Well: Winter Fruit Desert Recipes

Whether you are looking for an extra dose of vitamins or just love the flavors of fruit, winter is a time of abundance at the fruit stand. Martha Rose Shulman writes:

When I lived in Europe I got hooked on blood oranges, small oranges with dark ruby red pulp and mottled orange-red skins. Their flavor is deep and multidimensional, with nuances of berries and cherries. And like berries, cherries and other highly nutritious dark red, blue and purple fruits and vegetables, blood oranges have high levels of antioxidant-rich anthocyanins.

The same farmer I bought blood oranges from at my farmers’ market was selling over-ripe fuyu persimmons at a bargain price. I bought a few pounds for pureé, some of which I used for a sweet persimmon spice bread and some of which I froze. Persimmons are another fruit rich in phytonutrients like lutein and lycopene, zeaxanthin and cryptoxanthi, which are all reported to be rich in antioxidants.

Pears are also abundant. It is difficult to find pears that are ready to eat, even at farmers’ markets, so buy them a few days, or even a week, before you plan on making this week’s sorbet. The riper and juicier the pear, the better.

Here are five new ways to create dishes with winter fruits.

Blood Orange Compote: A delicious dessert, but it is also great at breakfast.


Lemon and Blood Orange Gelée Parfaits: A beautiful, layered gelatin dessert.


Pear Vanilla Sorbet: For maximum flavor, wait until the pears are nice and ripe before making this sorbet.


Tangerine Sorbet: A light, refreshing sorbet that can be made with a number of different fruits.


Persimmon Spice Bread: A dense, sweet bread that can be home to over-ripe persimmons.


Read More..

Well: Winter Fruit Desert Recipes

Whether you are looking for an extra dose of vitamins or just love the flavors of fruit, winter is a time of abundance at the fruit stand. Martha Rose Shulman writes:

When I lived in Europe I got hooked on blood oranges, small oranges with dark ruby red pulp and mottled orange-red skins. Their flavor is deep and multidimensional, with nuances of berries and cherries. And like berries, cherries and other highly nutritious dark red, blue and purple fruits and vegetables, blood oranges have high levels of antioxidant-rich anthocyanins.

The same farmer I bought blood oranges from at my farmers’ market was selling over-ripe fuyu persimmons at a bargain price. I bought a few pounds for pureé, some of which I used for a sweet persimmon spice bread and some of which I froze. Persimmons are another fruit rich in phytonutrients like lutein and lycopene, zeaxanthin and cryptoxanthi, which are all reported to be rich in antioxidants.

Pears are also abundant. It is difficult to find pears that are ready to eat, even at farmers’ markets, so buy them a few days, or even a week, before you plan on making this week’s sorbet. The riper and juicier the pear, the better.

Here are five new ways to create dishes with winter fruits.

Blood Orange Compote: A delicious dessert, but it is also great at breakfast.


Lemon and Blood Orange Gelée Parfaits: A beautiful, layered gelatin dessert.


Pear Vanilla Sorbet: For maximum flavor, wait until the pears are nice and ripe before making this sorbet.


Tangerine Sorbet: A light, refreshing sorbet that can be made with a number of different fruits.


Persimmon Spice Bread: A dense, sweet bread that can be home to over-ripe persimmons.


Read More..

Bits Blog: Former BlackBerry C.E.O. Sold All Company Shares

Jim Balsillie, the former co-chief executive and co-chairman of BlackBerry, has sold all of his shares in the struggling company, a regulatory filing indicated on Thursday.

Mr. Balsillie’s arrival at what was then called Research in Motion in 1992 and his personal investment of $125,000 saved the company in its early days. But Mr. Balsillie’s latest investment move means that he will not gain if the new line of BlackBerry 10 phones revive the company’s fortunes.

A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, dated Thursday, showed that Mr. Balsillie held no shares in the company as of the end of December. Mr. Balsillie owned up to 33 percent of the company, now called BlackBerry, before it became publicly traded and he reported holding 5.1 percent of its shares in a previous filing.

When asked about Mr. Balsillie’s pullout, Kris Thompson, a longtime BlackBerry analyst at National Bank Financial, replied: “Who cares?” BlackBerry’s shares initially slipped 7.5 percent to $12.94 in Nasdaq trading Thursday, but had recovered later in the morning.

Following a protracted and severe decline in BlackBerry’s stock price and American market share, Mr. Balsillie stepped down as both co-chief executive and co-chairman along with Mike Lazaridis in January 2012. While Mr. Lazaridis remains on the BlackBerry board as the company’s vice chairman, Mr. Balsillie resigned as a director in March.

A separate securities filing issued on Thursday indicated that Mr. Lazaridis, who co-founded the company, still holds 5.7 percent of BlackBerry’s stock.

Mr. Balsillie could not immediately be reached for comment. Adam Emery, a spokesman for BlackBerry, said the company does not “comment on holdings of individual shareholders.”

Earlier this week Mr. Thompson, the analyst, issued a report that praised many of the features on the new BlackBerry 10 phones but concluded that they will not significantly rebuild the company’s market share. He cited an impending wave of new products from larger competitors and the general lack of desirable and high quality apps for BlackBerry 10.

While Mr. Lazaridis handled the technology side of the company, Mr. Balsillie, an accountant, is widely credited with putting BlackBerry on the stable financial footing that ultimately allowed it to develop the BlackBerry device. He also played a pivotal role in convincing skeptical wireless carriers to carry the company’s first wireless e-mail devices on their networks.

Both men, however, were widely criticized for not responding more effectively and swiftly to the arrival of Apple’s iPhone and phones using Google’s Android operating system. Those smartphones now overwhelmingly dominate a market that BlackBerry created and was once leading.

At various times, Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Lazaridis have sold substantial stakes in BlackBerry to fund educational institutions in Waterloo, Ontario, the company’s hometown.

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The Lede: Answering Readers’ Questions About the Meteorite Strike in Russia

You asked us great meteor questions, readers, ones that went beyond the mere fact of the seriously cool video coming from all over Russia. But we wanted to give you a deeper look at the science behind bombardments from space, so we called in a respected source to help.

Clark R. Chapman is a senior scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio and a pioneer in the field of asteroid threat assessment. He is co-author of the 1989 book, “Cosmic Catastrophes,” with David Morrison, a senior scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

This is an unusual strike. It will take a while for analysis of the videos, and presumably of the seismic records of the explosion, before we can estimate the size of the projectile. I’m guessing it’s a once-in-a-decade kind of event.

Why unusual?

It’s unusual in the sense that it’s rare. It’s not the kind of event that happens very often. Also, they’re talking about maybe 1,000 people injured and some in the hospital. I’m not aware of a strike that has caused that much injury. That’s because it hit in a somewhat populated part of Russia, instead of the ocean or the desert or the middle of Siberia where relatively few people would have got hurt.

These things happen continually. This one was probably a few meters in diameter but they’re flying by the Earth all the time. And they hit – ones this big – maybe once in a decade. Things that would really devastate a city if they hit would occur maybe once every few centuries. It happens on a scale (of meteors small and large). Anyone living out in the countryside or a rural area, if the skies are clear, can look up at night and see apple-seed-size meteors hitting every few minutes, or at least every few hours.

Conceivably it could be part of a swarm, but it’s not associated with DA14 [the big asteroid that is to fly close by the Earth on Friday]. They’re on totally different trajectories. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but their orbits are totally different. They both intersect the Earth, more or less, but the asteroid is moving maybe south to north and the Russian meteorite west to east. They’d have to be coming in the same direction to be part of a swarm. It’s a remarkable coincidence that what may be the most damaging meteor strike in modern history would happen on the same day as the closest passage of an asteroid as big as DA14.

How big is DA14?

It’s about 100 feet across.

Should we be scared? What can we do?

The estimated danger from a large impact has dropped in recent decades because of telescopic observations and sky surveys. We should continue to monitor the skies for undiscovered large asteroids and for very much smaller ones that could still be quite dangerous, depending on where they hit. We should continue to look.

No space telescope now searches for such threats. Would such a device help?

That kind of project wouldn’t find what hit Russia (as the asteroid was too small) but it would find ones that are much more dangerous. And once they were detected, we could warn people. We could say, “It’s going to hit such an area at a certain time on a certain day and you should stay away from the windows.” You could provide warning of impacts that could be dangerous.

Could we divert a planetary threat?

If it’s found early enough – quite a few years in advance of its hitting – then NASA and the European Space Agency and other space agencies have the technology to divert the asteroid so it would miss the Earth.

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Judge Clears Transocean Plea in Gulf Spill





HOUSTON – A federal judge in New Orleans approved on Thursday Transocean’s agreement with prosecutors to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge and pay $400 million in criminal penalties for its role in the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil well blowout that left 11 workers dead and resulted in a yearlong moratorium on deepwater drilling.




The Switzerland-based owner and operator of the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon oil rig was charged with negligently discharging oil into the gulf.


“I believe the plea agreement is reasonable and is accepted,” said United States District Judge Jane Triche Milazzo. No witnesses came to court to object to the agreement, and Judge Milazzo said she received no letters of opposition.


Transocean’s criminal fine is the second highest assessed for an environmental disaster, but it pales in comparison with the $1.26 billion in criminal fines that BP was assessed for the same accident that spewed millions of barrels of crude oil into the gulf, soiling hundreds of miles of beaches in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.


Various government and independent reports have concluded that Transocean’s crew was negligent in interpreting pressure tests that might otherwise have made certain that the well casing and cement would not have leaked oil and gas. In court filings, the government reiterated its contention that BP supervisors had ultimate responsibility for supervising the testing.


In a statement made when the agreement was reached last month, Transocean said it represented a “a positive step forward” and company lawyers in a filing said Transocean “accepts responsibility” for criminal conduct.


The company has also agreed to pay $1 billion in civil penalties, and will be on probation for five years. Much of the money Transocean has agreed to pay will go toward research for oil spill prevention and response and to restoration of coastal natural habitat including the restitution of barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana.


Now, the long legal process surrounding the 2010 accident will focus again on BP.


BP, which has already pleaded guilty to 11 counts of felony manslaughter and other charges and agreed to pay a total of $4.5 billion in fines and penalties, is scheduled to return to court again on Feb. 25. Unless it reaches a settlement before then with the Justice Department, it faces as much as $21 billion in civil fines for what the government claims was gross negligence for the discharge of an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil over 87 days.


BP has so far strongly contested the claim that it was grossly negligent and it maintains that the government’s estimates for the amount of oil spilled has been exaggerated. BP executives have publicly and privately said they do not expect to settle out of court, and government rhetoric describing the company’s responsibilities has become more heated in recent months.


BP is also facing potential damages of more than $30 billion from claims made by the gulf states and local governments for property and economic damages. The company has already been forced to divest roughly $38 billion of assets to survive its long legal saga.


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U.S. Approves First Method to Give the Blind Limited Vision




The F.D.A. Approves a Bionic Eye:
The Argus II allows Barbara Campbell, who lost her sight 20 years ago, to see the world through patterns of light. Scientists hope it is the beginning of even more treatments.







The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first treatment to give limited vision to people who are blind, involving a technology called the “artificial retina.”




With it, people with certain types of blindness can detect crosswalks on the street, burners on a stove, the presence of people or cars, and sometimes even oversized numbers or letters.


The artificial retina is a sheet of electrodes surgically implanted in the eye. The patient is also outfitted with a pair of glasses with an attached camera and a portable video processor. These elements together allow visual signals to bypass the damaged portion of the retina and be transmitted to the brain. The F.D.A. approval covers this integrated system, which the manufacturer calls Argus II.


The approval marks the first milestone in a new frontier in vision research, a field in which scientists are making strides with gene therapy, optogenetics, stem cells and other strategies.


“This is just the beginning,” said Grace Shen, director of the retinal diseases program at the National Eye Institute, which helped finance the artificial retina research and is supporting many other blindness therapy projects. “We have a lot of exciting things sitting in the wings, multiple approaches being developed now to address this.”


With the artificial retina or retinal prosthesis, a blind person cannot see in the conventional sense, but can identify outlines and boundaries of objects, especially when there is contrast between light and dark — fireworks against a night sky or black socks mixed with white ones in the laundry.


“Without the system, I wouldn’t be able to see anything at all, and if you were in front of me and you moved left and right, I’m not going to realize any of this,” said Elias Konstantopolous, 74, a retired electrician in Baltimore, one of about 50 Americans and Europeans who have been using the device in clinical trials for several years. He said it helps him differentiate curbs from asphalt roads, and detect contours, but not details, of cars, trees and people. “When you don’t have nothing, this is something. It’s a lot.”


The F.D.A. approved Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products, to treat people with severe retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited diseases in which photoreceptor cells, which take in light, deteriorate.


The first version of the implant had a sheet of 16 electrodes, but the current version has 60. A tiny camera mounted on eyeglasses captures images, and the video processor, worn on a belt, translates those images into pixelized patterns of light and dark. The processor transmits those signals to the electrodes, which send them along the optic nerve to the brain.


About 100,000 Americans have retinitis pigmentosa, but initially between 10,000 and 15,000 will likely qualify for the Argus II, according to the company. The F.D.A. says that up to 4,000 people a year can be treated with the device. That number represents people who are older than 25, who once had useful vision, have evidence of an intact inner retinal layer, have at best very limited light perception in the retina, and are so visually impaired that the device would prove an improvement. Second Sight will begin making Argus II available later this year.


But experts said the technology holds promise for other people who are blind, especially those with advanced age-related macular degeneration, the major cause of vision loss in older people, affecting about two million Americans. About 50,000 of them are currently severely impaired enough that the artificial retina would be helpful, said Dr. Robert Greenberg, Second Sight’s president and chief executive.


In Europe, Argus II received approval in 2011 to treat a broader group of people, those with severe blindness caused by any type of outer retinal degeneration, not just retinitis pigmentosa, although it is currently only marketed in Europe for that condition. In the U.S., additional clinical trials need to be completed before the company can seek broader FDA approval.


Eventually, Dr. Greenberg said, the plan is to implant electrodes not in the eye, but directly into the brain’s visual cortex. “That would allow us to address blindness from all causes,” he said.


Read More..

U.S. Approves First Method to Give the Blind Limited Vision




The F.D.A. Approves a Bionic Eye:
The Argus II allows Barbara Campbell, who lost her sight 20 years ago, to see the world through patterns of light. Scientists hope it is the beginning of even more treatments.







The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first treatment to give limited vision to people who are blind, involving a technology called the “artificial retina.”




With it, people with certain types of blindness can detect crosswalks on the street, burners on a stove, the presence of people or cars, and sometimes even oversized numbers or letters.


The artificial retina is a sheet of electrodes surgically implanted in the eye. The patient is also outfitted with a pair of glasses with an attached camera and a portable video processor. These elements together allow visual signals to bypass the damaged portion of the retina and be transmitted to the brain. The F.D.A. approval covers this integrated system, which the manufacturer calls Argus II.


The approval marks the first milestone in a new frontier in vision research, a field in which scientists are making strides with gene therapy, optogenetics, stem cells and other strategies.


“This is just the beginning,” said Grace Shen, director of the retinal diseases program at the National Eye Institute, which helped finance the artificial retina research and is supporting many other blindness therapy projects. “We have a lot of exciting things sitting in the wings, multiple approaches being developed now to address this.”


With the artificial retina or retinal prosthesis, a blind person cannot see in the conventional sense, but can identify outlines and boundaries of objects, especially when there is contrast between light and dark — fireworks against a night sky or black socks mixed with white ones in the laundry.


“Without the system, I wouldn’t be able to see anything at all, and if you were in front of me and you moved left and right, I’m not going to realize any of this,” said Elias Konstantopolous, 74, a retired electrician in Baltimore, one of about 50 Americans and Europeans who have been using the device in clinical trials for several years. He said it helps him differentiate curbs from asphalt roads, and detect contours, but not details, of cars, trees and people. “When you don’t have nothing, this is something. It’s a lot.”


The F.D.A. approved Argus II, made by Second Sight Medical Products, to treat people with severe retinitis pigmentosa, a group of inherited diseases in which photoreceptor cells, which take in light, deteriorate.


The first version of the implant had a sheet of 16 electrodes, but the current version has 60. A tiny camera mounted on eyeglasses captures images, and the video processor, worn on a belt, translates those images into pixelized patterns of light and dark. The processor transmits those signals to the electrodes, which send them along the optic nerve to the brain.


About 100,000 Americans have retinitis pigmentosa, but initially between 10,000 and 15,000 will likely qualify for the Argus II, according to the company. The F.D.A. says that up to 4,000 people a year can be treated with the device. That number represents people who are older than 25, who once had useful vision, have evidence of an intact inner retinal layer, have at best very limited light perception in the retina, and are so visually impaired that the device would prove an improvement. Second Sight will begin making Argus II available later this year.


But experts said the technology holds promise for other people who are blind, especially those with advanced age-related macular degeneration, the major cause of vision loss in older people, affecting about two million Americans. About 50,000 of them are currently severely impaired enough that the artificial retina would be helpful, said Dr. Robert Greenberg, Second Sight’s president and chief executive.


In Europe, Argus II received approval in 2011 to treat a broader group of people, those with severe blindness caused by any type of outer retinal degeneration, not just retinitis pigmentosa, although it is currently only marketed in Europe for that condition. In the U.S., additional clinical trials need to be completed before the company can seek broader FDA approval.


Eventually, Dr. Greenberg said, the plan is to implant electrodes not in the eye, but directly into the brain’s visual cortex. “That would allow us to address blindness from all causes,” he said.


Read More..

Media Decoder Blog: Indian Music Service, Taking Page From Spotify, Goes Pro

Western music fans have no shortage of digital music services to choose from, and that abundance is spreading around the world. Apple’s iTunes is now in 119 countries, and others are racing to plant their digital flags everywhere. This week, for example, Spotify opened in Italy, Poland and Portugal, bringing its reach to 23 countries.

But just as interesting, and in the long run perhaps as significant to competition, is the rise of services that serve regional markets intensely. One is Saavn, a Spotify-like streaming service that specializes in Indian music, and has garnered 10.5 million monthly users with advertising-supported free listening. This week it will announce that it has taken another page from Spotify’s book, by offering a premium version at $4 a month that eliminates the ads, lets users listen to songs offline and will eventually add other features like higher quality audio.

Saavn, which has offices in New York, India and Mountain View, Calif., has a catalog of 1.1 million songs in nine languages and is available in more than 200 countries, with about 70 percent of its consumption within India, said Rishi Malhotra, one of its founders. Like Spotify, iHeartRadio and other Western services, it is an official partner of Facebook. About 80 percent of its use is on mobile devices, Mr. Malhotra said, and when the premium service, Saavn Pro, is opened in March, it will at first be available only for Apple devices.

The pricing is significantly lower than Western services. “We wanted to make it globally acceptable,” said Mr. Malhotra, who is based in New York. “The $10 price point that you see from a lot of music services we use here is way out of reach from what would fly in India or a lot of other emerging markets.”

Saavn believes it can succeed in India not only through its catalog of Bollywood hits, but through technological touches that may be meaningful only to Indian listeners. One example is the ability to search for a Bollywood song based on the actor who lip-synchs it — often more memorable to fans than the “playback” singer who actually provided the voice.

If successful, Saavn Pro could give the company an advantage in India’s quickly developing digital music market, which already has a handful of streaming services, like Dhingana, as well as a strong presence in downloads from Nokia. Yet that market is still tiny for a country of India’s size and overall media spending. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, recorded music had only $141 million in trade (or wholesale) value in 2011. A recent report by Ernst & Young said that music and radio combined count for only 2.4 percent of India’s media and entertainment spending, which for 2011 it estimated at $18 billion.

Part of the reason for music’s small proportion of India’s media economy is that popular music in India is dominated by the film industry. But a greater reason is piracy; the federation estimates that 55 percent of Internet users in India go to unlicensed music services on a monthly basis. That is slowly starting to change, music executives say, as courts there crack down on infringement and legitimate digital services proliferate. Apple’s iTunes opened there in December, and Nokia says it sells 1.4 million songs a day at its download store in India.

And Indian record companies are approaching digital business without the baggage that has been complicating deals with Western labels and services for more than a decade, Mr. Malhotra added.

“The labels in India are not reluctant about digital,” he said. “It’s not like they are protecting against some established, older revenue stream. It’s all found revenue for them.”


Ben Sisario writes about the music industry. Follow @sisario on Twitter.

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Traces of Anxiety Drug May Affect Fish Behavior, Study Shows





Traces of a common psychiatric medication that winds up in rivers and streams may affect fish behavior and feeding patterns, according to a new study in the journal Science.




Researchers in Sweden exposed wild European perch to water with different concentrations of Oxazepam, a generic anti-anxiety medication that can show up in waterways after being flushed, excreted or discarded.


Researchers reported that fish exposed to Oxazepam became less social, more active and ate faster, behaviors they said could have long-term consequences for aquatic ecosystems.


Scientists who study pharmaceuticals in waterways said the research was intriguing because it examined the potential effect on animals of a specific medication designed to affect human behavior.


“It seems to be a solid study with an environmentally relevant species,” said Donald Tillitt, an environmental toxicologist with the United States Geological Survey who was not involved in the study. He said it made sense that a medication that binds with a certain brain receptor in people could act similarly in fish, and the measures of behavior — activity, sociability, boldness and feeding rate — “are all important ones that we like to look at when we’re trying to see the environmental effects of pharmaceuticals.”


Still, because even the lowest concentration of Oxazepam in the study was higher than that found in the Swedish waterway researchers tested, “the relevance of their study to the real world is unclear,” the Environmental Protection Agency said in written answers to questions.


The agency said that while “most pharmaceuticals do not seem to pose known risks to humans, animals or the rest of the ecosystem” at the levels they occur in the environment, there are some medications “for which some researchers have noted physiological effects in fish exposed to levels close to those occasionally reached in the environment. These include some ingredients used for contraception, hypertension and mood disorders.”


The agency said how often this occurs and the possible environmental repercussions are unknown.


The study joins a small but growing body of research exploring the possible environmental impact of chemicals in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and other products. Many of these chemicals are not removed by wastewater treatment plants, which were designed to remove bacteria and nutrients, experts said.


The topic is difficult to study partly because concentrations of chemicals in waterways can vary with season, hour and distance from treatment plants, and other medications in water may influence a chemical’s effects.


The United States Geological Survey has found “intersex fish,” or male fish that develop female sexual characteristics, in the Potomac River and its tributaries, raising questions about whether hormone residues might be responsible. A study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft in the brains of fish collected downstream from wastewater discharge in Colorado and Iowa. But some antidepressants that were more common in those waterways, including Zyban and Citalopram, were not found as frequently in the fish.


In the Swedish study, researchers first tested perch in the wastewater-treated Fyris River, near the city of Uppsala, and found their muscle tissue contained six times the river’s concentration of Oxazepam, said Tomas Brodin, the lead author and an assistant professor of ecology at Umea University.


Researchers then took baby fish hatched from the roe of wild perch in what they considered a drug-free waterway, and divided them into three groups of 25. One group had no exposure to Oxazepam; the other two were placed in water with what researchers called a low concentration, at three times higher than the River Fyris, or an extremely high concentration, at 1,500 times higher.


The more Oxazepam they ingested the more active the fish were, measured by the number of swimming motions in a 10-minute period. They were also less social, spending less time near a section of the tank with other fish and more time near an empty compartment. And they were quicker to grab and eat zooplankton. At the highest Oxazepam concentration, fish were also bolder, measured by how long it took them to leave a box in the tank and explore new territory.


“Basically, no one left the box before they were subjected to the drug,” said Dr. Brodin, who said he saw the difference when he entered the room each day. The non-exposed fish “were hiding basically,” while the others “were out there, greeting me. They were totally different fish.”


In a statement, Matthew Bennett, senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said the study yielded “somewhat expected results” because of its higher-than-natural concentrations. He said the behavioral changes were small, and the study methods contradicted “widely accepted protocols that determine how the low levels of Oxazepam found in the environment accumulate in fish. The environmental relevance and potential for long-term impact from this drug, which has been in use for decades are therefore debatable.”


Joel A. Tickner, an environmental scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, who was not involved in the research, said he considered the study significant. “These effects may be very subtle,” he said, but “what they’re finding is it’s biologically relevant.”


Dr. Brodin, the lead author of the study, said the implications were unclear for perch, which might benefit from Oxazepam exposure by becoming more efficient eaters or be disadvantaged because enhanced risk-taking behavior might increase their vulnerability to predators. Zooplankton, algae and other organisms could also be affected by changes in fish behavior, he said.


Dr. Tillett, the toxicologist with the Geological Survey, said, “We’re smart enough and we should be able to design chemicals that fulfill these same sorts of functions but with less stress on the environment.”


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DealBook: Societe Generale to Restructure After 4th-Quarter Loss

5:05 a.m. | Updated

PARIS – Société Générale, one of the largest French banks, posted a larger fourth-quarter loss on Wednesday than the market had expected and said it would restructure to cut costs and simplify operations.

The bank reported a net loss of 476 million euros ($640 million), compared with a profit of 100 million euros in the period a year earlier. Analysts surveyed by Reuters had expected a net loss of about 237 million euros.

Profit was hurt by a charge of 686 million euros as the bank revalued its own debt, an accounting obligation as the market for those securities improved. It also set aside 300 million euros as a provision against legal costs, and it wrote down 380 million euros of good will in its investment banking business, mostly on the Newedge Group, a brokerage in which it owns a 50 percent stake.

Excluding the one-time items, it said fourth-quarter net income would have been about 537 million euros.

Under Frédéric Oudéa, its chairman and chief executive, Société Générale has been working to emerge from the financial crisis as a leaner institution. It said that from mid-2011 to the end of 2012, it disposed of 16 billion euros of loan portfolio assets from the corporate and investment banking unit, and an additional 19 billion euros of other assets.

The bank’s restructuring, and an improvement in sentiment in the euro zone economy, have helped to restore its market standing. After a difficult 2011 that was marred by questions about Société Générale’s exposure to Greece, the bank’s shares have rallied, gaining 49 percent in the last year.

In a research note to investors, Andrew Lim, a banking analyst at Espirito Santo in London, said that while “management has dealt convincingly with concerns about weak capital adequacy and liquidity in 2012, Société Générale is still struggling to convince investors that it can achieve improved returns.”

Shares in Société Générale, based in Paris, fell 3.5 percent in morning trading on Wednesday.

Société Générale said on Wednesday that Philippe Heim would take over as chief financial officer. Mr. Heim succeeds Bertrand Badré, who is leaving to take a position as managing director for finance at the World Bank. The bank also said Jacques Ripoll, the bank’s asset management chief, “has decided to pursue his career outside the group.”

The restructuring measures announced on Wednesday aim to focus the bank on three core businesses: French retail banking; international retail banking and financial services; and corporate and investment banking and private banking.

The Société Générale group employs about 160,000 employees around the world, and it was not immediately clear if the announcement of a new organization meant the bank would follow the lead of other large global institutions with a round of layoffs.

“There will be review processes to define the target organizations for each entity in the weeks to come,” the bank said. “The organization proposals will be addressed in the framework of an enhanced employee dialogue in keeping with agreements with trade unions and the procedures for consulting with worker councils.”

Mr. Oudéa said in a statement that the purpose of the changes was “to make our organization more efficient and flexible.”

Société Générale said its Tier 1 capital ratio, a measure of the bank’s ability to withstand financial shocks, stood at 10.7 percent at the end of December, up 1.65 percentage points from a year earlier. The French firm said it expected to attain a Core Tier 1 capital target under the accounting rules known as the Basel III regime of 9 percent to 9.5 percent by the end of 2013.

The French bank published its latest results a little more than five years after Jérôme Kerviel, a trader in the bank’s equity derivatives business, built unauthorized positions that led to a 4.9 billion euro loss for Société Générale.

Mr. Kerviel’s conviction on charges of breach of trust and forgery was upheld in October by the Paris Court of Appeals. He also was ordered to serve a three-year prison term, pending appeal, and to repay the bank for the full amount of the 4.9 billion euro loss.

On Tuesday, Mr. Kerviel told the French radio station RTL that he was challenging the repayment order in a labor court, saying he had been ordered to pay without a third-party expert being allowed to study the damages. He added that he was suing Société Générale for an amount equivalent to the 4.9 billion euro trading loss.

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