Apple to Resume U.S. Manufacturing

For the first time in years, Apple will manufacture computers in the United States, the chief executive of Apple, Timothy D. Cook, said in interviews with NBC and Bloomberg Businessweek.

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, introduced new products in October, including a thinner iMac.

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“Next year, we will do one of our existing Mac lines in the United States,” he said in an interview to be broadcast Thursday on “Rock Center With Brian Williams” on NBC.

Apple, the biggest company in the world by market value, moved its manufacturing to Asia in the late 1990s. As an icon of American technology success and innovation, the California-based company has been criticized in recent years for outsourcing jobs abroad.

“I don’t think we have a responsibility to create a certain kind of job,” Mr. Cook said in the Businessweek interview. “But I think we do have a responsibility to create jobs.”

The company plans to spend $100 million on the American manufacturing in 2013, according to the interviews, a small fraction of its overall factory investments and an even tinier portion of its available cash.

In the interviews, Mr. Cook said the company would work with partners and that the manufacturing would be more than just the final assembly of parts. He noted that parts of the company’s ubiquitous iPhone, including the “engine” and the glass screen, were already made in America.

Over the last few years, sales of the iPhone, iPod and iPad have overwhelmed Apple’s line of Macinotsh computers, the basis of the company’s early business. Revenue from the iPhone alone made up 48 percent of the company’s total revenue for its fiscal fourth quarter ended Sept. 30.

But as recently as October, Apple introduced a new, thinner iMac, the product that pioneered the technique of building the computer innards in the flat screen.

Mr. Cook did not say in the interviews where in the United States the new manufacturing would occur. But he did defend Apple’s track record in American hiring.

“When you back up and look at Apple’s effect on job creation in the United States, we estimate that we’ve created more than 600,000 jobs now,” Mr. Cook told Businessweek. Those jobs include positions at partners and suppliers.

An Apple spokesman could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Foxconn Technology, which manufactures more than 40 percent of the world’s electronics, is one of Apple’s main overseas manufacturing contractors. Based in Taiwan, Foxconn is China’s largest private employer, with 1.2 million workers, and it has come under intense scrutiny over working conditions inside its factories.

In March, Foxconn pledged to sharply curtail the number of working hours and significantly increase wages. The announcement was a response to a far-ranging inspection by the Fair Labor Association, a monitoring group that found widespread problems — including numerous instances where Foxconn violated Chinese law and industry codes of conduct.

Apple, which recently joined the labor association, had asked the group to investigate plants manufacturing iPhones, iPads and other devices. A growing outcry over conditions at overseas factories prompted protests and petitions, and several labor rights organizations started scrutinizing Apple’s suppliers.

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Egyptian Forces Deploy Tanks as President Mohamed Morsi’s Backers Clash With Rivals

Asmaa Waguih/Reuters

Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood walked past tanks outside the Egyptian presidential palace in Cairo on Thursday. More Photos »

CAIRO — An elite Egyptian unit deployed tanks outside the presidential palace on Thursday after a night of battles between Islamists and secular protesters that left five people dead and 450 wounded, spreading chaos in one of Cairo’s wealthiest suburbs and leaving streets littered with debris and burned-out cars.

Angry mobs of Islamists battled the secular protesters with fists, rocks and firebombs in the first major outbreak of violence between political factions here since the revolt against the ousted President Hosni Mubarak began nearly two years ago.

With at least 12 tanks drawn up near the palace, troops from the presidential guard hammered stakes into the ground to string barbed wire to separate Islamists camping outside the palace and secular protesters chanting slogans urging the guardsmen to choose “between the revolutionaries and the killers.” Other armored units were sent to guard the headquarters of state television, an important symbol of government power. The severity of the clashes — and their potential political impact — became apparent when three senior advisers to Mr. Mubarak’s successor, Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, resigned during the clashes Wednesday, blaming him for the bloodshed. Mr. Morsi’s prime minister implored both sides to pull back in order to make room for “dialogue.”

Graffiti on the walls of the presidential compound, mocking President Morsi, had been covered by Thursday morning with patches of white paint.

The scale of the fighting, in the affluent Heliopolis neighborhood just outside Mr. Morsi’s office in the presidential palace, raised the first doubts about Mr. Morsi’s effort to hold a referendum on Dec. 15 on a draft constitution approved by his Islamist allies over the objections of his secular opposition and the Coptic Christian Church.

Hundreds of Islamist supporters of Mr. Morsi spent the night outside the palace, and on Thursday some awoke with head bandages covering their wounds. Many said they were members of the Muslim Brotherhood from other provinces and they vowed to stay in Cairo until the draft constitution was approved.

They said they had come to defend Egypt’s democracy from a conspiracy by foreign powers, corrupt businessmen and cynical opposition leaders, insisting that their secular opponents were fighting for money, and not for sincere beliefs.

In a token of the deep suspicions since Egypt’s revolution, some maintained that Mr. Morsi could not rely on the police force to defend him and his palace because its leaders were holdovers from the old government trying to position themselves to be on the winning side of the political battle.

“We must take our freedom; it will not be given to us on a golden platter,” said Mohamed Hassan Awad Rashid, 54, a schoolteacher and member of the Muslim Brotherhood from Sharqiya in the Nile Delta who said he had arrived Wednesday and would stay until the referendum. “If we don’t complete our revolution now, then we are digging our own graves.”

In the early afternoon, the hundreds of Islamists supporting Mr. Morsi abruptly abandoned their encampment outside the presidential palace, possibly signaling a tactical shift by the president, who said through state media that he would address the nation later on Thursday.

State media also reported that in midafternoon, the presidential guard, which reports directly to the president, would clear the streets around the palace. Overnight, periodic gunshots could be heard at the front lines of the fight, and secular protesters displayed birdshot wounds and pellets. But it could not be determined whether the riot police or Islamists or the opposition had fired the guns.

Many in both camps brandished makeshift clubs, and on the secular side a few carried knives. Thousands joined the battle on each side. The riot police initially tried to fight off or break up the crowds with tear gas, but by midevening on Wednesday, the security forces had all but withdrawn. They continued to try to separate the two sides across one boulevard but stayed out of the battle that raged on all around.

In a city square on the Islamist side of the battle lines, a loudspeaker on the top of a moving car blared out exhortations that the fight was about more than politics or Mr. Morsi.

“This is not a fight for an individual, this is not a fight for President Morsi,” the speaker declared. “We are fighting for God’s law, against the secularists and liberals.”

Protesters reportedly set fire to Muslim Brotherhood political offices in the cities of Suez and Ismailia.

Mai Ayyad contributed reporting.

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Study Raises Questions on Coating of Aspirin

While aspirin may prevent heart attacks and strokes, a commonly used coating to protect the stomach may obscure the benefits, leading doctors to prescribe more expensive prescription drugs, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Circulation.

The conclusion about coated aspirin was only one finding in the study, whose main goal was to test the hotly disputed idea that aspirin does not help prevent heart attacks or stroke in some people.

For more than a decade, cardiologists and drug researchers have posited that anywhere from 5 to 40 percent of the population is “aspirin resistant,” as the debated condition is known. But some prominent doctors say that the prevalence of the condition has been exaggerated by companies and drug makers with a commercial interest in proving that aspirin — a relatively inexpensive, over-the-counter drug whose heart benefits have been known since the 1950s — does not always work.

The authors of the new study, from the University of Pennsylvania, claim that they did not find a single case of true aspirin resistance in any of the 400 healthy people who were examined. Instead, they claim, the coating on aspirin interfered with the way that the drug entered the body, making it appear in tests that the drug was not working.

The study was partly financed by Bayer, the world’s largest manufacturer of brand-name aspirin, much of which is coated.

Aside from whether coating aspirin conceals its effects in some people, there is little evidence that it protects the stomach better than uncoated aspirin, said Dr. Garret FitzGerald, chairman of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the study’s authors.

“These studies question the value of coated, low-dose aspirin,” he said in a statement accompanying the article. “This product adds cost to treatment, without any clear benefit. Indeed, it may lead to the false diagnosis of aspirin resistance and the failure to provide patients with an effective therapy.”

In a statement, Bayer took issue with some of the study’s conclusions and methods and said previous studies of coated aspirin, also called enteric-coated aspirin, have been shown to stop blood platelets from sticking together — which can help prevent heart attacks and stroke — at levels comparable to uncoated aspirin. Bayer also noted that the price difference between its coated and uncoated aspirin was negligible, although Dr. FitzGerald argued there was no reason patients should use anything other than uncoated generic aspirin, which is cheaper.

“When used as directed,” the company said, “both enteric and nonenteric coated aspirin provides meaningful benefits, is safe and effective and is infrequently associated with clinically significant side effects.”

Although researchers had long observed that, as is true with most drugs, aspirin’s effects varied among patients, the existence of “aspirin resistance” gained currency in the 1990s and early 2000s. One often-cited study, published in 2003, found that about 5 percent of cardiovascular patients were aspirin-resistant and that that group was more than three times as likely as those not aspirin-resistant to suffer a major event like a heart attack.

But some said the popularity of aspirin resistance got a boost in part because of the development of urine and blood tests to measure it and the arrival on the market of drugs like Plavix, a more expensive prescription drug sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb that also thins the blood.

In the most recent study, the patients who initially tested positive for aspirin resistance later tested negative for it and by the end of the study, Dr. FitzGerald said, none of the patients showed true resistance. “Nobody had a stable pattern of resistance that was specific to coated aspirin,” he said. If resistance to aspirin exists, he said, “I think that the incidence is vanishingly small.”

Dr. Eric Topol, one of the authors of the 2003 study, said he strongly disagreed with Dr. FitzGerald’s conclusions, noting that it looked only at healthy volunteers, “which is very different than studying people who actually have heart disease or other chronic illnesses who are taking various medications.” Those conditions or medications could affect the way aspirin works in the body, he said.

But Dr. Topol and Dr. FitzGerald did agree that there was little value in testing for whether someone was aspirin-resistant, in part because there was little evidence that knowing someone is resistant to aspirin will prevent a heart attack or stroke.

Representatives for Accumetrics, which sells a blood test, and Corgenix, which sells a urine test, maintained that there was value in determining how well aspirin worked in individual patients, and said more recent research on the issue has moved away from a stark determination of whether someone is resistant to aspirin. “This whole concept of drug resistance has moved past that term and moved into the level of response that someone has,” said Brian Bartolomeo, market development manager at Accumetrics.

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Extended Use of Breast Cancer Drug Suggested

The widely prescribed drug tamoxifen already plays a major role in reducing the risk of death from breast cancer. But a new study suggests that women should be taking the drug for twice as long as is now customary, a finding that could upend the standard that has been in place for about 15 years.

In the study, patients who continued taking tamoxifen for 10 years were less likely to have the cancer come back or to die from the disease than women who took the drug for only five years, the current standard of care.

“Certainly, the advice to stop in five years should not stand,” said Prof. Richard Peto, a medical statistician at Oxford University and senior author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Wednesday and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Breast cancer specialists not involved in the study said the results could have the biggest impact on premenopausal women, who account for a fifth to a quarter of new breast cancer cases. Postmenopausal women tend to take different drugs, but some experts said the results suggest that those drugs as well might be taken for a longer duration.

“We’ve been waiting for this result,” said Dr. Robert W. Carlson, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. “I think it is especially practice-changing in premenopausal women because the results do favor a 10-year regimen.”

Dr. Eric P. Winer, chief of women’s cancers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said that even women who completed their five years of tamoxifen months or years ago might consider starting on the drug again.

Tamoxifen blocks the effect of the hormone estrogen, which fuels tumor growth in estrogen receptor-positive cancers that account for about 65 percent of cases in premenopausal women. Some small studies in the 1990s suggested that there was no benefit to using tamoxifen longer than five years, so that has been the standard.

About 227,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and an estimated 30,000 of them would be in premenopausal women with ER-positive cancer and prime candidates for tamoxifen. But postmenopausal women also take tamoxifen if they cannot tolerate the alternative drugs, known as aromatase inhibitors.

The new study, known as Atlas, included nearly 7,000 women with ER-positive disease who had completed five years of tamoxifen. They came from about three dozen countries. Half were chosen at random to take the drug another five years, while the others were told to stop.

In the group assigned to take tamoxifen for 10 years, 21.4 percent had a recurrence of breast cancer in the ensuing nine years, meaning the period 5 to 14 years after their diagnoses. The recurrence rate for those who took only five years of tamoxifen was 25.1 percent.

About 12.2 percent of those in the 10-year treatment group died from breast cancer, compared with 15 percent for those in the control group.

There was virtually no difference in death and recurrence between the two groups during the five years of extra tamoxifen. The difference came in later years, suggesting that tamoxifen has a carry-over effect that lasts long after women stop taking it.

Whether these differences are big enough to cause women to take the drug for twice as long remains to be seen.

“The treatment effect is real, but it’s modest,” said Dr. Paul E. Goss, director of breast cancer research at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Tamoxifen has side effects, including endometrial cancer, blood clots and hot flashes, which cause many women to stop taking the drug. In the Atlas trial, it appears that roughly 40 percent of the patients assigned to take tamoxifen for the additional five years stopped prematurely.

Some 3.1 percent of those taking the extra five years of tamoxifen got endometrial cancer versus 1.6 percent in the control group. However, only 0.6 percent of those in the longer treatment group died from endometrial cancer or pulmonary blood clots.

“Over all, the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially,” Trevor J. Powles of the Cancer Center London, said in a commentary published by The Lancet.

Dr. Judy E. Garber, director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber, said many women have a love-hate relationship with hormone therapies.

Read More..

Extended Use of Breast Cancer Drug Suggested

The widely prescribed drug tamoxifen already plays a major role in reducing the risk of death from breast cancer. But a new study suggests that women should be taking the drug for twice as long as is now customary, a finding that could upend the standard that has been in place for about 15 years.

In the study, patients who continued taking tamoxifen for 10 years were less likely to have the cancer come back or to die from the disease than women who took the drug for only five years, the current standard of care.

“Certainly, the advice to stop in five years should not stand,” said Prof. Richard Peto, a medical statistician at Oxford University and senior author of the study, which was published in The Lancet on Wednesday and presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Breast cancer specialists not involved in the study said the results could have the biggest impact on premenopausal women, who account for a fifth to a quarter of new breast cancer cases. Postmenopausal women tend to take different drugs, but some experts said the results suggest that those drugs as well might be taken for a longer duration.

“We’ve been waiting for this result,” said Dr. Robert W. Carlson, a professor of medicine at Stanford University. “I think it is especially practice-changing in premenopausal women because the results do favor a 10-year regimen.”

Dr. Eric P. Winer, chief of women’s cancers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said that even women who completed their five years of tamoxifen months or years ago might consider starting on the drug again.

Tamoxifen blocks the effect of the hormone estrogen, which fuels tumor growth in estrogen receptor-positive cancers that account for about 65 percent of cases in premenopausal women. Some small studies in the 1990s suggested that there was no benefit to using tamoxifen longer than five years, so that has been the standard.

About 227,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and an estimated 30,000 of them would be in premenopausal women with ER-positive cancer and prime candidates for tamoxifen. But postmenopausal women also take tamoxifen if they cannot tolerate the alternative drugs, known as aromatase inhibitors.

The new study, known as Atlas, included nearly 7,000 women with ER-positive disease who had completed five years of tamoxifen. They came from about three dozen countries. Half were chosen at random to take the drug another five years, while the others were told to stop.

In the group assigned to take tamoxifen for 10 years, 21.4 percent had a recurrence of breast cancer in the ensuing nine years, meaning the period 5 to 14 years after their diagnoses. The recurrence rate for those who took only five years of tamoxifen was 25.1 percent.

About 12.2 percent of those in the 10-year treatment group died from breast cancer, compared with 15 percent for those in the control group.

There was virtually no difference in death and recurrence between the two groups during the five years of extra tamoxifen. The difference came in later years, suggesting that tamoxifen has a carry-over effect that lasts long after women stop taking it.

Whether these differences are big enough to cause women to take the drug for twice as long remains to be seen.

“The treatment effect is real, but it’s modest,” said Dr. Paul E. Goss, director of breast cancer research at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Tamoxifen has side effects, including endometrial cancer, blood clots and hot flashes, which cause many women to stop taking the drug. In the Atlas trial, it appears that roughly 40 percent of the patients assigned to take tamoxifen for the additional five years stopped prematurely.

Some 3.1 percent of those taking the extra five years of tamoxifen got endometrial cancer versus 1.6 percent in the control group. However, only 0.6 percent of those in the longer treatment group died from endometrial cancer or pulmonary blood clots.

“Over all, the benefits of extended tamoxifen seemed to outweigh the risks substantially,” Trevor J. Powles of the Cancer Center London, said in a commentary published by The Lancet.

Dr. Judy E. Garber, director of the Center for Cancer Genetics and Prevention at Dana-Farber, said many women have a love-hate relationship with hormone therapies.

Read More..

India Ink: India's Parliament Opens Door to Foreign Retail Investors

After two days of sometimes ear-splitting debate, India’s Lok Sabha, or lower house, of Parliament voted down a measure prohibiting large foreign retailers like Wal-Mart from entering the country. Of the 543 members in the house, 218 voted in favor of a proposition banning these companies from the country, and 253 against.

Rival leaders from Uttar Pradesh, Samajwadi Party leader Mulayam Singh Yadav and Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati, walked out before the debate and their parties’ abstentions helped defeat the measure.

The issue will now travel to the upper house of Parliament.

Allowing foreign multi-brand retailers into India has been a matter of debate for years, and was fast-tracked this year by a government under fire from allegations of corruption and paralysis. Here’s recent India Ink coverage on the issue:

The United Progressive Alliance government announced in September that they would allow big department stores who carry multiple brands, like Wal-Mart Stores, into the country but “laid out some very specific conditions,” Heather Timmons reported.

In an interview with India Ink in the same month, Anand Sharma, the minister of commerce and industry, said that despite the conditions some companies had “already expressed interest, from Tesco to Carrefore to Wal-Mart and Marks and Spencer.”

Explaining the benefits for rural producers he said:

“It will benefit the rural economy with the farmers, who will get a better price for what they produce. What perishes to a large extent will reach the market or the kitchens.”

The announcement was met with skepticism from industry and analysts, Vikas Bajaj reported, but there was hope that “If they follow through, it could prompt a new economic boom in India, where once-brisk growth has slowed markedly in recent years. But it is a big if.”

In a later article he focused on the way foreign direct investment in retail “often divides Indians as much by age as by their livelihoods.”

“Those younger than 25, a group that includes about half the country’s 1.2 billion people, appear quite open and eager to try foreign brands and shopping experiences, researchers say,” Mr. Bajaj wrote.

The Prime Minister, in a rare address to the nation, tried to assuage small retailers’s fears in late September, by saying that they “had nothing to fear from the impending arrival of giant Western retailers like Wal-Mart or Carrefour because there was a place for everyone, large or small, in a growing economy.”

The government may be overly optimistic about the benefits of allowing foreign direct investment into the retail sector, judging by Wal-Mart’s experience in other countries.

And even if that is not true, “any long-term impacts of Wal-Mart’s Mexico business have been overshadowed this year by the company’s involvement in a bribery scandal there,” and was “sure to find similar demands for bribes in India – especially now that ample evidence exists that the company has paid them elsewhere,” Heather Timmons wrote in an article titled, “Can Wal-Mart Build a Nation?”

In November, Wal-Mart said that an internal “investigation into violations of a federal anti-bribery law had extended beyond Mexico to China, India and Brazil, some of the retailer’s most important international markets,” Stephanie Clifford and David Barstow wrote in the New York Times.

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High-Speed Trades Hurt Investors, a Study Says

A top government economist has concluded that the high-speed trading firms that have come to dominate the nation’s financial markets are taking significant profits from traditional investors.

Mendoza College of Business

The economist Andrei Kirilenko’s findings are still being reviewed by peers and have encountered opposition.

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Bart Chilton of the C.F.T.C. says high-speed traders are taking “some of the cream off the top.”

The chief economist at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Andrei Kirilenko, reports in a coming study that high-frequency traders make an average profit of as much as $5.05 each time they go up against small traders buying and selling one of the most widely used financial contracts.

The agency has not endorsed Mr. Kirilenko’s findings, which are still being reviewed by peers, and they are already encountering some resistance from academics. But Bart Chilton, one of five C.F.T.C. commissioners, said on Monday that “what the study shows is that high-frequency traders are really the new middleman in exchange trading, and they’re taking some of the cream off the top.”

Mr. Kirilenko’s work stands in contrast to several statements from government officials who have expressed uncertainty about whether high-speed traders are earning profits at the expense of ordinary investors.

The study comes as a council of the nation’s top financial regulators is showing increasing concern that the accelerating automation and speed of the financial markets may represent a threat both to other investors and to the stability of the financial system.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council, an organization formed after the recent financial crisis to deal with systemic risks, took up the issue at a meeting in November that was closed to the public, according to minutes that were released Monday.

The gathering of top regulators, including Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner and Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, said in its annual report this summer that recent developments “could lead to unintended errors cascading through the financial system.” The C.F.T.C. is a member of the oversight council.

The issue of high-frequency trading has generated anxiety among investors in the stock market, where computerized trading first took hold. But the minutes from the oversight council, and the council’s annual report released this year, indicate that top regulators are viewing the automation of trading as a broader concern as high-speed traders move into an array of financial markets, including bond and foreign currency trading.

Mr. Kirilenko’s study focused on one corner of the financial markets that the C.F.T.C. oversees, contracts that are settled based on the future value of the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. He and his co-authors, professors at Princeton and the University of Washington, chose the contract because it is one of the most heavily traded financial assets in any market and is popular with a broad array of investors.

Using previously private data, Mr. Kirilenko’s team found that from August 2010 to August 2012, high-frequency trading firms were able to reliably capture profits by buying and selling futures contracts from several types of traditional investors.

The study notes that there are different types of high-frequency traders, some of which are more aggressive in initiating trades and some of which are passive, simply taking the other side of existing offers in the market.

The researchers found that more aggressive traders accounted for the largest share of trading volume and made the biggest profits. The most aggressive scored an average profit of $1.92 for every futures contract they traded with big institutional investors, and made an average $3.49 with a smaller, retail investor. Passive traders, on the other hand, saw a small loss on each contract traded with institutional investors, but they made a bigger profit against retail investors, of $5.05 a contract.

Large investors can trade thousands of contracts at once to bet on future shifts in the S.& P. 500 index. The average aggressive high-speed trader made a daily profit of $45,267 in a month in 2010 analyzed by the study.

Industry profits have been falling, however, as overall stock trading volume has dropped and the race for the latest technological advances has increased costs.

Ben Protess contributed reporting.

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Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon

Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word “organism.” Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.

For deaf students, this game of scientific Password has long been the daily classroom and laboratory experience. Words like “organism” and “photosynthesis” — to say nothing of more obscure and harder-to-spell terms — have no single widely accepted equivalent in sign language. This means that deaf students and their teachers and interpreters must improvise, making it that much harder for the students to excel in science and pursue careers in it.

“Often times, it would involve a lot of finger-spelling and a lot of improvisation,” said Matthew Schwerin, a physicist with the Food and Drug Administration who is deaf, of his years in school. “For the majority of scientific terms,” Mr. Schwerin and his interpreter for the day would “try to find a correct sign for the term, and if nothing was pre-existing, we would come up with a sign that was agreeable with both parties.”

Now thanks to the Internet — particularly the boom in online video — resources for deaf students seeking science-related signs are easier to find and share. Crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, enabling people who are deaf to coalesce around signs for commonly used terms.

This year, one of those resources, the Scottish Sensory Centre’s British Sign Language Glossary Project, added 116 new signs for physics and engineering terms, including signs for “light-year,”  (hold one hand up and spread the fingers downward for “light,” then bring both hands together in front of your chest and slowly move them apart for “year”), “mass” and “X-ray” (form an X with your index fingers, then, with the index finger on the right hand, point outward). 

The signs were developed by a team of researchers at the center, a division of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that develops learning tools for students with visual and auditory impairments. The researchers spent more than a year soliciting ideas from deaf science workers, circulating lists of potential signs and ultimately gathering for “an intense weekend” of final voting, said Audrey Cameron, science adviser for the project. (Dr. Cameron is also deaf, and like all non-hearing people interviewed for this article, answered questions via e-mail.)

Whether the Scottish Sensory Centre’s signs will take hold among its audience remains to be seen. “Some will be adopted, and some will probably never be accepted,” Dr. Cameron said. “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

Ideally, the standardization of signs will make it easier for deaf students to keep pace with their hearing classmates during lectures. “I can only choose to look at one thing at a time,” said Mr. Schwerin of the F.D.A., recalling his science education, “and it often meant choosing between the interpreter, the blackboard/screen/material, or taking notes. It was like, pick one, and lose out on the others.”

The problem doesn’t end at graduation. In fact, it only intensifies as new discoveries add unfamiliar terms to the scientific lexicon. “I’ve had numerous meetings where I couldn’t participate properly because the interpreters were not able to understand the jargon and they did not know any scientific signs,” Dr. Cameron said.

One general complaint about efforts to standardize signs for technical terms is the idea that, much like spoken language, sign language should be allowed to develop organically rather than be dictated from above.

“Signs that are developed naturally — i.e., that are tested and refined in everyday conversation — are more likely to be accepted quickly by the community,” said Derek Braun, director of the molecular genetics laboratory at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., which he said was the first biological laboratory designed and administered by deaf scientists.

Since at least the 1970s, deaf scientists have tried to address the lack of uniformity by gathering common signs for scientific terms in printed manuals and on videotapes. The problem has always been getting deaf students and their interpreters to adopt them.

Often, at science conferences, “local interpreters that we never met before would often use different signs for the same terms, leading to confusion,” said Caroline Solomon, a biology professor at Gallaudet University who is deaf.

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Sign Language Researchers Broaden Science Lexicon

Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word “organism.” Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.

For deaf students, this game of scientific Password has long been the daily classroom and laboratory experience. Words like “organism” and “photosynthesis” — to say nothing of more obscure and harder-to-spell terms — have no single widely accepted equivalent in sign language. This means that deaf students and their teachers and interpreters must improvise, making it that much harder for the students to excel in science and pursue careers in it.

“Often times, it would involve a lot of finger-spelling and a lot of improvisation,” said Matthew Schwerin, a physicist with the Food and Drug Administration who is deaf, of his years in school. “For the majority of scientific terms,” Mr. Schwerin and his interpreter for the day would “try to find a correct sign for the term, and if nothing was pre-existing, we would come up with a sign that was agreeable with both parties.”

Now thanks to the Internet — particularly the boom in online video — resources for deaf students seeking science-related signs are easier to find and share. Crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, enabling people who are deaf to coalesce around signs for commonly used terms.

This year, one of those resources, the Scottish Sensory Centre’s British Sign Language Glossary Project, added 116 new signs for physics and engineering terms, including signs for “light-year,”  (hold one hand up and spread the fingers downward for “light,” then bring both hands together in front of your chest and slowly move them apart for “year”), “mass” and “X-ray” (form an X with your index fingers, then, with the index finger on the right hand, point outward). 

The signs were developed by a team of researchers at the center, a division of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland that develops learning tools for students with visual and auditory impairments. The researchers spent more than a year soliciting ideas from deaf science workers, circulating lists of potential signs and ultimately gathering for “an intense weekend” of final voting, said Audrey Cameron, science adviser for the project. (Dr. Cameron is also deaf, and like all non-hearing people interviewed for this article, answered questions via e-mail.)

Whether the Scottish Sensory Centre’s signs will take hold among its audience remains to be seen. “Some will be adopted, and some will probably never be accepted,” Dr. Cameron said. “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”

Ideally, the standardization of signs will make it easier for deaf students to keep pace with their hearing classmates during lectures. “I can only choose to look at one thing at a time,” said Mr. Schwerin of the F.D.A., recalling his science education, “and it often meant choosing between the interpreter, the blackboard/screen/material, or taking notes. It was like, pick one, and lose out on the others.”

The problem doesn’t end at graduation. In fact, it only intensifies as new discoveries add unfamiliar terms to the scientific lexicon. “I’ve had numerous meetings where I couldn’t participate properly because the interpreters were not able to understand the jargon and they did not know any scientific signs,” Dr. Cameron said.

One general complaint about efforts to standardize signs for technical terms is the idea that, much like spoken language, sign language should be allowed to develop organically rather than be dictated from above.

“Signs that are developed naturally — i.e., that are tested and refined in everyday conversation — are more likely to be accepted quickly by the community,” said Derek Braun, director of the molecular genetics laboratory at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., which he said was the first biological laboratory designed and administered by deaf scientists.

Since at least the 1970s, deaf scientists have tried to address the lack of uniformity by gathering common signs for scientific terms in printed manuals and on videotapes. The problem has always been getting deaf students and their interpreters to adopt them.

Often, at science conferences, “local interpreters that we never met before would often use different signs for the same terms, leading to confusion,” said Caroline Solomon, a biology professor at Gallaudet University who is deaf.

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Assad Suffering Reversals in Fighting and Diplomacy

Thair Al-Khalidieh/Shaam News Network, via Reuters

A Free Syrian Army fighter battled government forces in Homs, Syria, on Monday.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Fierce fighting on the battlefield and setbacks on the diplomatic front increased pressure on the embattled Syrian government as fresh signs emerged on Tuesday of a sustained battle for control of the capital, Damascus.

News reports quoted activists as saying that fighting was raging in the southern suburbs of Damascus and near the international airport for a fifth straight day as government forces sought to dislodge rebels and reverse their recent gains.

While the government has superior firepower and rebels are reporting heavy losses, loyalist forces have been carrying out a serious counteroffensive in the suburbs without being able to subdue the insurgents.

The latest reports followed developments on Monday when a senior Turkish official said that Russia had agreed to a new diplomatic approach to seek ways to persuade President Bashar al-Assad to relinquish power, a possible weakening in Russia’s steadfast support for the Syrian government.

In Damascus, a prominent Foreign Ministry spokesman was said to have left the country amid reports of his defection, and President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton issued warnings that any use of chemical weapons by a desperate government would be met with a strong international response. The NATO secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, echoed this warning on Tuesday.

“The possible use of chemical weapons would be completely unacceptable to the whole international community,” Mr. Rasmussen said, according to Agence France-Presse.

A Western diplomat confirmed that there were grave concerns in United States intelligence circles that Syrian leaders could resort to the use of the weapons as their position deteriorates.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry, repeating earlier statements, told state television that the government “would not use chemical weapons, if it had them, against its own people under any circumstances.”

The United Nations said it was withdrawing nonessential international staff from Syria, and the European Union said it was reducing activities in Damascus “to a minimum,” as security forces pummeled the suburbs with artillery and airstrikes in a struggle to seal off the city from its restive outskirts and control the airport road. A senior Russian official spoke for the first time in detail about the possibility of evacuating Russian citizens.

The United Nations World Food Program reported on Tuesday that “the recent escalation of violence in Syria is making it more difficult to reach the country’s hardest-hit areas.”

“Food insecurity is on the rise due to bread shortages and higher food prices in many parts of the country. High prices are also affecting neighboring countries hosting Syrian refugees,” the organization said in a statement.

“Road access to and from Damascus has become more dangerous, making it difficult to dispatch food from World Food Program warehouses to some parts of the country, the organization said, adding that there had been increasing indiscriminate attacks on its trucks in different parts of the country.

It also said it would relocate seven nonessential staff members to neighboring Jordan while about “20 international and 100 national W.F.P. staff remain in the country to carry out the emergency operation to feed 1.5 million vulnerable Syrians.” Mr. Assad has held on longer than many had predicted at the start of the 21-month uprising. He still has a strong military advantage and undiminished support from his closest ally, Iran. Military analysts doubt the rebels are capable of taking Damascus by force, and one fighter interviewed on Monday said the government counteroffensive was taking a heavy toll. There were still no firm indications from Russia that it was ready to join Turkey and Western nations in insisting on Mr. Assad’s immediate departure.

But the latest grim developments follow a week of events that suggested the Assad government was being forced to fight harder to keep its grip on power. Rebels threatened its vital control of the skies, using surface-to-air missiles to down a fighter plane and other aircraft. The opposition also gained control of strategic military bases and their arsenals, and forced the government to shut down the Damascus airport periodically. The Internet was off for two days.

A Russian political analyst with contacts at the Foreign Ministry said that “people sent by the Russian leadership” who had contact with Mr. Assad two weeks ago described a man who has lost all hope of victory or escape.

“His mood is that he will be killed anyway,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of a Russian foreign affairs journal and the head of an influential policy group, said in an interview in Moscow, adding that only an “extremely bold” diplomatic proposal could possibly convince Mr. Assad that he could leave power and survive.

“If he will try to go, to leave, to exit, he will be killed by his own people,” Mr. Lukyanov said, speculating that security forces dominated by Mr. Assad’s minority Alawite sect would not let him depart and leave them to face revenge. “If he stays, he will be killed by his opponents. He is in a trap. It is not about Russia or anybody else. It is about his physical survival.”

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Ellen Barry from Moscow. Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell in London, Sebnem Arsu in Istanbul, Peter Baker in Washington, Hwaida Saad, Neil MacFarquhar and Hania Mourtada in Beirut, and Christine Hauser in New York.

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