However Caltex chief Des King has defended the Minister, saying Mr Ferguson may have made his case behind closed doors.
"I met with [Mr Ferguson] personally many times, and he can be a very effective blowtorch," he said.
Experts believe that Viagra, which dilates blood vessels, could help in events requiring explosive power, such as sprinting. Others suggest it could help endurance – not so much marathon sex sessions as marathon running – particularly at high altitude or in polluted conditions, such as those expected at the Beijing Olympics. The drug is believed to aid the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to muscles.How close in time to the race do they have to take it? And has there yet been a case where a guy who has taken it has had problems with the unintended side effect? It's not actually banned right now, by the way.
Meanwhile, British officials are taking action to prevent athletes fooling dope testers by using false penises when giving urine samples. The penises, and untainted urine, are widely available on the internet.Ah, the old false penis full of clean urine in the underpants trick. How to fight this:
Doping control officers have been given strict guidelines that athletes must be observed and their bodies visible from the stomach to the knees when they produce urine specimens.I assume that paruresis can be a career threatening condition for athletes.
By implementing a hidden internal check-valve, the act of urination is so realistic that even a direct observer will not be able to detect that it is in-fact simulated. There is no fumbling around with obvious switches or clamps. This eliminates a big problem associated with the original Whizzinator which has an on/off switch that is very audible and very obvious!
When her book hits the shelves in Britain this week, western readers will get a peek at what’s going on behind the veils and under the burqas. Disappointingly, the scenes are not too dissimilar to a western hen party: bitching, belly dancing and gossiping about men. The atmosphere seems far from warm and sisterly. Girls obsess about bodies and eye each others’ “front bumpers” and “back bumpers” with envy.You’d think that one advantage of being forced to cover up in public would be a freedom from a looks-fixated culture. Yet these women want nose jobs, they want liposuction, they want gym-honed booties and are highly competitive with it. In modern Riyadh it seems that hell isn’t other people, hell is other women.
“Women want to look good for themselves, not just for men,” says Alsanea. “All women show off to one another and like wearing designer clothes. I’m not showing a whole new world. In a lot of respects Saudi women are just like everyone else.”
In his paper, Luckey goes so far as to suggest that schools be built "in used nuclear power plants", and children be given sculptures that are impregnated with nuclear waste to boost their exposure to radiation (and their health). He does caution, "However, children should not ride [sculptures of] radioactive ponies for more than a few minutes every day".Yet another reason to go nuclear!
There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad they're good (though, strangely, not the reverse). And once in a while there is a movie so bad that it takes you to a place beyond good and evil and abandons you there, shivering and alone. Watching The Love Guru (Paramount Pictures) is a spiritual experience of a sort, but not the sort that its creator and star, Mike Myers, intended. This tale of a guru who brings joy to all who meet him is the most joy-draining 88 minutes I've ever spent outside a hospital waiting room. In the course of those long minutes, Myers leads you on a journey deep inside himself, to the source from whence his comedy springs—and it's about as much fun as a tour of someone's large intestine.The Happening has received reviews nearly as bad. How does M Night Shyamalan keep getting funding for his films (and big movie stars to appear in them?)
Dr Nitschke said his organisation, Exit International, would now change the way it advises people with Alzheimer's.Just how irresponsible can you get? He's a doctor, telling people not to see a doctor if they are worried that they might have early signs of Alzheimer's. No mediation for those who might benefit from it, then. All because they want to reserve their ability to top themselves later with less risk of legal complications.
"Any sign of Alzheimer's disease and you're going to lose any option for anyone to help you, and anyone who does dare to help you had better look carefully behind their shoulders because they could be facing a murder charge," he said.
"Many people said this person knew what he was doing. I thought he knew what he was doing. Yet they base it on the medical evidence that he had lost his ability to make a decision, that he had lost his ability to say whether he could die or not.
"We'll be advising people not to (declare they have Alzheimer's).
"Don't go to your doctor. Don't have the tests done. And if you do have the tests done that show that you're starting to lose mental capacity, make sure it is not recorded."
But how much can you fit in the Pacific Ocean?:First, in order to ensure that the injected CO2 has adequate time to mix throughout the deep sea, injection should be at depths greater than 3,500 metres - that is, the depth below which "liquid" CO2 becomes more dense than sea water.
Experiments conducted by Peter Brewer, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, not only confirm that this is the case but also demonstrate that the CO2 injected rapidly reacts with sea water to form a solid clathrate, which is more dense than both liquid CO2 and sea water. Hence, the injected CO2 would end up on the sea floor as a slush. This would gradually dissolve, releasing the CO2 to the surrounding sea water, where it would react with the dissolved carbonate and borate ions to become chemically bound in the form of bicarbonate ion. As the concentration of carbonate and borate ions is small, the neutralisation would take place gradually as the CO2-rich sea water mixed into the surroundings.
Broecker says 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide could be safely dumped directly into the waters of the deep Pacific, equivalent to the carbon pollution from about 16 years of the world's current fossil fuel use.Not that much, really. And some say that it would increase the acidity of the deep ocean, which as we all know, may not be a great idea.
Over the next century, if anthropogenic CO2 emissions proceed at the rates predicted by the IPCC scenarios (IPCC, 2001), then the identified pCO2 threshold concentration of 560 ppmv may be exceeded as early as 2050 (Fig. 3). Whilst the direct climatic impacts of this overshoot remain difficult to quantify with certainty, simple extrapolation of the central tenets of the urease hypothesis suggests that there is little doubt regarding the disruption and mass mortality that it will initiate within organisms that are heavily reliant upon the urease enzyme.Now, this is clearly presented by the author as a hypothesis, and it is called a "discussion paper". The author is a researcher from the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, but his exact qualifications are not clear. However, it certainly sounds like an idea worthy of some pretty intense investigation.
Previous mass extinction events appear to have guided the evolutionary process away from urease-dependence in higher vertebrate animals, but the threat remains for the lower invertebrates and plant communities. Importantly, these at-risk ecosystem elements are fundamental to: (i) the productive food chains, (ii) the essential habitat, and (iii) the stable climate cycles, upon which the higher vertebrate animals (including humans) rely for their survival.
Of particular note is the potential for a collapse in ocean productivity to initiate rapid greenhouse warming (Rampino and Caldeira, 2005). In this case, the cessation of marine biological export of 25 organic carbon from the surface would cause an increase in surface-ocean dissolved inorganic carbon, some of which would leak into the atmosphere to increase atmospheric pCO2. Modelling results suggest that a cessation of productivity today would result in a rapid doubling of pCO2 (Rampino and Caldiera, 2005). It is therefore a plausible scenario that a collapse of ocean productivity occurring at 560 ppm could trigger a rapid “post-apocalyptic” rise in pCO2 levels beyond 1000 ppm – leading to rapid global warming of 3–6C.
Recovery of atmospheric pCO2 from such a perturbation would be governed by the time scale of equilibrium of the ocean chemistry 5 with the carbonate system (c 104 years) (Archer et al., 1997). Post-apocalyptic greenhouse spikes of similar duration have been associated with previous mass extinctions (Retallack, 2005), and may be responsible for triggering additional climate change dependent kill responses (Elewa, 2008).
Clearly, the urease hypothesis forewarns of the global imperative that atmospheric pCO2 levels are stabilised well below 560 ppmv. This will require the development of technologies and solutions that are presently unavailable – thus demanding our immediate attention and resources.
The researchers said that the study cannot say whether the differences in brain shape are inherited or due to to exposure to hormones such as testosterone in the womb and if they are responsible for sexual orientation.But this is something they plan to look at in a further study of newborn babies to see if it can help predict future sexual orientation.
Would such a study be ethical? Are PET scans completely without risk, and just how important is it for science to pin down when such brain changes (if this study is correct) are formed?
Of the more than 10,500 same-sex couples married here since May 17, 2004, 6,121 wed in the first six months. There were 2,060 weddings in 2005; 1,442 in 2006; and 867 in the first eight months of 2007, the most recent data show.More figures of interest:
So it sounds like about half of gay couples living together there are married now, but with the diminishing numbers who are getting married annually, will that really continue to be the case?The Census Bureau recorded 23,655 same-sex households in Massachusetts in 2006.
Nearly two-thirds of the weddings have been lesbian marriages, including one between two women named Melissa McCarthy. And while nearly half of straight people marrying are under 30, more same-sex married couples of both sexes are older — nearly a third are in their 40s.
Well, I'm glad we overturned millennia of humanity's understanding of marriage so that some gay men who want to continue to openly play the field can still get the financial benefits of having a favourite boyfriend. (Yes, I know, we don't criticise heterosexual marriage as an institution because some - very, very, few I suspect- enter into "open" marriages. But if such attitudes are widespread amongst married gay men, I think it does mean they don't treat marriage seriously, and it weakens the case as to why they should be accommodated.)Eric Erbelding and his husband, Michael Peck, both 44, see each other only every other weekend because Mr. Peck works in Pittsburgh. So, Mr. Erbelding said, “Our rule is you can play around because, you know, you have to be practical.”
Mr. Erbelding, a decorative painter in Boston, said: “I think men view sex very differently than women. Men are pigs, they know that each other are pigs, so they can operate accordingly. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Still, Mr. Erbelding said, most married gay couples he knows are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.”
"This was completely flooded with feces and water and pee, and of course I smelled it. When I came in and I called the city guys and it’s estimated at 786.24 gallons of human feces got backed up into my house," Riley says.Well, just lucky it wasn't 786.45 gallons. (Why on earth is that figure so precise?)
Had it not been two men standing at the altar, any observer would have taken the service for a traditional wedding. The service – at the Church of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London – began: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God . . . to join together these men in a holy covenant of love and fidelity.” After a confession of sin “through our own deliberate fault”, the congregation heard a lesson from 1 Samuel 18, a Bible passage about the love between David and Jonathan.Oh no, that's not provocative at all!Dr Lord was asked: “David, wilt thou take this man as thy partner, in the sight of God? Wilt thou love him, comfort him, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?’” to which he responded: “I will.”
They also pledged to love each other physically, as in the traditional Anglican marriage service, stating: “With this ring I thee bind, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”
