Was watching House tonight ant there was a case that House was seeing in the Clinic and it was about parthenogenesis [virgin birth, asexual reproduction] which occurs in rarely nature to [ex. bees, reptiles fish and even in some plants], but more rarely in humans which always results in a female child due to the XX chromosome. But a hermaphroditic species can have both female and male off-springs as they have both XY chromosomes . Which can also, happen 1 in 5 million. The discovery.com has information reptiles and other species... Very cool... Found some articles:

- Second 'Virgin Birth' Documented in Shark. Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News [10-10-08] (video: A Mom Who Can Be Dad Too):
Oct. 10, 2008 -- The first documented virgin shark birth seemed like an odd miracle, but now a second female has become pregnant sans daddy, adding to the evidence that female sharks don't always need a male to conceive, according to a new study.

Virgin birth, scientifically known as parthenogenesis, has previously been proven in certain amphibians, reptiles, birds and bony fish. It's now suspected that most, if not all, female sharks possess the ability.

"Parthenogenesis may not have evolved in sharks," Demian Chapman, who led the research, told Discovery News. "It may just be an occasional mistake that sometimes occurs when eggs are left unfertilized."

Chapman, a shark scientist with the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science at Stony Brook University, explained that during egg production, a female shark produces four cells. Only one of these becomes the egg. Another of the four is called "the sister polar body," which is a close genetic match to the egg.

During parthenogenesis, according to Chapman, "the sister polar body fuses with the egg and injects its chromosomes into it."

Related Content:
Jennifer Viegas' blog: Born Animal
Female Sharks Reproduce Without Dad
How Stuff Works: Sharks

"Therefore, it acts like a sperm and triggers the development of an embryo," he said.

The discovery in this case is bittersweet, since the virgin shark in question, a female blacktip shark named "Tidbit," died after living for eight years without a male companion at the Virginia Aquarium.

An autopsy upon her death revealed that she was pregnant with a single offspring. DNA testing of the unborn offspring showed that it contained no genetic material from a father.

A paper outlining the findings appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Fish Biology.

Chapman and his team made a similar discovery just last May, when a hammerhead residing at an Omaha, Neb., zoo became pregnant after not being in contact with male sharks for at least three years. DNA fingerprinting techniques were used in that case as they were for Tidbit.

The method is identical to how researchers handle human paternity testing.

Female sharks can store sperm for long periods of time, which is why the scientists needed to confirm, through the DNA analysis, the lack of paternal input.

Despite the novelty of the phenomenon, virgin births are inferior to regular shark births in two major respects.

First, the female appears to only be able to produce a single offspring in this manner. Females that mate can have litters ranging from a few to more than 100 shark pups, depending on the species.

Second, the offspring of a virgin birth has "reduced genetic diversity when compared to its mother or any other shark produced by sex," Chapman said, adding that the process is "no great white hope for depleted shark populations."

He hopes that future conservation efforts will focus on "robust shark populations with balanced gender ratios, rather than hoping for a bailout from some interesting quirk of reproduction."

Robert Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research at the Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida, told Discovery News that he supports the new findings since "the research methods are sound and the conclusion of a parthenogenetic birth in this shark species is proven."

Hueter said it's still possible that virgin births are more of "an egg developmental aberration rather than a physiological response to a lack of a mate," but he predicts "time will tell as more research is focused on this interesting subject."

Such revelations may come sooner rather than later, as Chapman is now analyzing the DNA of an offspring from yet another suspected virgin shark birth.

- Korean Cloned Human Cells Were Product of "Virgin Birth". Fraudulent cloned cells were likely the first example of a human egg turned directly into stem cells By JR Minkel:
Researchers say they have confirmed suspicions that embryonic stem cells claimed to be extracted from the first cloned human embryo by discredited South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang actually owe their existence to parthenogenesis, a process in which egg cells give rise to embryos without being fertilized by sperm.

A series of genetic markers sprinkled throughout the cells' chromosomes show the same pattern found in parthenogenetic mice as opposed to cloned mice, according to a report published online today in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

The result suggests that, although Hwang deceived the world about achieving the first human cloning, his group was first to succeed in performing human parthenogenesis, which may offer a way of creating cells that are genetically matched to a woman for transplantation back into her body to treat degenerative diseases.

"I think this is an extremely important—and solid—paper," says stem cell researcher Robert Lanza, vice president of research and scientific development at Applied Cell Technology, a regenerative medicine company headquartered in Alameda, Calif., who did not take part in the study. "It conclusively proves that the stem cell line in question was not cloned as claimed, but rather was generated through parthenogenesis."

The result follows on the heels of an announcement last month by another California stem cell company, International Stem Cell Corporation (ISC) in Oceanside, that it had successfully achieved human parthenogenesis for the first time. Last year, Italian researchers claimed to have achieved the same feat but have yet to publish their results.

"The fact that this has now been achieved by two independent groups gives me a far greater degree of confidence," Lanza says.

The new finding brings a measure of closure to a story that first rocked the science world in February 2004, when Hwang and colleagues at Seoul National University announced they had cloned a female donor's cell by transferring its nucleus into one of her egg cells stripped of its nucleus in a procedure known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), and harvested embryonic stem cells from the resulting fusion. They published the result the next month in Science.

The claim went up in smoke in January of 2006 after a probe by the university concluded that Hwang had fabricated the evidence, which followed a similarly damning assessment of a landmark paper from the previous year in which the group falsely reported creating 11 cell lines genetically matched to their donors.

Unsolved Mysteries

A cloned cell should be identical to its donor, but the probe found that of 48 common genetic variations, or markers, present in the 2004 cells, eight did not match their apparent donor. Investigators raised parthenogenesis as the most likely explanation but could not be certain.

Later, during a chance discussion with European colleagues, stem cell researcher George Daley of Children's Hospital Boston and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute learned that they had received samples of the cell line before the work was retracted. "We had read the suspicions that the cell was a parthenote, but also realized that it had never really been proven," Daley says.

To settle the case, they analyzed the genetic sequence of the cell line at 500,000 locations across the genome.

The DNA of any two people will differ on average at one of every 1,000 subunits, or base pairs, Daley says. When a chromosome from a sperm cell joins with that of an egg, these single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs or "snips") tend not to match each other.

The same goes for cloned cells. But in contrast, pairs of matching chromosomes in parthenogenetic cells tend to match one another in the middle and differ near the ends because of a genetic mixing process called recombination. In their paper, Daley and colleagues report that the SNPs in the Korean cell line do indeed match toward the center of the chromosomes, similar to five parthenogenetic mouse cell lines that the team created for comparison.

In a separate analysis, they also found that three regions lacked the chemical modifications, or imprinting, that paternal genes impose on a fertilized embryo to prevent those genes from being activated.

Jeffrey Janus, president and director of research for ISC, agrees that "Dr. Hwang's cells have characteristics found in parthenogenetic cells" but remains cautious, saying "it needs more study."

The Irony of It All

Stem cell experts say that Hwang and his team probably had no clue what they had achieved, because if they had they would have claimed credit for it.

"I think this … is every bit as exciting as the SCNT they were claiming," says stem cell researcher Kent Vrana of Pennsylvania State University, who pioneered parthenogenesis in monkeys. "Parthenotes by their very nature are nonviable embryos, so you're not destroying embryos, which has some ethical advantages."

Vrana says the Korean team used a procedure common in attempts to induce parthenogenesis and SCNT alike, in which they injected egg cells with calcium and a protein synthesis inhibitor to mimic what happens when sperm fertilizes an egg.

To achieve SCNT, they first had to extract each egg's DNA and then inject the donor cell nucleus. Daley says the Korean scientists must have inadvertently left the DNA intact in one of the 242 egg cells they injected. "They claimed they verified the removal of the DNA,'' Daley says, "but obviously they didn't."

The injection of the donor nucleus could have failed if the injecting needle pulled it back out when withdrawn from the egg or if the egg somehow rejected the introduced nucleus, Vrana says.

Hwang's group purported to rule out parthenogenesis as an explanation in part by showing that two genes normally activated by paternal DNA were inactive in the cells. But Daley says such experiments are easy to misinterpret and are less conclusive than sequencing SNPs.

"I think they were just so blinded by what they hoped to accomplish, they missed it," Vrana says.

As a result, in late June, more than a year after Science retracted the 2004 paper, researchers at ISC were able to claim the discovery of human parthenogenetic cell lines as their own in the journal Cloning and Stem Cells. The group reported growing multiple parthenogenetic embryonic stem cell lines by incubating eggs in a warm, low-oxygen culture medium.

Before today's announcement, the work was already "awfully convincing," Vrana says, and surprisingly successful: out of some 50 donated eggs, the company grew six cell lines. Parthenogenesis in monkeys typically works only once every 90 eggs, he says.

Banking on Parthenotes

The therapeutic potential of parthenogenetic cells remains to be seen. The lack of imprinting from the paternal DNA may cause the cells to behave abnormally as they develop. Furthermore, they must have matching immune proteins to be transplanted back into a donor.

In principle, tissue banks of parthenogenetic cell lines could include enough different immune protein combinations to treat up to half of the U.S. population—men as well as women—Lanza says. But he adds that if human parthenotes routinely contain as many genetic mismatches as the Korean cells, the number of eggs needed to create such a bank could be prohibitively large.

Daley says his group hopes to acquire donated eggs from women with inherited diseases and use parthenogenesis to create cell lines to study those disorders. In the future, researchers will have to determine whether similar cells are safe and effective when transplanted.

"We're a long, long way," Daley says, "from realizing therapeutic uses of these cells."

- Virgin Births Lead to Transplantable Stem Cells. Stem cells created from unfertilized mice eggs are successfully transplanted without immune rejection By JR Minkel:
In the future individual egg cells may serve as the source for stem cells that doctors can transplant back into people if necessary to treat nerve damage and debilitating diseases, if researchers can extend a new procedure used on mice for making transplantable stem cells.

"This is just a small step along the way, but it's an important one," says stem cell researcher Paul Lerou of Children's Hospital Boston and Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital. Lerou and his colleagues extracted stem cells from embryolike clusters of cells grown from the unfertilized eggs of female mice that the researchers coaxed into dividing. They injected the stem cells back into related mice, where they grew without being rejected by immune cells, the group reports in a paper published online December 14 by Science.

In principle the method could make it easier to create human stem cells and potentially carry out still far-off treatments for spinal cord injuries and degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. "I think it's very attractive and this paper shows it has the potential to do really great things," says molecular biologist Kent Vrana of Penn State University.

Researchers have previously proposed growing embryonic stem cells using so-called therapeutic cloning, in which the nucleus of a donor's body cell is placed in an egg cell stripped of its nucleus. The problem is that the process would likely require at least 100 donated egg cells to work even once, judging from the number of eggs needed to clone animals.

To avoid this, Lerou's team in essence tricked unfertilized egg cells from mice into dividing the same way that a growing embryo would. Researchers induce this effect, called parthenogenesis, by exposing ovulating or immature eggs to a chemical that prevents them from splitting their two sets of chromosomes into two daughter cells with one set each. The process works about 70 percent of the time in mice and nonhuman primates, Lerou says.

Normally, such cells would be genetically mismatched with cells like those of their donor. Specifically, the donor would have genes for two different proteins called major histocompatibility complexes (MHC), one on each chromosome 17 in its genome. The so-called parthenote embryo, however, would have identical pairs of chromosomes, so it would have only one MHC. If a cell's MHCs do not match those of the rest of the organism, the immune system will attack and reject those cells in much the same way it rejects a transplanted organ that comes from an incompatible donor.

A parthenote's chromosomes are not completely identical, however. An egg cell starts off containing both sets of chromosomes, each of which is copied and one of which then gets expelled. Before that expulsion, the different chromosomes mix together a bit so that a chromosome that would normally have one MHC protein sometimes gets the other one instead, giving the parthenote two different MHCs.

The researchers hypothesized that they could make compatible matches if they were able to isolate the few cells in the bunch with both MHCs. Toward that end, they analyzed the genomes of individual cells from their parthenotes and, lo and behold, found a few with both proteins. When they transplanted those cells into mice that also had a mixed set of MHC proteins, the parthenote cells took hold and grew into the three major kinds of embryonic tissue.

"It's pretty solid data," says stem cell researcher Jose Cibelli of Michigan State University. "If that is going to hold true in humans we don't know, but it is very encouraging." He cautions, however, that stem cells of any origin must still prove stable when transplanted to hold any hope of treating disease. One possible hitch: Parthenotes might not grow properly, because they lack important contributions from male genes.

These articles are not in anyway written by me

Haaa! had to freaken' laugh 'cuz I love this song, but when I saw the lyrics I thought of 1 particular person... This song would have been a great dedication to the past idiot in my life, yrs ago, haaa... I'm over and done with him NOW, but that ass had to take my shit! It's perfect!!!!

yah, love this song! like tons!



KBS Yoon Do Hyun Love Letter 300th episodes Special (June 6, 2008)

Yoon Do Hyun, Hong Kyung Min, Kim Gun-Mo, Windy City's Kim Ban Jang, Ji Hyun-Woo, Crying Nut, Hwayobi, Gummy, Lyn & Young Ji - performing "Wrongful Meeting / 잘못된 만남" (originally by Kim Gun Mo).

* just got it! yah!! also the the AhYooMee version!:) hee...

I stumbled upon this really great article for BFG and me, through digg at zenhabits. even printed it out!



11 Ways to Cure Someday Syndrome
Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Alex Fayle of the Someday Syndrome blog.
• Someday Syndrome: not doing what you want to because you don’t know what it is, because you’re procrastinating about it, or because you have too much stuff getting in your way.
Everyone suffers from Someday Syndrome at some point in their lives, often catching it repeatedly. For me, most recently, I’d been saying that I really should give running a try without doing anything about it.
You probably have something similar going on in your life – a project, a task, a goal - that you just haven’t got around to doing yet. Right?
I could quote Nike and say: Just Do It, but if it were that simple Someday Syndrome wouldn’t exist. In my own case, it wasn’t until my body rebelled and refused to sleep from lack of exercise that I finally got started.
I decided that here had to be an easier way than waiting for pain to push me into getting over myself and getting on with my goals. So I came up with this: 11 ways to cure Someday Syndrome so that others don’t need to suffer through a cure.
1. Be you. This is The Happiness Project’s number one Happiness Commandment. I hate team sports, so there’s no way I’d play football (soccer). Running allows me to exercise when I want and I can do it on my own or with a friend. Perfectly me.
Maybe you’re not doing something because in reality, it doesn’t fit with who you are. If so, dump the idea and the expectations that likely came along with it, and go find something that suits you better.
2. Clear out the junk. If you don’t know what would suit you better, it could be because your mind and emotions are all cluttered up. I mean, seriously, if your mind’s in chaos, how could you possibly make a clear decision on getting rid of your some days? The clutter I’m talking about includes the negative thoughts (like me thinking that I’d never be able to run more than 30 seconds without dying), or negative attitudes (I’m too lazy to run).
There are some great tools available in the Simplicity category of ZenHabits. Use them.
3. Know what you want. And why you want it. If you are going cure Someday Syndrome, you’ll need to know details about that desire and the reasons behind it.
And if you don’t know what that is, the blogosphere is full of blogs ready to help you figure out your dreams - Someday Syndrome and ZenHabits are two examples, but you can find others on the PluginID website on Glen’s Personal Development page.
4. Make a grand plan. I say “grand” because this is the big picture plan. Don’t get carried away. Planning can feel like action, but really it’s no different than talking. Until you actually do something, you’re still procrastinating.
I have a goal of running 20K next November. That’s enough for now. Starting is more important than getting into detailed plans.
5. Take one step at a time. The only details you need to choose at this point is first steps. I get overwhelmed by details. When I look past the big picture I don’t just see a few details – I see all of them, therefore I focus on just the next two or three things that I’m going to do.
I know what I need to do to get started (the first two months of training). That’s enough.
6. Ignore the rest. That’s right. Ignore everything else in the goal except what you’re working on. We often use comparisons of where we are now to where we want to be as a form of procrastination. While checking in is always a good thing, we can do it when each small task is completed, and not in the middle of a task.
On my running days, when I’m in the middle of my current workout, I don’t think about what’s coming up next week. Why would I want to freak myself out?
7. Get help. Daniel Gilbert in his book Stumbling on Happiness, says that the best route to figuring out if our goals will actually make us happy is to talk to others who have done it.
I also try to be lazy when I can be, so if someone else has done the work (like this Couch-to-5K Running Plan), then there’s no need to waste my time coming up with something new, now is there?
8. Don’t compare. Be careful when you get help, because the dream-shattering tendency to compare lurks nearby. Leo talks about the bad side to comparisons in his post: Life’s Enough. Stop Comparing Yourself to Others.
Enough said. (Yes, I’m taking my own advice about Getting Help and moving on.)
9. Be uncomfortable. Judith Sills in her book The Comfort Trap, or What If You’re Riding a Dead Horse? talks about how we might be terribly unhappy, but we’re comfortable so we don’t do anything about the unhappiness. Happiness is a risk, but the current situation even if it’s painful is safe.
Which would you prefer? Comfortably in pain and unhappy or uncomfortably blissful? I live my life the second way and would recommend that you always choose the uncomfortable option.
10. Celebrate the process as well as the end. I don’t mean celebrations like Dash’s Grade 3 “graduation ceremony” from The Incredibles. I mean acknowledge your progress. I Tweet my runs and mention them on my Facebook status. I also talk with other runners and we talk progress and tips.
And in turn this sharing inspires others and helps them move past their own Somedays and toward achieving their goals.
11. Don’t stop at the easy point. Wait a second. Most lists are only ten points. Why does this one have eleven?
Because it’s important to push yourself just a little bit further than you think you can go. Although my big goal is running 20K within a year, I’ve committed to running 7K on December 31st.
So, while you’re celebrating and taking it one step at a time, come up with one unexpected action you can take that’ll add energy, excitement and a bit of fear to your goal.
Believe me, that bit of fear will probably be the best motivator you’ve ever found.
For more from Alex Fayle, check out his blog, Someday Syndrome (or subscribe to his feed).
—
If you liked this article, please share it on del.icio.us, StumbleUpon or Digg. I’d appreciate it. :)

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from zenhabits

The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.
The network link has interrupted while negotiating a connection, please try again.

This is happening too many times to me on Firefox and Opera... Thinking of seeing how Chrome works...

Thinking should I go shopping or wait until I do a wipe of my PC? Aaarrggghhh!! Vista is getting on my nerves but still like how it looks! Me and my Dumb-A always on cute mode!! Let's not forget my daily reads at yahoo, digg, dailymail and others...

Looking at my email saw that TwinkieBeyond has an RSS and is on twitter. Heee... Haven't really been listening but do read his post at his site and now with his twitter site, even better... Do miss his antics and also the wife... I wonder if he changed his intro?

Getting tired of this layout, want to change it to something more but what??? Aaaaahhh!

Want a Set of Gmail-Themed Stickers? You’re In Luck!
Posted 12/04/08 at 07:48:22 PM | by Alex Castle

We don’t know how we’ve managed to live this long without a set of vinyl Gmail stickers for our computer. Finally, our prayers have been answered, and Google’s offering to give away these priceless keepsakes for free. Just send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to the address at this page, and you’ll get back a set of Gmail stickers.

The stickers include the Gmail “mvelope” icon, a set of Gmail hotkey reminders to stick on your keyboard, and one of three (collectible!) nameplate stickers. You’d better hurry, though, because knowing the way us nerds snap up anything Google or pseudo-ironic, these suckers are probably going to go fast.

To redeem your free stickers, you have to mail a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE ftw!) to the following address:

Send me some Gmail stickers already
P.O. Box 391420
Mountain View, CA 94039-1420

Is anyone else as excited to receive your Google stickers as we are? Let us know in the comments. And if anyone gets the unicorn faceplate, hold onto it—we’ll trade you.

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from http://www.maximumpc.com/

19 Handy Twitter Mashups and Tools Posted By Thomson Chemmanoor
December 8th, 2008

Twitter mashups and tools put a unique spin on the way we use Twitter. By “mashing” information from Twitter with other applications, you get an unmatchable user experience that can be both fun and useful. Enjoy these top 19 Twitter mashups.

1) Twitter Burner.com - Tweetburner is a twitter mashup that allows you to create tiny URLs and also allow you to track how many times they where clicked on it. Ideal for someone who lets out a lot of links on twitter.

2) Twalala.com - Get ready to take control of your twitterstream. twalala is a client for Twitter that allows you to control what you see, and more importantly, what you don’t see in your twitterstream. Using twalala, you can filter tweets out of your stream by keywords and phrases or mute individuals who get a bit too chatty. Finally, Twitter with a mute button.

3) Twitspy.com lets you see what people are posting on Twitter in realtime by spying on the Twitter public timeline. Twitspy also tracks website links within tweets.

4) Twitterstats.com - In your Tweets, Graphin’ Your Stats! Weekly Stats. Graph your Twitter Stats including. Tweets per hour; Tweets per month; Tweet timeline;

5) Twittervision.com is a web mashup combining Twitter with Google Maps to create a real time display of tweets across a map.

6) mail2twitter.com is a free service that allows you to post tweets through e-mail, and the most important, from any email-enabled mobile device.

7) TwitterCounter.com -Add a daily updating TwitterCounter to your blog so everybody can see how popular you are

8) Twit Pic.com, Share photos with your friends on twitter with twitpic. No signup required, just login using your twitter account.

9) Twittercal.com - It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client.

10) Geotwitter.org - This mashup uses the Google Maps API and Twitter API. The most recent updates are fetched from the public timeline and mapped once every minute. If you have any comments suggestions or ideas feel free to leave a note on our blog.

11) TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ tweets of Twitter. (previously known as TwitterNotifier)

12) TwittyTunes is a FoxyTunes companion Firefox extension - it allows you to post your currently playing songs to Twitter with a click.

13) Twitbin.com - Send and receive messages to all your fellow twitterholics, right from your firefox browser.

14) TwitterBar - allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar. A small unobtrusive grey icon sits to the right of your address bar; clicking on it will post your tweet, and you can hover your mouse over it to see how many characters you have left.

15) StockTwits.com is an open, community-powered investment idea and information service for financial investors.

16) Twitterholic.com - Provides a list of the 100 best twitterers based on their followers, the people they follow and the number of their updates

17) TwitterFeed.com - Feed your blog to twitter, post RSS to twitter.

18) TwitterBuzz.com shows you what people using Twitter, a micro-blogging service, are linking to.

19) Twitter Map - Provides users with the ability to update their locations on a Google Map and send a tweet with it

These great Twitter mash-ups and tools represent some of the best ways twitter data can be used to create a great twittering experience.

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from: digitallabz.com

Key to 'curing' obesity may lie in worms that destroy their own fat: McGill researchers
Usual metabolic process goes awry in recently discovered mutation, burning lipids instead of storing them - Public release date: 8-Dec-2008
Contact: Mark Shainblum - mark.shainblum@mcgill.ca = 514-398-2189
This release is available in French.

A previously unknown mutation discovered in a common roundworm holds the promise of new treatments for obesity in humans, McGill University researchers say. Their study was published Dec. 3 in the journal Nature, and was funded by the Canadian Cancer Society and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

In lean times, a normal Caenorhabditis elegans worm goes into a form of suspended animation called "dauer" that slows its metabolism and allows it to survive for extended periods without food.

"When they go into dauer, these worms radically alter their metabolism," said Dr. Richard Roy, a cancer researcher at McGill's Department of Biology specializing in the control of cell division. "They shut down everything energy-consuming, which includes foraging, cell division and reproduction."

Unlike other "hibernating" organisms, C. elegans maintains a degree of mobility during dauer by stocking up on energy in the form of fats – or lipids – which they store in special cells or reserves.

"This allows them to live up to six months without eating, instead of the two weeks they would otherwise have," Roy explained. A worm with the newly discovered mutation, however, will usually die within a week of going into dauer

"These mutants somehow cannot shut down the process of cell division, which is why we noticed them in the first place," Roy said. "However, that's not what kills them. They cannot adjust their metabolism correctly. They store up their six-month lipid reserves, but as soon as they shift into dauer they use them up within a few days. This is because they lack an enzyme that blocks the activity of a very important triglyceride lipase. Without this regulation the lipase burns up all the fat it encounters and destroys the worm's energy reserves."

This discovery was a near-accidental by-product of Roy's regular line of research, searching for cells that abnormally disobey cellular signals in a cancer context, and he gives graduate student and study first author Patrick Narbonne much of the credit.

"Patrick was absolutely brilliant. He was so observant that he noticed these animals were dying way too early, and he also realized that they were not dying because of the cell-division issue."

Roy and Narbonne believe this discovery, which will require considerable additional research, may have significant long-term implications for human health.

"I think we should start looking at the enzymes involved in this cascade, particularly in obese individuals. They are likewise accumulating lipids, but in a reverse situation to C. elegans, this enzyme isn't recognizing it, or something is blocking its function. We're making the case that we can uncouple this enzyme from its normal regulation. If we could develop drugs to do that selectively in fatty tissue, we'd be able to chew up all the fat."

"This study fascinates me," said Dr. Robert Sladek, one of Canada's most prominent diabetes researchers, affiliated to the McGill Department of Human Genetics and the McGill and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre. "It will be exciting to see whether this pathway that controls energy storage and lifespan in worms plays a similar role in humans. The implications for patients with obesity and diabetes might be quite far-reaching."

ABOUT McGILL UNIVERSITY: McGill University, founded in Montreal, Que., in 1821, is Canada's leading post-secondary institution. It has two campuses, 11 faculties, 10 professional schools, 300 programs of study and more than 33,000 students. McGill attracts students from more than 160 countries around the world. Almost half of McGill students claim a first language other than English – including 6,000 francophones – with more than 6,200 international students making up almost 20 per cent of the student body.

ABOUT THE CANADIAN CANCER SOCIETY: The Canadian Cancer Society is a national community-based organization of volunteers whose mission is to eradicate cancer and to enhance the quality of life of people living with cancer. It is the largest national charitable funder of cancer research in Canada. Last year, the Society funded close to $49.5 million in leading-edge research projects across the country. To know more about cancer, visit the website at www.cancer.ca or call the toll-free, bilingual Cancer Information Service at 1 888 939-3333.

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from: eurekalert.org

New trojan in mass DNS hijack
Single box pollutes entire LAN
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author
Posted in Security, 5th December 2008 20:05 GMT

Researchers have identified a new trojan that can tamper with a wide array of devices on a local network, an exploit that sends them to impostor websites even if they are hardened machines that are fully patched or run non-Windows operating systems.

The malware is a new variant of the DNSChanger, a trojan that has long been known to change the domain name system settings of PCs and Macs alike. According to researchers with anti-virus provider McAfee's Avert Labs, the update allows a single infected machine to pollute the DNS settings of potentially hundreds of other devices running on the same local area network by undermining its dynamic host configuration protocol, or DHCP, which dynamically allocates IP addresses.

"Systems that are not infected with the malware can still have the payload of communicating with the rogue DNS servers delivered to them," McAfee's Craig Schmugar writes here of the new variant. "This is achieved without exploiting any security vulnerability."

The scenario plays out something like this:

* Jill connects a PC infected by the new DNSChanger variant to a coffee shop's WiFi hotspot or her employer's local network.

* Steve connects to the same network using a fully-patched Linux box, which requests an IP address.

* Jill's PC injects a DHCP offer command to instruct Steve's computer to rout all DNS requests through a booby-trapped DNS server.

* Steve's Linux box can no longer be trusted to visit authoritative websites. Although the address bar on his browser may show he is accessing bankofamerica.com, he may in fact be at an impostor website.

The only way a user might know the attack is underway is by manually checking the DNS server his computer is using (e.g. by typing "ipconfig /all" at a Windows command prompt). There are several countermeasures users can take, Schmugar said, the easiest being hard-coding a DNS server in a machine's configuration settings.

(In Windows, this can be done by going to Start > Control Panel > Network Connections and right clicking on Local Area Connection and choosing properties. Scroll down to Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click the Properties button. Then type in the primary and secondary for your DNS service. We're partial to OpenDNS, whose settings are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.)

In an interview, Schmugar said the DHCP attack doesn't exploit a vulnerability in either user machines or network hardware, allowing it to work with a wide variety of home and enterprise routers. It involves a ndisprot.sys driver that is installed on the infected box. Once there, it monitors network traffic for DHCP requests and responds with bogus offers that contain the IP address to the rogue DNS server.

DNSChanger has already been viewed exploiting router weaknesses to change DNS settings, but the ability to poison other machine's DHCP connections appears to be new, said Eric Sites, VP of research at Sunbelt Software. For the moment, the new variant doesn't appear to be widely circulated, but the prospect of a trojan that can poison other machines' DHCP connections suggests this one is worth watching. ®

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from http://www.theregister.co.uk/

Started watching 'We are dating now' not such a great k-drama but still. 16 eps... heee... I'm on episode 9, but I find the main character a bore and she doesn't deserve the guy! whatever...

changed my wallpaper on my desktop but seems that its making me hungry for cake and coffee... heee...

SUVs are the most stolen. The gem for car thieves is the Escalade, the 10 most stolen cars are trucks and SUVs... On the truck side the Ford F-250 and F-350 are among thieves’ desirable... The least stolen is the Mercedes E class sedan. Thieves will pass over a small car and go for the SUVs... [Read on...]

Had a coffee and an 1/2 an almond croissant that BFG got at the Hosp. He also made me the coffee and brought it to me. What a sweetie... We made lunch together... Had an egg-which and soup, he had to go fast to a meeting. Practically, late...

There are a few versions of her song... on YouTube if you search with her name... Some good and some not so... :) Song that was sang by Chaka, too. [video]

Original song by Janis Ian... also like her Child’s Society... This has a sad background... As most of her songs. Would like to get my hands on her 2 cd compilation from 1995... She made it bigger in Japan... Very interesting lady.

This came to my attention when I was watching eTalk and Celine Dion came on and was singing "I learned the truth at seventeen" and went on Google in search for the song... I liked the tune... when voila, found it and came upon Mrs. B post of the song...
I Learned the Truth at Seventeen - post. Been reading some of her posts, freaken' funny about the kittens Lily and Pete.

Reading about the Virgin Suicides which the song from Janis Ian played to the boys through the phone. That's how the girls communicated... Found to love that movie, will get it into my collection... nya!

Went on the hunt for my old iPod... found it and retrieved "Adesso e Fortuna," which is still in the back of my mind... Need to upload it onto my new iPod... :)

Crap can't find my camera. I wanted to take and upload some pictures to my craft blog. Crap!

Been reading old posts from old bloggers and new posts too... Went to vent on the craziness is the CA gov't. Crystals, why did H get the boot? The GG is smoking’s something. Sheesh!

Haven't watched TV for a most of the day. I will try this from now on. I'm thinking of getting freaky with the Wii and Samba de Amigo... Wonder were the Wii is, though?

EEGs show brain differences between poor and rich kids
By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 02 December 2008

BERKELEY — University of California, Berkeley, researchers have shown for the first time that the brains of low-income children function differently from the brains of high-income kids.

In a study recently accepted for publication by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, scientists at UC Berkeley's Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and the School of Public Health report that normal 9- and 10-year-olds differing only in socioeconomic status have detectable differences in the response of their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is critical for problem solving and creativity.

Child wired for EEG to test brain functionElectroencephalography, or EEG, uses electrodes on the scalp and held in place by a cap to measure underlying brain activity. (Lee Michael Perry/UC Berkeley)
Brain function was measured by means of an electroencephalograph (EEG) - basically, a cap fitted with electrodes to measure electrical activity in the brain - like that used to assess epilepsy, sleep disorders and brain tumors.

"Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult," said Robert Knight, director of the institute and a UC Berkeley professor of psychology. "We found that kids are more likely to have a low response if they have low socioeconomic status, though not everyone who is poor has low frontal lobe response."

Previous studies have shown a possible link between frontal lobe function and behavioral differences in children from low and high socioeconomic levels, but according to cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, first author of the new paper, "those studies were only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors that tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity."

Co-author W. Thomas Boyce, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of public health who currently is the British Columbia Leadership Chair of Child Development at the University of British Columbia (UBC), is not surprised by the results. "We know kids growing up in resource-poor environments have more trouble with the kinds of behavioral control that the prefrontal cortex is involved in regulating. But the fact that we see functional differences in prefrontal cortex response in lower socioeconomic status kids is definitive."

Boyce, a pediatrician and developmental psychobiologist, heads a joint UC Berkeley/UBC research program called WINKS - Wellness in Kids - that looks at how the disadvantages of growing up in low socioeconomic circumstances change children's basic neural development over the first several years of life.

"This is a wake-up call," Knight said. "It's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums."

Kishiyama, Knight and Boyce suspect that the brain differences can be eliminated by proper training. They are collaborating with UC Berkeley neuroscientists who use games to improve the prefrontal cortex function, and thus the reasoning ability, of school-age children.

"It's not a life sentence," Knight emphasized. "We think that with proper intervention and training, you could get improvement in both behavioral and physiological indices."

Kishiyama, Knight, Boyce and their colleagues selected 26 children ages 9 and 10 from a group of children in the WINKS study. Half were from families with low incomes and half from families with high incomes. For each child, the researchers measured brain activity while he or she was engaged in a simple task: watching a sequence of triangles projected on a screen. The subjects were instructed to click a button when a slightly skewed triangle flashed on the screen.

The researchers were interested in the brain's very early response - within as little as 200 milliseconds, or a fifth of a second - after a novel picture was flashed on the screen, such as a photo of a puppy or of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

"An EEG allows us to measure very fast brain responses with millisecond accuracy," Kishiyama said.

The researchers discovered a dramatic difference in the response of the prefrontal cortex not only when an unexpected image flashed on the screen, but also when children were merely watching the upright triangles waiting for a skewed triangle to appear. Those from low socioeconomic environments showed a lower response to the unexpected novel stimuli in the prefrontal cortex that was similar, Kishiyama said, to the response of people who have had a portion of their frontal lobe destroyed by a stroke.

"When paying attention to the triangles, the prefrontal cortex helps you process the visual stimuli better. And the prefrontal cortex is even more involved in detecting novelty, like the unexpected photographs," he said. But in both cases, "the low socioeconomic kids were not detecting or processing the visual stimuli as well. They were not getting that extra boost from the prefrontal cortex."

"These kids have no neural damage, no prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, no neurological damage," Kishiyama said. "Yet, the prefrontal cortex is not functioning as efficiently as it should be. This difference may manifest itself in problem solving and school performance."

The researchers suspect that stressful environments and cognitive impoverishment are to blame, since in animals, stress and environmental deprivation have been shown to affect the prefrontal cortex. UC Berkeley's Marian Diamond, professor of integrative biology, showed nearly 20 years ago in rats that enrichment thickens the cerebral cortex as it improves test performance. And as Boyce noted, previous studies have shown that children from poor families hear 30 million fewer words by the time they are four than do kids from middle-class families.

"In work that we and others have done, it really looks like something as simple and easily done as talking to your kids" can boost prefrontal cortex performance, Boyce said.

"We are certainly not blaming lower socioeconomic families for not talking to their kids - there are probably a zillion reasons why that happens," he said. "But changing developmental outcomes might involve something as accessible as helping parents to understand that it is important that kids sit down to dinner with their parents, and that over the course of that dinner it would be good for there to be a conversation and people saying things to each other."

"The study is suggestive and a little bit frightening that environmental conditions have such a strong impact on brain development," said Silvia Bunge, UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology who is leading the intervention studies on prefrontal cortex development in teenagers by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Boyce's UBC colleague, Adele Diamond, showed last year that 5- and 6-year-olds with impaired executive functioning, that is, poor problem solving and reasoning abilities, can improve their academic performance with the help of special activities, including dramatic play.

Bunge hopes that, with fMRI, she can show improvements in academic performance as a result of these games, actually boosting the activity of the prefrontal cortex.

"People have tried for a long time to train reasoning, largely unsuccessfully," Bunge said. "Our question is, 'Can we replicate these initial findings and at the same time give kids the tools to succeed?'"

This research is supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health.

For more information:
Sylvia Bunge's research, including video: This is your brain on adolescence.

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from http://www.berkeley.edu/news/

FDA to Allow Trace Levels of Melamine in Baby Formula
By JENNIFER CORBETT DOOREN

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration said Friday that it will allow trace amounts of melamine in infant formula. Earlier this week, the agency said it found the industrial chemical in at least one brand of formula sold in the U.S.

The new stance partly reverses the agency's October assessment that it was safe to consume food and beverages with melamine levels below 2.5 parts per million, with the exception of infant formula. The FDA said at the time that it couldn't determine if there was a safe level of melamine and melamine-related compounds in infant formula.

But Friday, the FDA said it "concluded that levels of melamine alone or cyanuric acid alone, at or below one part per million in infant formula do not raise public health concerns." Melamine is a chemical approved for use in plastics and the liners of some food containers in the U.S. It isn't approved for use in food. Cyanuric acid is a melamine byproduct.

Earlier this week, the FDA said it found traces of melamine in a liquid form of Good Start Supreme Infant Formula with Iron made by Nestlé SA's Nestlé USA unit and traces of cyanuric acid in Infant Formula Powder, Enfamil LIPIL with Iron from Mead Johnson Nutritionals, a unit of Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. Both companies have said their own tests haven't found such chemicals.

"The domestic supply of infant formula is safe," Stephen Sundlof, head of the FDA's food-safety division, said Friday. The agency, he said, has determined that trace amounts of melamine and cyanuric acid separately are unlikely to cause health problems in babies. The two chemicals together, however, cause crystals to form in urine and lead to kidney damage. Dr. Sundlof said no amount of the two chemicals together will be allowed in infant formula.

The combination of the chemicals in contaminated infant formula caused severe kidney problems for thousands of babies in China this year. Dr. Sundlof said melamine and cyanuric acid together also caused last year's kidney problems and deaths in cats and dogs that ate pet food contaminated with the chemicals.

The FDA started testing U.S. infant formula after the problems in China, where milk was watered down and melamine was added. In tests, melamine appears to boost the protein content of milk.

The FDA tested products from the U.S.'s five FDA-approved makers of milk-based infant formulas: Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers, Nestlé, PBM Products LLC and Solus Products LLC.

The FDA said the bulk of tests in 87 formula samples came back negative for both melamine and cyanuric acid. The agency is still waiting for results from 13 samples.

Dr. Sundlof said the amount of melamine found in one sample of Good Start formula -- at 0.137 parts per million -- is 10,000 times below the levels found in some Chinese infant formula and well below the one part per million level set by the U.S. on Friday for formula. The level of 2.5 parts per million set in October for melamine and melamine-related compounds for other food and drinks remains unchanged.

Write to Jennifer Corbett Dooren at jennifer.corbett-dooren@dowjones.com

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from: www.online.wsj.com

Samba de Amigo [ IGN info ]
DDR: Hottest Party2 [ gamespot info ]
Animal Crossing: City Folk [ gamespot info ]
Super Mario Galaxy [ gamespot info ]
Cooking Mama: World Kitchen [ official site & IGN info ]

It's been a while but been craft blogging @ LOVECRAFTYGURL...

some pics of my craftiness...
oranges
charms
pins
plants
Halloween cakes
kitty
chocolates
cakies
mushrooms [Mario style, you know the game, heee...]
basket [made out of juice top]

On another note... been freaken' sick once again... 7 days exactly today! My ear is all stuffed up... I cannot stand it... Hate being sick...

Spend yesterday talking to my mom about my turkey recipe... Just spoke to to her and she's started cooking already... :) I wish I was there... YUM!

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Mum burns word 'wimp' on daughter's neck with cigarette

November 25, 2008 02:47pm

A MUM has been arrested after allegedly burning the word "wimp" into her six-year-old daughter's neck with a cigarette - because the youngster tripped and fell.

The girl told police in rural Moundsville in West Virginia, US, that Tammy Smith branded her in a fit of rage.

A teacher at the girl's school noticed the burn and took photographs of the injury before alerting police and social services.

A shocked police spokesman said: "Even the 'i' was dotted."

Smith was charged with five counts of child abuse. She faces up to five years in prison on each charge.

Single box pollutes entire LAN
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco • Get more from this author
Posted in Security, 5th December 2008 20:05 GMT

Researchers have identified a new trojan that can tamper with a wide array of devices on a local network, an exploit that sends them to impostor websites even if they are hardened machines that are fully patched or run non-Windows operating systems.

The malware is a new variant of the DNSChanger, a trojan that has long been known to change the domain name system settings of PCs and Macs alike. According to researchers with anti-virus provider McAfee's Avert Labs, the update allows a single infected machine to pollute the DNS settings of potentially hundreds of other devices running on the same local area network by undermining its dynamic host configuration protocol, or DHCP, which dynamically allocates IP addresses.

"Systems that are not infected with the malware can still have the payload of communicating with the rogue DNS servers delivered to them," McAfee's Craig Schmugar writes here of the new variant. "This is achieved without exploiting any security vulnerability."

The scenario plays out something like this:

* Jill connects a PC infected by the new DNSChanger variant to a coffee shop's WiFi hotspot or her employer's local network.

* Steve connects to the same network using a fully-patched Linux box, which requests an IP address.

* Jill's PC injects a DHCP offer command to instruct Steve's computer to rout all DNS requests through a booby-trapped DNS server.

* Steve's Linux box can no longer be trusted to visit authoritative websites. Although the address bar on his browser may show he is accessing bankofamerica.com, he may in fact be at an impostor website.

The only way a user might know the attack is underway is by manually checking the DNS server his computer is using (e.g. by typing "ipconfig /all" at a Windows command prompt). There are several countermeasures users can take, Schmugar said, the easiest being hard-coding a DNS server in a machine's configuration settings.

(In Windows, this can be done by going to Start > Control Panel > Network Connections and right clicking on Local Area Connection and choosing properties. Scroll down to Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and click the Properties button. Then type in the primary and secondary for your DNS service. We're partial to OpenDNS, whose settings are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.)

In an interview, Schmugar said the DHCP attack doesn't exploit a vulnerability in either user machines or network hardware, allowing it to work with a wide variety of home and enterprise routers. It involves a ndisprot.sys driver that is installed on the infected box. Once there, it monitors network traffic for DHCP requests and responds with bogus offers that contain the IP address to the rogue DNS server.

DNSChanger has already been viewed exploiting router weaknesses to change DNS settings, but the ability to poison other machine's DHCP connections appears to be new, said Eric Sites, VP of research at Sunbelt Software. For the moment, the new variant doesn't appear to be widely circulated, but the prospect of a trojan that can poison other machines' DHCP connections suggests this one is worth watching. ®

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/

Japanese man makes Mexico City airport home
Hiroshi Nohara is on a layover at the Mexico City airport. It has lasted almost three months and he has no plans to leave.

For reasons he can't explain, the Japanese man has been in Terminal 1 of the Benito Juarez International Airport since Sept. 2, surviving off donations from fast-food restaurants and passengers and sleeping in a chair.

At first, he frightened passengers and airport authorities asked the Japanese Embassy to investigate why the foul-smelling man refused to leave. Now, he's somewhat of a celebrity, capturing Mexico's collective imagination with nearly daily television news reports on his life at the food court.

Tourists stop to pose with him for photographs or an autograph.

The Tokyo native flew into Mexico with a tourist visa and a return ticket home but he never left the airport. In an interview Thursday alongside the airport McDonald's, he said he had no motive for his extended stay and doesn't know how much longer he'll remain.

"I don't understand why I'm here," he said through a visiting interpreter originally hired by a television station.

"I don't have a reason."

The embassy can't force him to leave and since Nohara's visa is valid all Mexican officials can do it wait for it to expire in early March.

During his stay, Nohara's wiry goatee has grown into a scraggly mass. His red-tinted hair is speckled with dust and dandruff and his cream-colored jacket and fleece blanket are dingy with overuse. He smells like he hasn't had a shower in months.

"He's a calm person, a nice man," said Silvia Navarrete del Toro, an airport janitor.

"He just sits here and eats all day."

Various stalls in the food court give Nohara free snacks and drinks, sometimes even throwing in hats or coffee mugs with store logos for free publicity during his frequent television appearances.

Strangers often buy him pastries or hamburgers; he prefers the latter.

He sits with the interpreter, talking and laughing for hours, at a small table covered with cups of cold coffee, packets of ketchup and sandwiches wrapped in foil.

Stroking his facial hair, Nohara said the 2004 film "The Terminal," starring Tom Hanks as an Eastern European man stuck in a New York City airport, was not his inspiration. But he acknowledged the similarities.

"My life," he joked, "is 'The Terminal 2.'"

Woke early morning, showered... Had some meds and then was all up in the sky... Being sick is awful!!! When you see bloggers in real life, it's kinda like you feel like you know them but don't really, weird. She was busy so, I decided that I shouldn't really bother her. I did buy some really cute earrings [posted on my craft blog]... Had no time to talk or anything like that... I guess because I may have had a cold and was all drugged out from the meds... oh well, still like my ear rings they're beautiful... Wanted to ask how they were made but I was just not feeling myself and just gave my money smiled and walked away... Having a cold was not my plan this weekend. I was looking forward to this bazaar today for a long time. BFG was kinda laughing at me for the bad karma I was having... Oh well...

Went to the SS, met w/ acc. then went to Chinatown to get some bake goods... Came home ate some and then started to have a soar throat and headache... Took some pills, NeoCitran and plenty of fluids... 38.5C, a small fever... watched 'Ghost Whisperer' and then went off to bed...

Happy only by watching TV maybe?= Unhappy People Watch Lots More TV
By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer

Unhappy people glue themselves to the television 30 percent more than happy people.

The finding, announced on Thursday, comes from a survey of nearly 30,000 American adults conducted between 1975 and 2006 as part of the General Social Survey.

While happy people reported watching an average of 19 hours of television per week, unhappy people reported 25 hours a week. The results held even after taking into account education, income, age and marital status.

In addition, happy individuals were more socially active, attended more religious services, voted more and read a newspaper more often than their less-chipper counterparts.

The researchers are not sure, though, whether unhappiness leads to more television-watching or more viewing leads to unhappiness.

In fact, people say they like watching television: Past research has shown that when people watch television they enjoy it. In these studies, participants reported that on a scale from 0 (dislike) to 10 (greatly enjoy), TV-watching was nearly an 8.

But perhaps the high from watching television doesn't last.

"These conflicting data suggest that TV may provide viewers with short-run pleasure, but at the expense of long-term malaise," said researcher John Robinson, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, College Park.

In this scenario, even the happiest campers could turn into Debbie-downers if they continue to stare at the boob-tube. The researchers suggest that over time, television-viewing could push out other activities that do have more lasting benefits. Exercise and sex come to mind, as do parties and other forms of socialization known to have psychological benefits.

Or, maybe television is simply a refuge for people who are already unhappy.

"TV is not judgmental nor difficult, so people with few social skills or resources for other activities can engage in it," Robinson and UM colleague Steven Martin write in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research.

They add, "Furthermore, chronic unhappiness can be socially and personally debilitating and can interfere with work and most social and personal activities, but even the unhappiest people can click a remote and be passively entertained by a TV."

The researchers say follow-up studies are needed to tease out the relationship between television and happiness.

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google [creative labs places emphasis on consumers needs]
by Simon Canning
THE newly named strategic planning director of Google's Creative Lab in New York says the web giant will place greater emphasis on consumers' needs rather then simply inventing things and throwing them into the market in the future.
Stuart Smith, a former planning director at advertising agency Wieden and Kennedy in London who worked on brands such as Nike and Honda, joined Google's recently formed advertising division two months ago and is now working on ideas to expand the brand.

Smith, who was in Sydney last week to meet local agency planning directors, says Google remains driven by engineers but there has to be a shift in the development process, which will be led by the Creative Labs group.

"What typically happens is it is just a load of engineers producing a load of things and then refining until it finds an audience," Smith says. "What they have never really done is to look at audiences and understand audiences and say 'perhaps there is a need over here -- let's meet that need'.

"Now I think they have seen an opportunity to come at it from an audience perspective and that is part of what any planners' job is -- to understand audiences."

He says the challenge is Google's wide variety of audiences, from consumers through to the advertising industry.

He admits that within the advertising industry there has been trepidation about the creation of Google Creative Labs. Some wondered if it would put agencies out of business by taking over their role.

But Smith says the Lab's role is to promote Google and its products, bringing advertising clients with them along the way.

"Our jurisdiction is to come up with ideas to promote the Google brand -- initiatives, projects, ideas, whatever it may be to help people stay in love with the Google brand," he says.

At the same time, he believes Creative Labs will bring a new level of creativity to the Google brand. "Google is an incredibly metrics-based organisation -- everything has to be measured, everything has to have a number against it. Our section, we are hoping, will have a bit more creative freedom to create things on a whim. The creative process isn't quite as quantifiable as the rest of the Google business."

The creation of the Labs division and the hiring of a planner whose career has been in the advertising industry represents a learning curve for Google, Smith believes.

"It's an interesting question," Smith says.

"I think there might be a healthy tension between those two perspectives.

"You have got creative people who don't necessarily like to be evaluated in quite that particular fashion and then an organization that has always done that and been very successful at it.

"Particularly going into a recession, it is going to be very interesting because we are going to have to justify our actions."

Smith expects many of the ideas to come out of Creative Labs to be driven by altruism.

Project 10/100, for example, aims to come up with ideas that help the most people in a single action, and the Vote Hour asked CEOs to give people time off to vote in the recent US election.

Smith believes the division will play an important role in communicating the positive elements of Google while acknowledging that some parts of the community harbour concerns about its scale and influence.

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Woman Addicted to Surgery Injects Oil Into Her Face
Hang Mioku, who had her first plastic surgery at the age of 28, is a cosmetic surgery addict who has let her obsession with surgeries ruin her life.
After her first plastic surgery, her addiction led her to Japan where she received additional operations on her face, which eventually became enlarged and deformed.

Eventually the surgeons she was visiting told her that they would no longer perform operations on her and suggested she seek help for her addiction.

Upon, returning home to Korea, Mioku was so deformed that her own family could no longer recognize her.
After searching for someone who would perform more surgeries on here, she found a local Korean doctor who provided her with silicone, which she would self inject into her face with a needle.

Mioku was so addicted to plastic surgery, she would even inject cooking oil into her face when the silicone supply ran out.

Recently, Mioku was featured on a Korean TV show for her addiction and deformities. Many viewers sent in money to help her get additional surgeries to help reduce the size of her face.
Having seen the error in her decisions, Mioku only wishes she could go back and have her original face back.

========= ** ========= *** ==========

Public release date: 17-Nov-2008
Contact: Dr. Mark Huebener - mark@neuro.mpg.de - Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Forgotten but not gone -- how the brain takes care of things
Thanks to our ability to learn and to remember, we can perform tasks that other living things can not even dream of. However, we are only just beginning to get the gist of what really goes on in the brain when it learns or forgets something. What we do know is that changes in the contacts between nerve cells play an important role. But can these structural changes account for that well-known phenomenon that it is much easier to re-learn something that was forgotten than to learn something completely new? Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have been able to show that new cell contacts established during a learning process stay put, even when they are no longer required. The reactivation of this temporarily inactivated "stock of contacts" enables a faster learning of things forgotten. (Nature, November 12, 2008).

While an insect still flings itself against the window-pane after dozens of unsuccessful attempts to gain its freedom, our brain is able to learn very complex associations and sequences of movement. This not only helps us to avoid accidents like walking into glass doors, but also enables us to acquire such diverse skills as riding a bicycle, skiing, speaking different languages or playing an instrument. Although a young brain learns more easily, we retain our ability to learn up to an advanced age. For a long time, scientists have been trying to ascertain exactly what happens in the brain while we learn or forget.

Flexible connections

To learn something, in other words, to successfully process new information, nerve cells make new connections with each other. When faced with an unprecedented piece of information, for which no processing pathway yet exists, filigree appendages begin to grow from the activated nerve cell towards its neighbors. Whenever a special point of contact, called synapse, forms at the end of the appendage, information can be transferred from one cell to the next - and new information is learned. Once the contact breaks down, we forget what we have learned.

The subtle difference between learning and relearning

Although learning and memory were recently shown to be linked to the changes in brain structure mentioned above, many questions still remain unanswered. What happens, for example, when the brain learns something, forgets it after a while and then has to learn it again later? By way of example, we know from experience that, once we have learned to ride a bicycle, we can easily pick it up again, even if we haven't practiced for years. In other cases too, "relearning" tends to be easier than starting "from scratch". Does this subtle difference also have its origins in the structure of the nerve cells?

Cell appendages abide the saying "a bird in the hand …"

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology have now managed to show that there are indeed considerable differences in the number of new cell contacts made - depending on whether a piece of information is new or is being learned second time around. Nerve cells that process visual information, for instance, produced a considerably higher number of new cell contacts if the flow of information from their "own" eye was temporarily blocked. After approximately five days, the nerve cells had rearranged themselves so as to receive and process information from the other eye - the brain had resigned itself to having only one eye at its disposal. Once information flowed freely again from the eye that had been temporarily closed, the nerve cells resumed their original function and now more or less ignored signals from the alternative eye.

"What surprised us most, however, was that the majority of the appendages which developed in response to the information blockade, continued to exist, despite the fact that the blockade was abolished ", project leader Mark Hübener explains. Everything seems to point to the fact that synapses are only disabled, but not physically removed. "Since an experience that has been made may occur again at a later point in time, the brain apparently opts to save a few appendages for a rainy day", Hübener continues. And true enough, when the same eye was later inactivated again, the nerve cells reorganized themselves much more quickly - because they could make use of the appendages that had stayed in place.

[Store room for future learning: nerve cells retain many of their newly created connections and if necessary, inactivate only transmission of the information. This makes relearning easier.]

Useful reactivation
Many of the appendages that develop between nerve cells are thus maintained and facilitate later relearning. This insight is crucial to our understanding of the fundamental processes of learning and memory. And so, even after many years of abstinence, it should be no great problem if we want to have a go at skiing again this winter.
Original work:
Sonja B. Hofer, Thomas D. Mrsic-Flogel, Tobias Bonhoeffer, Mark Hübener
Experience leaves a lasting structural trace in cortical circuits.
Nature, November 12, 2008

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mothers force to make grim decision which child lives or dies [poverty]
(CNN) -- Some mothers choose what their children will eat. Others choose which children will eat and which will die.
A food riot erupts in Haiti. Food scarcity is now hitting more affluent countries, experts say.

A Haitian boy begs for food. One child dies from hunger every six seconds, an aid agency says.

Those mothers forced to make the grim life-or-death choices are the impoverished women Patricia Wolff, executive director of Meds & Food for Kids, encounters during her frequent trips to Haiti.

Wolff says Haitians are so desperate for food that many mothers wait to name their newborns because so many infants die of malnourishment. Other Haitian mothers keep their children alive by parceling out food to them, but some make an excruciating choice when their food rationing fails, she says.

"It's horrible. They have to choose among their children," says Wolff, whose nonprofit group was formed to fight childhood malnutrition. "They try to keep them alive by feeding them, but sometimes they make the decision that this one has to go."

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech that "I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies." Four decades later, King's wish remains unfulfilled. The global food market's shelves are getting bare, hunger activists say -- and it will get worse.

Food riots erupted across the globe this year in countries such as Egypt and India. Food pantries in the United States also warned that they were running out of food because of unprecedented demand. The news from the World Food Programme is even grimmer: A child dies of hunger every six seconds, and hunger now kills more people every year than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined.

As World Hunger Relief Week is marked, more people are asking: Why are so many people starving and what, if anything, can be done to eradicate hunger?

The end of food?

Wolff thinks hunger can be conquered. Her group produces "Medika Mamba," energy dense, peanut butter food that's designed to ensure Haitian children survive childhood. Medika Mamba is easy to make, store, preserve and distribute, she says.

"It just takes the will to do it," she says of eliminating hunger. "Look at what we did for Wall Street. We didn't have enough money for infrastructure, schools, but all of a sudden, we had all of this money for Wall Street."

Raj Patel, author of "Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System," says the right to food should be seen as a human right. But, he says, powerful corporate food distributors control too much of the world's food supply to ensure a robust global food supply.

Patel says "2008 was a record year in terms of harvest. There's more food per person in 2008 than there's ever been in history. The problem is not food, but how we distribute it."

Other causes for the rise in global hunger have been documented. They include:

• Surging oil costs have made it more expensive to harvest, fertilize, store and deliver food.

• The rise in droughts and hurricanes worldwide has wiped out crops and made farming more difficult.

• The world is running out of the raw materials -- water, oil, good farmland -- needed to keep the food system intact.

"A lot of people have begun to understand at various levels that the food system, as it is, can't go on," says Paul Roberts, author of "The End of Food."

Every time an American bites down on a steak or hamburger, they're contributing to global hunger, Roberts says. As other countries become more affluent, they're copying our meat-heavy diet. The problem: It takes so much grain and other resources to produce meat, he says.

"If the rest of the world were to eat like we do, the planet would collapse," Roberts says. "There's been this unspoken assumption that the rest of the world won't eat meat like we do. That doesn't go over well in countries like China."

Fixing our food system would be similar to weaning ourselves of our addiction to oil, Roberts says. It's going to require innovation, heavy business involvement and changes in public policy.

People are going to have to find ways to grow food with less fertilizer and water, and use less energy to store and transport food, he says.

Much of this innovation will have to be driven not just by activist and aid workers, but by savvy business people, he says.

"It's going to have to be profitable or the market won't be interested in it," Roberts says. "And if the market isn't interested in it, it's not going to happen."

In the meantime, Wolff offers some of her own solutions. She says the practice of big foreign aid agencies shipping in food to poor countries like Haiti needs to be modified. Food has become too expensive to produce, ship and store, she says.

"You can't count on big aid agencies showing up to save everybody," she says. "Not everybody can do it, and when they do it, it's not soon enough and not long enough."

She suggests that more groups teach local farmers in poor places how to produce their own crops. In Haiti, for example, her group employs 22 Haitians who make Medika Mamba and teaches other farmers how to grow crops for the mixture.

"Instead of throwing fish in the crowd, we should be teaching people how to fish," she says.

Until that day takes place, Wolff, who is a pediatrician in St. Louis, Missouri, will continue to make her trips to Haiti, where mothers are forced to make their grim choices.

"It's the most difficult thing I've ever done," she says. "You realize how absolutely blessed you are by the fate of your soul coming down the chute in the United States of America," she says. "You wonder: Why did this happen to me and not to them?'

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Primary Physicians in the US would love to change their profession too overwhelmed with the red tape from insurance companies and government agencies
By Val Willingham - CNN Medical Producer

(CNN) -- Nearly half the respondents in a survey of U.S. primary care physicians said that they would seriously consider getting out of the medical business within the next three years if they had an alternative.
Experts say if many physicians stop practicing, it could be devastating to the health care industry.

Experts say if many physicians stop practicing, it could be devastating to the health care industry.

The survey, released this week by the Physicians' Foundation, which promotes better doctor-patient relationships, sought to find the reasons for an identified exodus among family doctors and internists, widely known as the backbone of the health industry.

A U.S. shortage of 35,000 to 40,000 primary care physicians by 2025 was predicted at last week's American Medical Association annual meeting.

In the survey, the foundation sent questionnaires to more than 270,000 primary care doctors and more than 50,000 specialists nationwide.

Of the 12,000 respondents, 49 percent said they'd consider leaving medicine. Many said they are overwhelmed with their practices, not because they have too many patients, but because there's too much red tape generated from insurance companies and government agencies.

And if that many physicians stopped practicing, that could be devastating to the health care industry. Video Dr. Gupta: Watch more on the looming doctor dearth »

"We couldn't survive that," says Dr. Walker Ray, vice president of the Physicians Foundation. "We are only producing in this country a thousand to two thousand primary doctors to replace them. Medical students are not choosing primary care."

Dr. Alan Pocinki has been practicing medicine for 17 years. He began his career around the same time insurance companies were turning to the PPO and HMO models. So he was a little shocked when he began spending more time on paperwork than patients and found he was running a small business, instead of a practice. He says it's frustrating.

"I had no business training, as far as how to run a business, or how to evaluate different plans," Pocinki says. "It was a whole brave new world and I had to sort of learn on the fly."

To manage their daily work schedules, many survey respondents reported making changes. With lower reimbursement from insurance companies and the cost of malpractice insurance skyrocketing, these health professionals say it's not worth running a practice and are changing careers. Others say they're going into so-called boutique medicine, in which they charge patients a yearly fee up front and don't take insurance.

And some like Pocinki are limiting the type of insurance they'll take and the number of patients on Medicare and Medicaid. According to the foundation's report, over a third of those surveyed have closed their practices to Medicaid patients and 12 percent have closed their practices to Medicare patients That can leave a lot of patients looking for a doctor.

And as Ray mentioned, med school students are shying away from family medicine. In a survey published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in September, only 2 percent of current medical students plan to take up primary care. That's because these students are wary of the same complaints that are causing existing doctors to flee primary care: hectic clinics, burdensome paperwork and systems that do a poor job of managing patients with chronic illness.

So what to do? Physicians don't have a lot of answers. But doctors say it's time to make some changes, not only in the health care field but also with the insurance industry. And they're looking to the new administration for guidance.
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One of President-elect Barack Obama's health care promises is to provide a primary care physician for every American. But some health experts, including Pocinki, are skeptical.

"People who have insurance can't find a doctor, so suddenly we are going to give insurance to a whole bunch of people who haven't had it, without increasing the number of physicians?" he says. "It's going to be a problem."

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Woman wakes up during surgery
By Ninemsn Staff

A Northern Territory woman has endured a nightmare operation at Alice Springs Hospital after she became conscious during stomach surgery but remained paralyzed by the unaesthetic.

Rebecca Jones, 24, told the Northern Territory News she could feel every cut of the surgeon's knife during the operation last month but was unable to scream for help as the anaesthesia had paralysed her.

Ms Jones, who was being operated on for gallstones, said she could not open her eyes but could hear and feel everything.

"I thought the doctors had woken me up because the surgery was over — I quickly realized that was not the case," she was quoted by the Northern Territory News as saying.

Ms Jones realized her predicament when she took a breath and found she couldn’t move, but eventually moved her hand to get the attention of surgery staff — to no avail.

"(Someone) said, 'she's just moved her hand' but they kept going," she said.

The hospital's general manager Vicki Taylor admitted to the NT News that Ms Jones had been awake during the operation but denied medical staff knew of her pain.

Ms Jones is now considering legal action against the hospital.

THESE ARTICLES ARE NOT IN ANYWAY WRITTEN BY ME...

Yamagata restaurant featured on Chef Abroad with Michael Smith.

Christine Cushing Live, was watching early morning and she was making traditional Greek foods... One thing that got my eyes was dolmades [googled it].

Skinny models are a 'turn off' in advertising, claim scientists
It has been a golden rule of advertising from its inception - thin models sell more products to women. The only trouble is, it is not true, claims new research.
By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent
Researchers have found that skinny models are actually a turn off to consumers in TV commercials and other advertising.

They found that images of super-thin models carry no edge in encouraging young women to buy and for the majority of adult women ads showing skinny girls actually discouraged sales.

So-called plus-size models, on the other hand, actually encouraged them to buy.

In the study psychologist Phillippa Diedrichs, of the University of Queensland, Australia, created a series of ads for underwear, shampoo and a party dress.

Each ad was made twice, once using a skinny size eight model and another featuring a size 12 woman.

When the ads were shown to 400 young women, they produced no difference in the likelihood for them to buy.

However, when women aged between 18 and 25 saw the adverts they felt better - and more likely to buy - after viewing the images of the larger models.

Miss Diedrichs said: "For anything to change, research has to be convincing, not just to government and health researchers, but also to people in advertising who actually make the decisions.

"Often people make the argument that thinness sells, and that's why they use slim models.

"But we can change the images we see and still sell products but also make people feel better about themselves."

The Unilever soap brand Dove has based its image on a campaign using "real women" and highlighting how much imagery in advertising is manipulated.

But critics point out that the same firm uses more traditional imagery to promote other brands, such as Lynx deodorant, which features skinny models.

There have been concerted campaigns against the ultra-thin "size zero" with fashion weeks in Madrid and Milan banning models from the catwalk who were of a weight deemed unhealthy by the Body Mass Index measure.

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from: www.telegraph.co.uk

We Used To Recycle Everything; What Happened?
Throughout history, since the dawn of man, we have been a recycling people. We reused anything and everything multiple times before discarding of it - if there was anything left at all. When we were lucky enough to get our hands on something useful, we were careful with it so as to make it last as long as possible. Hunters used every part of an animal. Houses were made from any scrap material that could be rounded up, as it was easier than building one from scratch. Children played with the same toys their entire childhood. Things were cherished - nothing was thrown away unless it was absolutely destroyed. No one bought the “new” version of something before the “old” version was used up. How times have certainly changed…

Now we throw everything away - and most of it still works! We replace perfectly fine household electronics because ours is not the “new” kind, we buy new cell phones every few months, we only keep cars for a few years (which I have certainly been guilty of!), and we are sold so many single-use items that I don’t even know if anyone knows how to use a washable mop/sponge/diaper anymore. We buy cheap clothing by the bundle and it only lasts a few months before it is either out of style or torn to shreds. Products are bought, used for a short time, and thrown away. Most everything we buy cannot be recycled, so it ends up in an overcrowded landfill that we then bury or burn, contributing to the decline in the quality of our environment. It’s a never-ended cycle that seems to get worse by the year - I am hopeful that so many people taking a newly found interest in the green movement that we can reverse the trend before we take it too far.

There are still some smaller industries and companies who do their best to recycle and reuse everything. Take a small farm for example - the farmers grow crops, which feed both them and their animals. The animals digest their food, leaving behind animal poop that is can be used as compost to regrow more crops, which feed more animals…you get the picture. And even better than that, some farmers are using the animal waste to actually make electricity and reusable water - an Alberta farm is the future site of IMUS, which is a new technology that will turn manure into a source of electricity, heat, fertilizer and reusable water – all while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts. And companies like Patagonia (who I buy my fleeces from) and Act2 turn old plastic bottles (and their own old garments) into clothing and consumer goods. This is very good progress, and every day more and more companies are seeing the benefits of recycling and going green, both for the environment and their bottom line!

We used to be a nation (and world, for that matter) of recyclers, but it has become to easy to just “buy a new one” because the “one” we have is out of style or has a little wear and tear. I think we need to encourage more of us to go back to the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra that we have followed since the beginning of time - even if we didn’t know it then. There is no way we can continue to buy and throw away at the rate that we are - all that stuff has to go somewhere. (Want to know where? Check out the book “Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash” which is a staple on my bookshelf.) Let’s start building quality products again so when we buy something we know it will last a very long time, and let’s start reusing what we already have access to. Enough with the single-use plastic crap that every store is full of - let’s bring back quality goods!

Article is not in anyway written by me... Its originally from: www.thegoodhuman.com

This article was on yahoo. I found it interesting and wanted to keep it on my blog... :) I didn't write any of this...

Global recession fears deepen after lackluster G20
TOKYO (AFP) - Japan became the latest major country to fall into recession Monday as global economic fears deepened after a Washington summit offered markets scant hope for action to contain the damage, analysts said.

Markets showed little initial enthusiasm for a vague pledge on Saturday from Group of 20 leaders to join forces to galvanize growth and overhaul the world's financial architecture. The G20 , grouping developed and developing countries, stopped short of announcing specific steps such as coordinated stimulus spending. "In the midst of an emergency crisis, to have a statement that reads 'We will cooperate with each another' is all but meaningless," said Daisuke Uno, chief strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.

"Market sentiment has soured and with all eyes back on the theme of global recession," he said. Major European stock exchanges fell at the opening of trade, following a mixed performance in Asia, but later pared their losses. The yen strengthened as risk-averse investors, despite news of a Japanese recession, sought shelter in what they saw as a safe currency. In London the FTSE 100 index was down 0.11 percent at mid-morning while Paris had edged up 0.34 percent and Frankfurt 0.18 percent.

Stocks closed down 2.5 percent in Sydney and 0.9 percent in Seoul, while Hong Kong was 0.4 percent lower in late trade. Tokyo managed to eke out a gain of 0.7 percent as investors hunted for bargains.

Chinese share prices closed with a gain of 2.22 percent, led by airlines following reports that two of the nation's biggest carriers could get government aid, dealers said. The dollar fell to 96.91 yen in Tokyo afternoon trade, down from 97.06 in New York late Friday. The euro dropped to 1.2567 dollars from 1.2591 and to 121.77 yen from 122.24.

"The economic spillover of the financial crisis has increased and there is uncertainty about when conditions will stop getting worse," said Saburo Matsumoto, chief forex strategist at Sumitomo Trust Bank. "Equities are struggling to rise and traders are reluctant to buy the dollar, euro and other currencies, pushing up the yen," he said.

There was no let-up in the flow of bad economic news. Official data showed Japan, the world's second largest economy, contracted 0.1 percent in the third quarter, following Germany, Italy and Ireland into recession. "This is not going to be a short or painless recession," warned Noriko Hama, a professor and economist at Doshisha University.

The last time Japan was in recession -- usually defined as two or more consecutive quarters of economic contraction -- was in 2001 after the Internet bubble burst. The Bank of France predicted Monday that the French economy was likely to contract by 0.5 percent in the last quarter of the year, leaving growth for the year at just 0.9 percent.

France narrowly escaped recession with growth of 0.1 percent in the third quarter after its economy shrank 0.3 percent in the second. US president-elect Barack Obama, who did not attend the weekend G20 gathering, vowed to make fighting a looming recession a top priority, notably with fresh stimulus spending and help for the auto industry. He said there was a common understanding that "we have to do whatever it takes to get this economy moving again."

"And that we shouldn't worry about the deficit next year or even the year after. That short term, the most important thing is that we avoid a deepening recession," he told the CBS television network in an interview. The parlous state of the US auto industry was also threatening car manufacturers elsewhere. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was due to hold crisis talks with executives at car maker Opel, which has said it needs state guarantees for its bank loans as its US parent company, General Motors, struggles to stave off bankruptcy. But German Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck ruled out a financial rescue package for the auto sector.

"An economic program for the entire automobile industry makes no sense," Steinbrueck told the mass-circulation daily Bild, stressing that the state is "not responsible for errors committed by industrialists."

The head of the International Monetary Fund meanwhile told the BBC on Monday that the IMF, which offers credits to cash-strapped countries that agree to strict reforms, would likely need an extra 100 billion dollars to meet appeals for help over the next six months.

"The number of countries having problems at the same time has dramatically increased and they come to the IMF asking for support," IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.

another Article that I found interesting: Global crisis shows teeth with mass Citigroup cuts