few."

The intense nor'easter now commonly known as "The Perfect Storm," from the best-selling book and popular movie, hit Chatham hard on Halloween 1991. By the time it dispersed, 10 houses without seawalls had toppled into the ocean. The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection allows seawalls to be constructed to protect glacial moraine, but not sand dunes. Madsen suggests that Chatham would have suffered less damage if a seawall had been built along the entire coastline that was exposed to direct wave attack, rather than having unprotected stretches where waves could gouge out sand and destroy houses.

"Good seawalls can protect the shore and decrease the loss of sand for the whole beach," said Madsen. "But the wall must be continuous. If you interrupt the flow of sand along a beach with a jetty or seawall, increased erosion will occur downstream on someone else's beach or property."

MIT gas sensor is tiny, quick

MIT research scientist Luis Velasquez-Garcia, left, and Akintunde Ibitayo Akinwande, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, are developing a tiny sensor that can detect hazardous gases, including biochemical warfare agents
Energy-efficient device could quickly detect hazardous chemicals.
Engineers at MIT are developing a tiny sensor that could be used to detect minute quantities of hazardous gases, including toxic industrial chemicals and chemical warfare agents, much more quickly than current devices.

The researchers have taken the common techniques of gas chromatography and mass spectrometry and shrunk them to fit in a device the size of a computer mouse. Eventually, the team, led by MIT Professor Akintunde Ibitayo Akinwande, plans to build a detector about the size of a matchbox.

"Everything we're doing has been done on a macro scale. We are just scaling it down," said Akinwande, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and member of MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL).

Akinwande and MIT research scientist Luis Velasquez-Garcia plan to present their work at the Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) 2008 conference next week. In December, they presented at the International Electronic Devices Meeting.

Scaling down gas detectors makes them much easier to use in a real-world environment, where they could be dispersed in a building or outdoor area. Making the devices small also reduces the amount of power they consume and enhances their sensitivity to trace amounts of gases, Akinwande said.

He is leading an international team that includes scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Texas at Dallas, Clean Earth Technology and Raytheon, as well as MIT.

Their detector uses gas chromatography and mass spectrometry (GC-MS) to identify gas molecules by their telltale electronic signatures. Current versions of portable GC-MS machines, which take about 15 minutes to produce results, are around 40,000 cubic centimeters, about the size of a full paper grocery bag, and use 10,000 joules of energy.

The new, smaller version consumes about four joules and produces results in about four seconds.

The device, which the researchers plan to have completed within two years, could be used to help protect water supplies or for medical diagnostics, as well as to detect hazardous gases in the air.

The analyzer works by breaking gas molecules into ionized fragments, which can be detected by their specific charge (ratio of charge to molecular weight).

Gas molecules are broken apart either by stripping electrons off the molecules, or by bombarding them with electrons stripped from carbon nanotubes. The fragments are then sent through a long, narrow electric field. At the end of the field, the ions' charges are converted to voltage and measured by an electrometer, yielding the molecules' distinctive electronic signature.

Shrinking the device greatly reduces the energy needed to power it, in part because much of the energy is dedicated to creating a vacuum in the chamber where the electric field is located.

Another advantage of the small size is that smaller systems can be precisely built using microfabrication. Also, batch-fabrication will allow the detectors to be produced inexpensively.

The research, which started three years ago, is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass.

IAP class probes Singapore highway collapse

An extensive subway system with lines fanning out in many directions speeds transportation in small, crowded Singapore. On April 20, 2004, during construction for the new Circle line of the subway, a deep excavation suddenly collapsed. The catastrophe killed four people, twisted steel beams, swallowed two construction cranes and knocked out a substantial chunk of the main highway running over the tunnel.

"This was one of the largest failures of a civil engineering project under construction in about 50 years," said Professor Andrew Whittle of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in a Jan. 9 IAP class, "What Caused the Collapse of the Nicoll Highway in Singapore?"

Singapore authorities promptly began an intensive inquiry into the disaster, and Whittle was chosen by the Singaporean Land Transit Authority to be one of four international experts to investigate the accident and determine the causes. During what Whittle called "some of the most intense meetings I've ever attended," the experts studied the evidence and wrote a report on the collapse. Twenty ongoing excavation projects were temporarily shut down for design-practice reassessment, resulting in very large costs associated with delays and changes.

"Failure is always a combination of factors," said Whittle, who listed a series of cascading errors.

The original design misinterpreted the local geology and overestimated the soil shear strength in its analysis. The structure was therefore underdesigned to resist lateral earth pressures. Excavations for the subway extended more than 100 feet below the ground surface where the strongest marine clay was "weaker than the weakest clay in Boston," Whittle said.

There were also errors in detailing the structural connections for the structural bracing system; the collapse occurred when one level of bracing was overloaded and there was inadequate capacity to redistribute the loads among the remaining supports. Although large wall deflections occurred during the excavation, the measured strut loads were smaller than expected. As a result, the project engineers were apparently unaware of the potential for a catastrophic failure.

The complete findings from the official committee of inquiry were published in a 460-page report with detailed graphs and photos

Microsoft Corporation announced the opening of a sixth research lab near Mit

Microsoft to Open Research Center near MIT
Microsoft Corporation announced the opening of a sixth research lab in Cambridge, Mass. The new lab, which will open in July, continues the company's dedication to theoretical research, which has increased eightfold since 1997. The Boston area lab is to bring experts in computers and social science together in new interdisciplinary areas of research.

"Microsoft Research New England will create additional opportunities for researchers to pursue their passions in the Cambridge area, one of the world's foremost centers of innovation, setting the stage for new discoveries and scientific breakthroughs," said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

Veteran Microsoft researcher Jennifer Tour Chayes has been appointed the managing director of the new lab, the first woman appointed to lead one of Microsoft's international research labs.

"I hope my new role will serve as an inspiration for other women in scientific fields, and particularly for young girls who may be interested in math and science. I want to show them that math and science are cool, that research is creative and exciting, and that there is a path for women in technical fields at companies like Microsoft," Chayes said.

Besides her longtime work at Microsoft, she has also been a professor at the University of Washington and the University of California, Los Angeles. The research center will be located in offices near MIT.

Microsoft already has similar labs set up in Redmond, Wash.; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Cambridge, England; Beijing, China; and Bangalore, India. Microsoft Research was founded in 1991 and its labs are virtually the only expanding corporate theoretical research labs besides those of Google Inc.

This was also remarked by Venkatesh Narayanamurti, dean of Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, who said most companies, and even government organizations, are shrinking or eliminating these kinds of risky investments, "Microsoft's ongoing commitment to basic research makes it a notable exception."

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Nokia, MIT to Open Research Center
Nokia will open a research center near the MIT campus in January to study new areas for mobile technology, the company said on Thursday. The center would be a partnership with the university's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

"For Nokia, this is a fresh approach to our research collaboration with universities," said Dr. Bob Iannucci, head of Nokia Research Center. "Bringing together the collective expertise of MIT and Nokia in mobile computing and communications provides a vehicle for rapidly generating new concepts and bringing innovations to the marketplace on a large scale."

The company says much of the work done by the new research center will center around making handheld wireless devices part of an "ecosystem" of information and services. Work will also be done on interfaces and platforms, and to make devices more intuitive.

In total, 20 researchers from both MIT and Nokia will staff the center. Dr. James Hicks will head the MIT office. Nokia has wasted no time putting the researchers to work; five projects have already been planned.

CSAIL says this partnership with Nokia is different from other industry-university alliances. "The joint laboratory with Nokia will bring a dynamic group of scientists into close physical proximity in an open, creative and dynamic environment," Professor Rodney Brooks, director of CSAIL, said in a statement.

The partnership is not the first time the two groups have worked together. Nokia and MIT also join up for the Oxygen Alliance, a project aimed at creating new types of computers.

Budget proposal calls for ‘greener’ NASA to track climate change

Six new Earth-watching satellites planned

After years cutting of budgets for tracking global warming, President Bush on Monday proposed more than a $1 billion increase over the next five years for launching more and better Earth-observing satellites.

The president's 2009 budget provides money for six new NASA satellites to watch Earth's changes, costing at least $910 million over the next five years.

It also calls for an increase of more than $200 million for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's weather satellites and climate monitoring, including restoration of key instruments that had been cut from a troubled and delayed weather satellite.

NASA had not approved a new Earth sciences mission in four years, and the number of NASA Earth-observing satellites either in orbit or in the pipeline had dropped from 26 in 2004 to 21 last month.

A critical report last year by the National Academy of Sciences contended the government was unprepared for collecting vital information about global warming. It noted that NASA's Earth sciences research budget had been effectively cut by 30 percent since 2000, and the report prompted changes in the government's Earth observing plans, officials said.

"Think of NASA's blue logo as turning a little bit greener," NASA sciences chief Alan Stern told The Associated Press Monday. "We are amping up our emphasis on Earth sciences."

Two new satellites, listed as top priorities by the National Academy, were included in Bush's budget proposal. One, called SMAP, would map critical soil moisture around the world. The other satellite would be a next-generation ICESat probe, designed to replace an aging spacecraft that monitors shrinking ice worldwide. The NASA budget includes money for four other satellites, but the agency hasn't yet decided which ones to build, Stern said.

New satellites are crucial to see changes in water, soil, ice and air to act as early warnings for global warming changes yet to come, scientists said.

"This is the right time for Earth observations," said White House science adviser Jack Marburger. "Everyone's concerned about climate change."

Richard Anthes, a past president of the American Meteorological Society who co-chaired the National Academy report, called the new budget an improvement, but said it "does not go far enough." He said it is about $850 million short of what the academy recommended over the next three years.

On the energy emissions that cause global warming, the president's proposed budget would cut spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy by $500 million, but would increase spending on "clean coal" technologies for power plants and nuclear power.

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who chairs a special House global warming committee, called the budget an investment in "the dirty fuels of the past."

more....

Bush Wants to Beef Up Earth Monitoring
After years cutting of budgets for tracking global warming, President Bush on Monday proposed more than a $1 billion increase over the next five years for launching more and better Earth-observing satellites.

The president's 2009 budget provides money for six new NASA satellites to watch Earth's changes, costing at least $910 million over the next five years.

It also calls for an increase of more than $200 million for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's weather satellites and climate monitoring, including restoration of key instruments that had been cut from a troubled and delayed weather satellite.

NASA had not approved a new Earth sciences mission in four years and the number of NASA Earth-observing satellites either in orbit or in the pipeline had dropped from 26 in 2004 to 21 last month.

A critical report last year by the National Academy of Sciences contended the government was unprepared for collecting vital information about global warming. It noted that NASA's Earth sciences research budget had been effectively cut by 30 percent since 2000 and the report prompted changes in the government's Earth observing plans, officials said.

"Think of NASA's blue logo as turning a little bit greener," NASA sciences chief Alan Stern told The Associated Press Monday. "We are amping up our emphasis on Earth sciences."

Two new satellites, listed as top priorities by the National Academy, were included in Bush's budget proposal. They would map critical soil moisture around the world and replace an aging satellite that monitors shrinking ice worldwide. The NASA budget includes money for four other satellites, but the agency hasn't yet decided which ones to build, Stern said.

New satellites are crucial to see changes in water, soil, ice and air to act as early warnings for global warming changes yet to come, scientists said.

"This is the right time for Earth observations," said White House science adviser Jack Marburger. "Everyone's concerned about climate change."

Richard Anthes, a past president of the American Meteorological Society who co-chaired the National Academy report, called the new budget an improvement, but said it "does not go far enough." He said it is about $850 million short of what the academy recommended over the next three years.

On the energy emissions that cause global warming, the president's proposed budget would cut spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy by $500 million, but would increase spending on "clean coal" technologies for power plants and nuclear power.

A telescope arms race is taking shape around the world.

Super-sized boom coming for telescopes
A telescope arms race is taking shape around the world. Astronomers are drawing up plans for the biggest, most powerful instruments ever constructed, capable of peering far deeper into the universe - and further back in time - than ever before.

The building boom, which is expected to play out over the next decade and cost billions of dollars, is being driven by technological advances that afford unprecedented clarity and magnification. Some scientists say it will be much like switching from regular TV to high-definition.

In fact, the super-sized telescopes will yield even finer pictures than the Hubble Space Telescope, which was put in orbit in 1990 and was long considered superior because its view was freed from the distorting effects of Earth's atmosphere. But now, land-based telescopes can correct for such distortion.

Just the names of many of the proposed observatories suggest an arms race: the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope, which was downsized from the OverWhelmingly Large Telescope. Add to those three big ground observatories a new super eye in the sky, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013.

With these proposed giant telescopes, astronomers hope to get the first pictures of planets outside our solar system, watch stars and planets being born, and catch a glimpse of what was happening near the birth of the universe.

"We know almost nothing about the universe in its early stages," said Carnegie Observatories director Wendy Freedman, who chairs the board that is building the Giant Magellan Telescope. "The GMT is going to see in action the first stars, the first galaxies, the first supernovae, the first black holes to form."

When scientists look at a faraway celestial object, they are seeing it as it existed millions and millions of years ago, because it takes so long for light from the object to reach Earth.

Current telescopes are able to look back only about 1 billion years in time. But the new telescopes will be so powerful that they should be able to gaze back to a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang, which scientists believe happened 13.7 billion years ago. That's where all the action is.

"We hope to answer these questions: Are we alone in the universe? What is the nature of dark matter and dark energy in the universe?" said astronomer Henri Boffin, outreach scientist for the European Southern Observatory.

Two new technologies enable this extraordinary quest - one reliant on modern lasers and computing power and the other inspired by ancient Greek and Roman tilework.

The first is adaptive optics. It allows telescopes on the ground to get rid of the distortion caused when looking through Earth's thick atmosphere into space.

Adaptive optics relies on a laser to create an artificial star, or a constellation of fake stars, in the sky. Astronomers then examine the fake stars and use computers to calculate how much atmospheric distortion there is at any given time. Then they adjust the mirrors to compensate like a pair of eyeglasses. This adjustment happens automatically hundreds of times per second.

Adaptive optics worked first for smaller telescopes. But getting it to work for big observatories was a problem. The first successful use in large telescopes was in 2003 at the twin-telescope Keck Observatory in Hawaii, an effort that took nine years.

The second breakthrough involves technology that makes bigger mirrors possible. Instead of casting a giant mirror in one piece, which is difficult and limits size, astronomers now make smaller mirror segments and piece them together.

Keck scientist Jerry Nelson, now working on the Thirty Meter Telescope, pioneered this technique and said he got the idea from looking at how the Greeks and Romans tiled their baths. This technique is going from 36 segments in current telescopes to 492 segments with his new project.

In astronomy, the bigger the mirror, the greater the amount of light that can be grabbed from the universe. For the past decade and a half, the Keck has had the largest Earth-bound telescopes, with mirrors nearly 33 feet in diameter.

However, three giant land observatories, proposed for construction within the decade, are going to dwarf those:

- The Giant Magellan Telescope. A partnership of six U.S. universities, an Australian college, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Carnegie Institution of Washington will place the telescope in Las Campanas, Chile, around 2016. The plan is for an 80-foot mirror. The cost is around $500 million.

- The Thirty Meter Telescope. The California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy are aiming for a telescope with about a 98-foot mirror by 2018. No site has been chosen. The cost is about $780 million.

- The European Extremely Large Telescope. A partnership of European countries called the European Southern Observatory already has telescopes in Chile and is aiming for a new one with a mirror of 138 feet, scaled back from initial plans of 328 feet. The Europeans are aiming for a 2018 completion, but have not chosen a specific location yet. The cost would be $1.17 billion.

The managers of these projects are fairly confident they will get the money they need to complete their grand visions. However, some astronomers worry that there may not be enough private or government money for all of them, so they find themselves competing for funding, even as they cheer each other on.

If completed, ESO's European Extremely Large Telescope would be the biggest of the new observatories and should be able to see 20 to 100 times more sharply than the current best land-based telescopes. The Hubble, which set the standard for stunning astronomical pictures, will seem less amazing.

"Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet," said 2006 Nobel Prize-winning physicist John Mather, senior project scientist for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

The $4.5 billion Webb Telescope, designed to travel 900,000 miles beyond Earth's orbit, is not faced with the atmospheric distortion of ground telescopes. Still, it will use its own version of adaptive optics. Because of temperature fluctuations in the cold of space, the telescope will have to adjust the shape of its mirrors automatically. Webb's mirror, which is 2½ times bigger than Hubble's, has 18 segments.

While places like Arizona and Hawaii have been successful sites for high-quality space images, Chile is the focal point of the next-generation building boom.

Both the Thirty Meter and European telescope are looking at several sites there although the Thirty Meter team is also considering Baja Mexico and Hawaii. What's needed is the right combination of atmospheric conditions, weather, high altitude, prevailing winds and dark skies.

But there is more in the works than just the super-sized scopes. Smaller, more specialized telescopes are in various stages of design and construction.

The $400 million Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to be built in Chile by 2014 would survey the sky, constantly shooting a movie of 20 billion objects in the cosmos and spotting targets for bigger telescopes.

A planned project in Hawaii would be on the lookout for "killer asteroids." And in Chile, dozens of high-precision antennas are being erected for a huge radio astronomy observatory, called ALMA, that would look into the universe in a different way.

It is the biggest observatories in the works, however, that will provide the dramatic change in astronomical pictures. The pictures to come, Nelson said of the Thirty Meter project, will "knock your socks off, faint stuff that Hubble can't see."

Microsoft has begun shipping the latest versions of Windows Vista

Microsoft preps Vista SP1 and Server 2008
Latest versions shipped to manufacturers
Microsoft has begun shipping the latest versions of Windows Vista and Windows Server to manufacturers. Both are expected to be made available to customers next month.

Windows Server 2008 will be the first new version of Microsoft's server operating system since 2003.

Known by its Longhorn code name until last summer, Server 2008 will sport improved security and new features designed to improve stability.

"It is an exciting day for us and an exciting day for our partners and customers," wrote group programme manager Alex Hinrichs on Microsoft's Windows Server Division Blog.

"We have all been working towards this day for the past three years and over 5,000 people have contributed to this release."

Microsoft Volume Licensing costumers, or those with Microsoft Software Assurance or an Enterprise Agreement, will be able to download Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008 in late February as part of a special event called Heroes Happen Here.

All other users will be able to purchase Server 2008 on 1 March.

Users will need to wait a bit longer for the first Windows Vista service pack, however, which is now slated for mid-March.

Windows Vista SP1 offers stability and compatibility updates, but some researchers have disputed Microsoft's claims of increased performance.

Users will be able to download Vista SP1 in mid-March. By April, most users will be able to get the service pack as an automatic update.

There is one group, however, which will not be able to install the new version of Vista.

Microsoft said that a small group of hardware drivers are still not compatible with the new software. Those users will be able to download the update as the drivers become available.

Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008 finalized
Microsoft has wrapped up development of two major products, Windows Server 2008 and the Service Pack 1 update to Windows Vista, CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts Monday.

"Both products have released to manufacturing today, which is good news," Ballmer said.

Ballmer highlighted a few big corporate deployments of Vista, including at Continental Airlines, which is in the process of upgrading 10,000 systems.

"We think we are turning the corner in terms of enterprise deployment, and Service Pack 1 will be a huge boon," Ballmer said.

Microsoft will begin distributing Vista SP1 via Windows Update in mid-March.

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Microsoft Corp. said it sent a major package of upgrades and fixes for Windows Vista, its latest operating system, off to manufacturers for mass production on Monday.

The software maker said Vista Service Pack 1, or SP1, will be available in March, and that the upgrade will go first to business customers with volume licensing deals.

Many of the fixes for Vista have already been released as part of regular monthly updates in the year since the operating system went on sale to consumers. Microsoft said SP1 improves reliability, security and performance.

Windows Server 2008 was also released to manufacturing Monday, and will be available to new customers on March 1. Existing owners of Windows Server licenses will be able to download the software at the end of February.

Yahoo Bid : Microsoft bids $44.6 billion to buy Yahoo

To transform two ailing Internet businesses into a worthy competitor for market leader Google Inc.
In what would be the biggest Internet deal since the ill-fated Time Warner-AOL merger, Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer sent a letter to Yahoo's board on Thursday night to offer $31 per share in cash and stock.

The price is a 62 percent premium over Yahoo's Thursday close, but only about a quarter of what the Internet company was worth at the height of the dotcom bubble in 2000.

Yahoo would give Microsoft dominance in Web banner ads used by corporate brand advertisers. It also attracts more than 500 million people monthly to sites devoted to news, finance and sports, and Yahoo Mail is the No. 1 consumer e-mail service.

The shares of Microsoft, which has a market capitalization of about $300 billion, fell 6.6 percent as some investors worried the world's top software maker may be overpaying for Yahoo and could have a hard time getting a return on its investment.

Critics say the two companies have too many overlapping businesses -- from instant messaging to email and advertising, as well as news, travel and finance sites -- and both are weak in the Web search market, where Google dominates.

"They have to do it because they've tried everything they can do to fix MSN.

Yahoo is the most visited site in the world, so it goes without saying that, given the current valuation, this is the perfect time for them to buy it," said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

But he added: "Google is running away with the search market and that's obviously the best part of the market.

The likelihood that Google gets caught is slim to none."

Yahoo said on Friday its board will evaluate the unsolicited offer. Its shares shot up about 48 percent to $28.33. The shares of Google, which has a market value of about $160 billion, fell 8.58 percent to close at $515.90.

TRANSFORMATIVE OR CULTURE CLASH?

Speculation about a Microsoft-Yahoo deal has swirled through the markets for more than a year, as investors looked for a joint stand against the ever more powerful Google.

Google's share of the U.S. Web search market rose to 58.4 percent by December from 52.6 percent in January last year, while Yahoo's fell to 22.9 percent from 26.9 percent, and Microsoft's fell to 9.8 percent from 10.4 percent, according to comScore data.

Skeptics say Microsoft and Yahoo have very different corporate cultures and worry about a clash such as the one that marred AOL's $182 billion purchase of Time Warner in 2001, which is seen as the worst merger in recent history.

Time Warner Inc is now valued at only $57 billion.

The perception is that Yahoo, an iconic Silicon Valley company with a free-flowing, fun-loving attitude, may not fit in with the button-up, competitive Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker. "Culture is the big thing where people have some concerns," said Jupiter Research analyst Bobby Tulsiani.

"If they have anything in common, they're both tired of losing to Google, so they can agree on that probably." CEO Ballmer, in his most aggressive move to shape the future Microsoft, said the deal would transform its money-losing Internet division, which it sees as critical to growth, into a profitable pillar of its business.

"We have been losing money. Our plan here would be to not lose money in the future," he said on a conference call.

Ballmer said Microsoft has had on-and-off talks with Yahoo for 18 months, but was told by management a year ago that the timing was not right -- in an apparent reference to Yahoo's then Chairman and Chief Executive Terry Semel. Semel was replaced by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang as CEO in June and resigned as chairman on Thursday.

"With the Semel roadblock now gone, there is reason to think this (merger) is now likely to happen," said RBC Capital Internet analyst Jordan Rohan, noting Yahoo is running out of options in the face of a weakening business climate.

RICH VALUATION

Under the proposal, Yahoo shareholders can choose to get $31 cash, or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock.

The deal in aggregate must consist of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock, the software maker said. Microsoft's current stock price of $30.45 values Yahoo at around $30, or a rich 57 times forecast 2009 earnings, according to Reuters Estimates.

In comparison, Google is trading at around 20 times forecast 2009 profit. Some analysts said Microsoft was overpaying for a company that warned earlier this week it faced "head winds" in 2008, forecasting revenue below Wall Street expectations.

"To me, the premium seems exorbitant, for what is a dwindling business. I personally don't see how the synergies of Microsoft-Yahoo is going to take on Google," said Tim Smalls, head of U.S. stock trading at brokerage firm Execution LLC.

Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry said Yahoo is not worth more than $20 per share as its only worthwhile properties are Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Answers and Yahoo Finance.

But others said the price is low enough for rival bidders to emerge, noting Yahoo traded at $34.08 in late October.

"There could be a little more money on the table," said Laura Martin, an analyst at Soleil-Media Metrics. "The company is in play. Yahoo will not be able to stay independent. Other bidders will emerge before this is over."

Analysts cited Comcast Corp, Viacom Inc and General Electric Co among possible bidders, although they also said few companies had the balance sheet to compete with Microsoft or were as natural a fit for Yahoo.

As Yahoo shares are trading close to Microsoft's valuation, it indicates few investors expect a sweeter offer.

ANTITRUST CONCERNS

Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith acknowledged other bidders could emerge, but said any attempt by arch-rival Google to acquire Yahoo would face insurmountable antitrust hurdles.

Antitrust experts said regulators would likely take a close look at a Microsoft-Yahoo deal, but as the two are dwarfed by Google, the deal will ultimately likely be approved. Microsoft said the online advertising market is expected to reach nearly $80 billion by 2010 from over $40 billion in 2007.

It paid $6 billion last year to buy online advertising services firm aQuantive as a bulwark against Google's growing position. The software company forecast at least $1 billion in annual cost savings for the merged entity, from synergies in areas such as combining engineering talent.

Bernstein Research said the deal appeared to be less about expanded business potential and more about cost-savings that can be wrung out of shrinking redundant operations.

"We are relatively comfortable with (Microsoft's) estimate of $1 billion in annual synergies. It appears to us that the majority of the synergies are on the cost side," said the note from Bernstein analysts Charles Di Bona and Jeffrey Lindsay.

Morgan Stanley and Blackstone LP scooped the prize banking job of advising Microsoft on the deal, according to sources familiar with the matter, while Yahoo is being advised by Goldman Sachs Group Inc.