Dead Lotto Winner's Wife Seeks 'Truth'

The wife of a $1 million Chicago lottery winner who died of cyanide poisoning told ABC News that she was shocked to learn the true cause of his death and is cooperating with an ongoing homicide investigation.

"I want the truth to come out in the investigation, the sooner the better," said Shabana Ansari, 32, the wife of Urooj Khan, 46. "Who could be that person who hurt him?

"It has been incredibly hard time," she added. "We went from being the happiest the day we got the check. It was the best sleep I've had. And then the next day, everything was gone."

Ansari, Khan's second wife, told the Chicago Sun-Times that she prepared what would be her husband's last meal the night before Khan died unexpectedly on July 20. It was a traditional beef-curry dinner attended by the married couple and their family, including Khan's 17-year-old daughter from a prior marriage, Jasmeen, and Ansari's father. Not feeling well, Khan retired early, Ansari told the paper, falling asleep in a chair, waking up in agony, then collapsing in the middle of the night. She called 911.

Khan, an immigrant from India who owned three dry-cleaning businesses in Chicago, won $1 million in a scratch-off Illinois Lottery game in June and said he planned to use the money to pay off his bills and mortgage, and make a contribution to St. Jude Children's Research Center.

"Him winning the lottery was just his luck," Ansari told ABC News. "He had already worked hard to be a millionaire before it."

Illinois Lottery/AP Photo

Chicago Lottery Winner Died From Cyanide Poisoning Watch Video

Lottery Murder Suspect Dee Dee Moore Found Guilty Watch Video

Lottery Winner Murder Trial: Opening Statements Begin Watch Video

Jimmy Goreel, who worked at the 7-Eleven store where Khan bought the winning ticket, described him to The Associated Press as a "regular customer ... very friendly, good sense of humor, working type of guy."

In Photos: Biggest Lotto Jackpot Winners

Khan's unexpected death the month after his lottery win raised the suspicions of the Cook County medical examiner. There were no signs of foul play or trauma so the death initially was attributed to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which covers heart attacks, stroke or ruptured aneurysms. The medical examiner based the conclusion on an external exam -- not an autopsy -- and toxicology reports that indicated no presence of drugs or carbon monoxide.

Khan was buried at Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago.

However, several days after a death certificate was issued, a family member requested that the medical examiner's office look further into Khan's death, Cook County Medical Examiner Stephen Cina said. The office did so by retesting fluid samples that had been taken from Khan's body, including tests for cyanide and strychnine.

When the final toxicology results came back in late November, they showed a lethal level of cyanide, which led to the homicide investigation, Cina said. His office planned to exhume Khan's body within the next two weeks as part of the investigation.

Melissa Stratton, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Police Department, confirmed it has been working closely with the medical examiner's office. The police have not said whether or not they believe Khan's lottery winnings played a part in the homicide.

Khan had elected to receive the lump sum payout of $425,000, but had not yet received it when he died, Ansari told the AP, adding that the winnings now are tied up as a probate matter.

"I am cooperating with the investigation," Ansari told ABC News. "I want the truth to come out."

Authorities also have not revealed the identity of the relative who suggested the deeper look into Khan's death. Ansari said it was not her, though she told the AP she has subsequently spoken with investigators.

"This is been a shock for me," she told ABC News. "This has been an utter shock for me, and my husband was such a goodhearted person who would do anything for anyone. Who would do something like this to him?

"We were married 12 years [and] he treated me like a princess," she said. "He showered his love on me and now it's gone."

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Tony Fadell: From iPhones to sexing up thermostats

After quitting Apple, the tech guru behind the iPod wanted to revolutionise our homes – starting with the humble thermostat

After you left Apple, you developed a "smart" thermostat. Was that always your plan?
Not at all! The plan was to retire with my wife, who also worked for Steve [Jobs], and spend time with our children. We didn't see them because we were working so madly at Apple. We wanted to build a house in Lake Tahoe. I wanted to design the greenest, most connected house that I could. That's when I found out about the thermostat problem. These devices had not seen innovation in 30 years. They were the same as the ones our parents had. I wanted something that was very different.

Your solution was the NEST. Tell me about it
It uses algorithms and sensors to remember the temperatures you like, create a custom schedule for your home and turn itself down when you are away. And you can use your smartphone, tablet or computer to control it remotely. We call it the thermostat for the iPhone generation. It has a big dial, not fiddly buttons.

Did Steve Jobs have any input?
I was going to talk to Steve about it. He knew we were working on something, but he didn't know what. When it was time to show him, he said he couldn't do it. Unfortunately, he died just a few weeks later, before he could see it.

Is the NEST just the start of a range of smart-home devices?
Absolutely. But if you look at what we did at Apple after the iPod came out, it took us five years to start thinking about the iPhone and two more years to finally ship it. I would love to make more devices, but our goal is to make the NEST successful first.

Who would have believed the iPod could turn into the iPhone, then the iPad?
Even I wondered how many people would buy an iPad. But you have to be at the right place in the cultural time. We plan a similar trajectory with the NEST, with the ways that emerging behaviours can happen in the home through interconnected devices. You can't start with all of these things at once because people's minds get blown. You start with very simple things, simple concepts, and then you can build on them.

Will people have to continually upgrade their thermostats, as they do with cellphones?
Unlike a cellphone, you're not going to change the NEST every 18 months! They are supposed to hang on your wall for 10 to 15 years. Our goal is to continue to improve it via software, and we have built tonnes of extra capability into this device to allow that to happen. For example, we have a new update that gives an energy report - it shows how you're doing compared with last month, and even compares you to your neighbours.

Was it your aim to raise awareness of the energy we waste heating our homes?
The NEST starts people thinking about how they're using energy in the home. But it's also a great party trick. You get people whipping out their phones and saying "Check out my NEST at home! Watch, I'm going to freeze my wife!"

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C. African government, opposition head for talks with rebels

BANGUI, Central African Republic: Central African Republic government and opposition delegations left on Tuesday to join rebels for talks later in the week in the Gabonese capital Libreville to end the conflict in their volatile nation.

A delegation of the rebels who have seized key towns in the impoverished country arrived Monday, while government, opposition and civil society representatives left Bangui early Tuesday, a government official said.

Congo Republic President Denis Sassou Nguesso, who is serving as mediator, has said the peace talks could open later this week, while sources said some one-on-one meetings could take place earlier.

The head of the government delegation, Jean Willybero-Sako, voiced confidence that concessions that Central African President Francois Bozize has made so far -- he has proposed a national unity government and said he would not try to seek an unconstitutional third mandate -- would go a long way toward resolving the conflict.

The concessions "cleared a lot of obstacles," Willybero-Sako told AFP on Sunday, "That showed a certain willingness to go forward, to take into account everyone's concerns."

Minister of Territorial Administration Josue Binoua has said the government would also propose "army reform, an economic stimulus plan and the implementation of a new electoral code" at the talks.

Asked about a persistent rebel demand that Bozize step down, Willybero-Sako replied: "We have struggled -- rebels, opposition and government -- to provide our nation with a constitution that everyone now wants to see respected."

Bozize, a former army general, came to power in a coup in 2003 and has been voted back into office twice, in 2005 and 2011.

He has been suspected of wanting to modify the constitution to be allowed to seek a third term in 2016.

Bozize made a quick trip Monday to Brazzaville to meet with Sassou Nguesso.

At a joint press conference afterward, Sassou Nguesso stressed that a "military solution was not a good one and there must be negotiations."

Bozize, who will be present in Libreville but will not attend the talks, claimed the rebel movement was triggered by "elements coming from outside".

He added: "We consider them as mercenaries manipulated from outside, who attacked the peaceful Central African people."

The rebels have insisted that the departure of Bozize, who has been in power since 2003, should be up for discussion at the talks -- and Sassou Nguesso said the issue would be addressed.

"We cannot interpret, in our role as mediator, the statements of one or the other" side, he said, adding that "all parties have agreed to go to negotiations in Libreville and we will address all these questions among brothers."

Rebel chief Michel Djotodia, who made no statement on arrival in the Gabonese capital on Monday, told AFP earlier on a stopover in Chad: "One doesn't make war without also looking for peace."

The Seleka alliance of three rebel movements launched its assault on December 10 in the north of the Central African Republic, a mineral-rich country of five million that is notorious for coups and army mutinies.

Since then, it has moved steadily south, capturing a string of key towns with little or no resistance from the poorly equipped and poorly trained army.

They are now in striking distance of the capital Bangui, near Sibut, 160 kilometres (100 miles) to the north.

At first, the rebels were simply calling on the Bangui government to respect the terms of peace accords signed in 2007 and 2011. As their position strengthened, however, they began calling for Bozize to step down.

The Economic Community of Central African States (CEEAC) will host the Libreville talks. But the regional bloc has also sent more troops to strengthen FOMAC, its multinational intervention force in the CAR.

They are deployed as a buffer force at Damara, 75 kilometres north of the capital Bangui.

-AFP/fl

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Track your steps, sleep with Fitbit Flex wristband

LAS VEGAS--Who doesn't need a little more exercise? Fitbit wants to push you to get more active with its Flex wristband, shown off at
CES 2013.

It's a colorful pedometer that monitors how far you walk every day, as well as your time spent sleeping or tossing and turning.

The Flex can track steps, distance, calories, and how many minutes you've been active. It also has a silent alarm to wake you up.

You can also set daily goals, which a reflected in flashing LEDs on the water-resistant wristband. As you progress toward your daily goal, more lights flash.

Known for its wireless clip-on activity tracker, Fitbit integrated wireless connectivity in the Flex, which can sync with PCs, Macs, or mobile devices via Bluetooth 4.0. Its lithium-polymer batteries run for five to seven days.

It has an MSRP of $99.95, and is slated to be released in spring 2013 in a variety of colors.

The related website and apps can track user weight goals, calories consumed, and friends' progress too.

Fortunately, it's easy to take off if you feel like slacking off.

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Primitive and Peculiar Mammal May Be Hiding Out in Australia

It’d be hard to think of a mammal that’s weirder than the long-beaked, egg-laying echidna. Or harder to find.

Scientists long thought the animal, which has a spine-covered body, a four-headed penis, and a single hole for reproducing, laying eggs, and excreting waste, lived only in New Guinea. The population of about 10,000 is critically endangered. Now there is tantalizing evidence that the echidna, thought to have gone extinct in Australia some 10,000 years ago, lived and reproduced there as recently as the early 1900s and may still be alive on Aussie soil.

The new echidna information comes from zoologist Kristofer Helgen, a National Geographic emerging explorer and curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution. Helgen has published a key finding in ZooKeys confirming that a skin and skull collected in 1901 by naturalist John T. Tunney in Australia is in fact the western long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus bruijnii. The specimen, found in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, was misidentified for many years.

(More about echidnas: Get to know this living link between mammals and reptiles.)

Helgen has long been fascinated by echidnas. He has seen only three in the wild. “Long-beaked echidnas are hard to get your hands on, period,” he said. “They are shy and secretive by nature. You’re lucky if you can find one. And if you do, it will be by chance.” Indeed, chance played a role in his identification of the Australian specimen. In 2009, he visited the Natural History Museum of London, where he wanted to see all of the echidnas he could. He took a good look in the bottom drawer of the echidna cabinet, where the specimens with less identifying information are often stored. From among about a dozen specimens squeezed into the drawer, he grabbed the one at the very bottom.

(Related from National Geographic magazine: “Discovery in the Foja Mountains.”)

“As I pulled it out, I saw a tag that I had seen before,” Helgen said. “I was immediately excited about this label. As a zoologist working in museums you get used to certain tags: It’s a collector’s calling card. I instantly recognized John Tunney’s tag and his handwriting.”

John Tunney was a well-known naturalist in the early 20th century who went on collecting expeditions for museums. During an Australian expedition in 1901 for Lord L. Walter Rothschild’s private museum collection, he found the long-beaked echidna specimen. Though he reported the locality on his tag as “Mt Anderson (W Kimberley)” and marked it as “Rare,” Tunney left the species identification field blank. When he returned home, the specimen was sent to the museum in Perth for identification. It came back to Rothschild’s museum identified as a short-beaked echidna.

With the specimen’s long snout, large size, and three-clawed feet, Helgen knew that it must be a long-beaked echidna. The short-beaked echidna, still alive and thriving in Australia today, has five claws, a smaller beak, and is half the size of the long-beaked echidna, which can weigh up to 36 pounds (16 kilograms).

As Helgen began tracing the history and journey of the specimen over the last century, he crossed the path of another fascinating mind who had also encountered the specimen. Oldfield Thomas was arguably the most brilliant mammalogical taxonomist ever. He named approximately one out of every six mammals known today.

Thomas was working at the Natural History Museum in London when the Tunney echidna specimen arrived, still misidentified as a short-beaked echidna. Thomas realized the specimen was actually a long-beaked echidna and removed the skull and some of the leg bones from the skin to prove that it was an Australian record of a long-beaked echidna, something just as unexpected then as it is now.

No one knows why Thomas did not publish that information. And the echidna went back into the drawer until Helgen came along 80 years later.

As Helgen became convinced that Tunney’s long-beaked echidna specimen indeed came from Australia, he confided in fellow scientist Mark Eldridge of the Australian Museum about the possibility. Eldridge replied, “You’re not the first person who’s told me that there might be long-beaked echidnas in the Kimberley.” (That’s the Kimberley region of northern Australia.) Scientist James Kohen, a co-author on Helgen’s ZooKeys paper, had been conducting fieldwork in the area in 2001 and spoke to an Aboriginal woman who told him how “her grandmothers used to hunt” large echidnas.

This is “the first evidence of the survival into modern times of any long-beaked echidna in Australia,” said Tim Flannery, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This is a truly significant finding that should spark a re-evaluation of echidna identifications from across northern Australia.”

Helgen has “a small optimism” about finding a long-beaked echidna in the wild in Australia and hopes to undertake an expedition and to interview Aboriginal communities, with their intimate knowledge of the Australian bush.

Though the chances may be small, Helgen says, finding one in the wild “would be the beautiful end to the story.”

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Meet Obama's Defense Secretary Nominee

President Obama nominated former Senator Chuck Hagel as the next U.S. secretary of defense. To those who haven't followed the Senate closely in the past decade, he's probably not a household name.

Hagel is a former GOP senator from Nebraska and Purple-Heart-decorated Vietnam veteran, but he wouldn't necessarily be a popular pick with Republicans in Congress.

At age 21, Hagel and his brother Tom became the next in the family to serve in the United States Army. They joined the masses of Americans fighting an unfamiliar enemy in Vietnam.

In his book, he describes finding himself "pinned down by Viet Cong rifle fire, badly burned, with my wounded brother in my arms."

"Mr. President, I'm grateful for this opportunity to serve our country again," Hagel said after Obama announced his nomination Monday.

In 1971, Hagel took his first job in politics as chief of staff to Congressman John Y. McCollister, a position he held for six years. After that, he moved to Washington for the first time, where he went on to work for a tire company's government affairs office, the 1982 World's Fair and in 1981, as Ronald Reagan's Deputy Administrator of the Veterans Administration.

Obama Taps Sen. Chuck Hagel for Defense Secretary Watch Video

Sen. Chuck Hagel's Defense Nomination Draws Criticism Watch Video

Obama's Defense Nominee Chuck Hagel Stirs Washington Lawmakers Watch Video

He worked in the private sector for most of the 80s and 90s before his first election to the Senate in 1997.
Since the turn of the century, Hagel has followed a curvy path of political alliances that puts his endorsements all over the map. Hagel's record of picking politically unpopular positions could be a large part of why Obama is naming him for the job, as Slate's Fred Kaplan surmises the next Defense secretary will be faced with tough choices.

In 2000, he was one of few Republican senators to back Sen. John McCain over then-presidential-candidate George W. Bush.

After that election, Hagel fiercely criticized Bush for adding 30,000 surge troops to Iraq, in place of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group's proposal of a draw-down and regional diplomacy, which Hagel preferred. When Bush instead announced that more troops would go to Iraq, Hagel co-sponsored a nonbinding resolution to oppose it, along with then-Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del.

"The president says, 'I don't care.' He's not accountable anymore," Hagel told Esquire in June 2007. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends how this goes."

Hagel's fierce opposition to America's involvement in Iraq – he called it one of the five monumental blunders of history, on par with the Trojan War – will be of substantial importance as the Obama administration charts our course out of Afghanistan, deciding how to withdraw the last of the troops in 2014 and how much of a presence to leave behind.

Hagel's support for McCain, which was substantial in his competition against Bush, disappeared in the 2008 election. Hagel toured Iraq and Afghanistan with Obama during his first campaign for the presidency.

In October 2008, Hagel's wife, Lillibet, announced her support for the Obama team, after the Washington Post reported on her donations to his campaign. She donated again in 2012.

Before the 2008 election, Hagel wrote: "The next president of the United States will face one of the most difficult national security decisions of modern times: what to do about an Iran that may be at the threshold of acquiring nuclear weapons."

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West vs Asia education rankings are misleading

Western schoolchildren are routinely outperformed by their Asian peers, but worrying about it is pointless

MATHEMATICS and science are as essential to modern economies as coal was to the industrial revolution. So when the results of international tests show Western schoolchildren lagging behind their peers in countries like Singapore and Japan, alarm bells start ringing.

The latest results to cause consternation are from a comparison of mathematical and scientific knowledge called TIMSS, or Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. This is given every four years to 9-10-year-olds and 13-14-year-olds from more than 50 countries.

The results, released last month, show that students from the UK, US and Australia continue to perform disappointingly. In maths, for example, English, American and Australian 13-year-olds were outperformed by their peers in South Korea, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan and Russia. It was a similar story in science.

Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth. US secretary of education Arne Duncan lamented that "a number of nations are out-educating us today... If we as a nation don't turn that around, those nations will soon be outcompeting us in a knowledge-based, global economy."

Australia's Education Standards Institute director Kevin Donnelly said the results proved that the country's education system had gone "pear-shaped".

However, there are reasons to think that such worries are misplaced.

First of all, although the results are not world-beating, they are far from terrible. All were above average, and better than many other developed nations. For the US at least, they continue a trend of long-term improvement. In the first international mathematics survey, conducted in 1964, the US finished second from bottom.

Second, the common-sense connection between test scores and future economic success doesn't necessarily hold up. For developed nations, there is scant evidence that TIMSS rankings correlate with measures of prosperity or future success. The same holds for a similar test, the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA).

In 2008, Christopher Tienken, then at Rutgers University in New Jersey, compared 1995 TIMSS scores with the 2006 Growth Competitiveness Index. This index was devised by the World Economic Forum to measure a nation's future economic health. Tienken found that for developed countries there was no statistically significant relationship (International Journal of Education Policy & Leadership, vol 3, no 4).

Tienken, now at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, has since done a similar analysis of the 2003 PISA mathematics rankings and two measures of economic success: per-capita GDP in 2010, and the 2010-2011 Growth Competitiveness Index. The study, to be published in April, again found no statistically significant relationship.

These findings make TIMSS and PISA rankings seem irrelevant. But it could be worse than that. In many cases, high test scores correlate with economic failure.

Japanese students, for example, have always been near the top of the TIMSS. You might expect those high-flying students to be driving a high-flying economy. Yet the Japanese economy stagnated throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

There may be no causal connection, but the same negative correlation is seen elsewhere.

In 2007, Keith Baker of the US Department of Education made a rough comparison of long-term correlations between the 1964 mathematics scores and several measures of national success decades later.

Baker found negative relationships between mathematics rankings and numerous measures of prosperity and well-being: 2002 per-capita wealth, economic growth from 1992 to 2002 and the UN's Quality of Life Index. Countries scoring well on the tests were also less democratic. Baker concluded that league tables of international success are "worthless" (Phi Delta Kappan, vol 89, p 101).

A more recent analysis of 23 countries found a significant negative relationship between 2009 PISA scores and ranking on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor's measure of perceived entrepreneurial capabilities. This counts the percentage of people in a country who feel confident that they could start a business.

With so many indicators showing a negative relationship, perhaps we need to reconsider how we interpret success - or failure - on international education scores. "If we believe that these tests actually tell us how well a kid or a country is doing, and then we hold people accountable for that, those people are going to focus on what's most likely to be tested, and they're going to cut out everything else," says Tienken.

This is especially relevant to the UK, where the education secretary Michael Gove has justified some of his controversial reforms by referring to the country's performance on the international educational stage.

We might instead consider that in a global economy, where the answers to almost any standard question are a few smartphone taps away, skills like creativity and initiative will be the true drivers of prosperity. None of these traits can be measured easily by tests. When testing consumes precious educational time, focus and money, they get squeezed out.

"Standardised tests reward the ability to find answers to pre-existing questions, but finding the question is more important," says Yong Zhao, an education researcher at the University of Oregon in Eugene who found the negative relationship between PISA scores and entrepreneurship.

We must, of course, continue to promote the importance of mathematics and science, but fixating on international tests as a way to achieve this could prove counterproductive.

MacGregor Campbell is a New Scientist consultant based in Portland, Oregon, and a former teacher

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Conservancy workers trained to help make estates safer

SINGAPORE: More conservancy workers have been trained to help make the estates safer.

About 270 workers in the the east went through a half-day training workshop, named "Workers-on-Watch".

They were taught how to look out for suspicious characters and activities.

The workshop was organised by Bedok Police Division, with support from the Singapore Civil Defence Force, Singapore Customs and National Crime Prevention Council.

The programme started in 2008, with 30 workers at East Coast Town Council and has been expanded to four more town councils - Tampines, Marine Parade, Pasir Ris-Punggol and Moulmein-Kallang.

- CNA/xq

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Roku surpasses 700 channels, adds Roku Ready TV partners

700 channels and counting

(Credit:
Sarah Tew/CNET)

Roku has no new hardware here at CES 2013, but that's not stopping the company from building on its success: content, content, content. The company just crossed the 700-channel benchmark for its line of smart TV boxes, and it's got even more new services on deck for 2013.

Among the new channels that Roku is planning to add (in the territories indicated) in the first quarter of 2013:

• TWC TV: This app adds upwards of 300 live streaming TV channels for existing Time Warner Cable subscribers at no additional charge. (U.S. only)


• Fox Now: This is Fox's answer to Hulu -- full episodes of many Fox network TV shows. Sorry, cable cutters -- this is only available to customers who subscribe to a "participating TV provider." (U.S. only)


• PBS: According to Roku, this new channel will include "hundreds of full-length videos from local PBS stations, including episodes from new programs as well as the PBS archives, with new national and local content updated daily." (U.S. only)


• PBS Kids: The kid-friendly version of the above, with "more than 1,000 videos" including content such as Curious George and Sesame Street. (U.S. only)


• Blockbuster On Demand: Dish's pay-per-view movie service -- yet another alternative to Amazon, Vudu, and the like. (U.S. only)


• Dailymotion: The YouTube competitor comes to Roku. (U.S., Canada, U.K., Ireland)


• iHeartRadio: The ClearChannel audio service will add to Roku's now-comprehensive audio roster. (U.S. only)


• Flingo: Roku says: "More than 70 new channels, including brands like TMZ, A&E, History Channel, Lifetime, Transworld, Warren Miller, Fitness Magazine, and CollegeHumor. Select channels are available
  now. New channels will launch every month." But it's unclear exactly what content will be available, and how Flingo plays a role.

Those new offerings will join Roku's already category-leading lineup, which includes Netflix, Amazon Instant, Vudu, Hulu Plus, Crackle, HBO Go, MLB TV, Pandora, Dish World (live international programming), as well as the recently added Amazon Cloud Player, Spotify, and Vevo channels.

Still notably, frustratingly, curiously absent: YouTube.

Aside from that and Apple's
iTunes, though, Roku has nearly every major video and audio service out there (including, for the record, our own CNET channel).

More Roku Ready hardware partners
Separately, Roku also announced that it's expanding the list of "Roku Ready" hardware partners -- those companies that ship TVs and other AV products that include or are designed to work with the Roku Streaming Stick. Add Coby, Harman Kardon, Hisense, TCL, Voxx (which sells under RCA and other brands), and Westinghouse to the Roku Ready roster. They join 3M -- maker of the cool Streaming Projector -- Element, Haier America, Hitachi, Insignia, Oppo, and Apex.

Of course, that list leaves out every top tier TV manufacturer -- Samsung, LG, Sony, Panasonic, Vizio and the like -- all of which prefer to build their own smart TV suites and platforms. The irony is that Roku offers a far more extensive content selection than all of them, and it tends to upgrade and expand its offerings more frequently than the mainstream manufacturers.

But competition is amping up -- streaming video is arguably the hot topic here at CES 2013. Expect a slew of announcements from the majors in next few days as they pronounce their plans to out-Roku Roku in 2013 and beyond.

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Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: Places

  Photograph by Nenad Saljic

  A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.

  Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.

  (Read more about full moons.)

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: People

  Photograph by Micah Albert

  A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

  The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Photograph by Jason Ching

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  

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}// end ecommerce object

var store_43331 = new ecommerce_43331();





store_43331.init();

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