A major study has revealed that women who take a daily multi-vitaminGiven the bad publicity that many vitamin supplements have been accruing over the last 5 years or so, I wonder if sales have been significantly affected.
pill are nearly 20 per cent more likely to develop breast cancer.
They say Houston behaved oddly, chatting about nothing in particular for minutes on end, took a 15-minute break only half a dozen songs in, and had trouble reaching some of her high notes.She does indeed appear to be regularly (see the comments below about the next concert) making a spectacular hash of the famous climax of "I will always love you", as you can see here. It's doubly excruciating because of the long, long break she takes before attempting it, and the whoops and encouragement given by her (not very British sounding) fans.
However, Houston's rendition of the ultimate schmaltz anthem "I Will Always Love You" must have tested even her most loyal followers. It's a challenging ballad, not least if you've been doing extraordinarily damaging things to your upper body for several years. Her voice wheezes and grates through the high notes. There are attempts to plaster over the cracks with octave changes and smiles, but mid-song she stops, sighs and turns around to compose herself. She does finish the number, in a way, but it isn't spectacular and Houston, frozen, knows it. A momentary silence is pierced by the sound of a child crying in the stalls. Quite why left this song to the end is bewildering.But the on-stage behaviour is perhaps worth seeing on its own:
The songs include moments of genuine bonkersness. During "Saving All My Love for You" she stoops to moisturise her ankles and on several occasions appears to be singing to her shoes.All a bit sad, in its way.
Pedophilia, say experts, is more a question of a stunted (or arrested) sexuality, more a question of power, and more a question of proximity (among many other complicated psychological factors). Simply put, being gay does not make one a pedophile.Um, doesn't celibacy for men who have (presumably, in many cases) entered into celibacy as virgins (or at least with little in the way of long lasting sexual relationships) just about guarantee a "stunted or arrested sexuality"?
Volcanologists say the fireworks exploding from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Iceland, which is responsible for the ash cloud that is grounding all commercial flights across northern Europe, may become a familiar sight. Increased rumblings under Iceland over the past decade suggest that the area is entering a more active phase, with more eruptions and the potential for some very large bangs.As for the question of whether the current eruption could cause significant cooling: apparently, it's not thought big enough yet to do that."Volcanic activity on Iceland appears to follow a periodicity of around 50 to 80 years. The increase in activity over the past 10 years suggests we might be entering a more active phase with more eruptions," says Thorvaldur Thordarson, an expert on Icelandic volcanoes at the University of Edinburgh, UK. By contrast, the latter half of the 20th century was unusually quiet.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last ten years – aside from the fact that a man who can write a self-refuting line like “Only a Sith believes in absolutes” and be paid a billion dollars – it’s this: web communities create in-breeding. It’s less the planet-holding-hands-and-singing-the-Coke-song than Cities in Flight, domed off, heading on different trajectories. If you doubt this, subscribe to a few Twitter feeds from people who believe different things than you do, and you will find dross passed off as insight, biscuit-crumbs strewn as if they were pearls on silk, all because the writer believes he or she is speaking to an audience that need not be persuaded. The worst part of the internet is its ability to let the pre-persuaded accrete, and declare the sun moves around them.Oh, and from the same column:
I suppose I could assume everyone who’s sensible and/or hip to the new “cyber” tools for interpersonal avoidance masquerading as immediate communication is already hooked up with the RSS and the Twitter and the Tumblr...
King has been married to seven different women, but this is his eighth divorce, because he remarried one of his former spouses and then divorced her again.I remember, years ago, that David Letterman had a funny video segment that was a "guide" to being a new wife for Larry King. I wonder if it is around on the net somewhere.
Japan's budget, announced last week o kick off the fiscal year, promises to spend a record trillion dollars, and the government must issue a record ¥44.3-trillion of new bonds this year.
The heavy spending and financing are raising worries in Japan about the country's long-term fiscal health, amid concern that Japanese government
bonds are turning into an asset bubble fuelling a public debt that is the highest among advanced economies.Japan's debt, mostly owed to creditors within the country, is more than 200 per cent of annual gross domestic product, compared with 113 per cent in Greece, 50 per cent in Spain, and 69 per cent in the United States, according to the New York-based ISI Group.
This is the part that really caught my eye:
“I'm actually envious of the Greek situation,” said Masaaki Kanno, chief economist at J.P. Morgan in Tokyo, and a former senior official of the Bank ofJapan . “They have market pressure forcing them to take action sooner than later. In Japan, even if the government tries to cut spending, social security costs will likely grow ¥1-trillion every year. The government deficit is likely to grow forever, in a sense.”
"So, we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to earth, and a landing on Mars will follow."
A new species of leech, discovered by an international team of scientists, has a preference for living up noses.
Researchers say the leech can enter the body orifices of people and animals to attach itself to mucous membranes.
They have called the new blood-sucking species Tyrannobdella rex which means tyrant leech king.
The creature was first discovered in 2007 in Peru when a specimen was plucked from the nose of a girl who had been bathing in a river.
The creature lives in the remote parts of the Upper Amazon and has a "particularly unpleasant habit of infesting humans", the scientists say.
Studies also revealed that it had "a preference for living up noses". The research published their findings in the online scientific journal PLoS One.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Thought for Food - Mentally Ill Advertisers & German Cupcakes | ||||
| ||||
They don't actually explain what bugs can give you the disease, apart from having a photo of some unnamed blood sucker. Wikipedia explains that it is usually via a bug with particularly unpleasant habits:Some 18m people worldwide have Chagas disease, caused by an infection with the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi.
Recently, researchers discovered having this disease puts the individual at increased risk of stroke due to heart complications and blood clots.
Chagas disease is endemic in Latin America. But emigration of millions of people to Europe, North America, Japan and Australia over the past 20 years has also made Chagas disease an emerging health problem in these countries with the potential to cause a substantial disease burden, say the investigators.
In Chagas-endemic areas, the main mode of transmission is through an insect vector called a triatomine bug.[1] A triatomine becomes infected with T. cruzi by feeding on the blood of an infected person or animal. During the day, triatomines hide in crevices in the walls and roofs. The bugs emerge at night, when the inhabitants are sleeping. Because they tend to feed on people’s faces, triatomine bugs are also known as “kissing bugs.” After they bite and ingest blood, they defecate on the person. Triatomines pass T. cruzi parasites (called trypomastigotes) in feces left near the site of the bite wound. Scratching the site of the bite causes the trypomastigotes to enter the host through the wound, or through intact mucous membranes, such as the conjunctiva.Yuck.
Since Obama announced his changes to NASA, which include abandoning the current return to the moon rocket development, some have argued that this may work out better in the long run. I don't really know enough to know, but I can certainly see the argument that NASA needed shaking up in some major way.The main problem with NASA is not lack of money. Its current budget is about the same size, when adjusted for inflation, as the average during the 1960s and early 1970s. But space exploration has become so costly that this level of financing won’t even pay for a return to the Moon anytime soon, which is what prompted the White House to cancel the Bush administration’s lunar mission.
Normally, once a pioneer makes the first trip somewhere, the cost goes down as others follow and technology improves. That’s why so many colonists could follow Columbus to the New World, and why the masses today can afford to fly in Lindbergh’s path back to Europe. The real costs of shipping freight by rail and air have declined by an order of magnitude since locomotives and airplanes were invented.
In space transportation, though, many costs have actually risen since the days of Apollo.
