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Saturday, 2 March 2013

Leaving NKorea, Rodman calls Kims 'great leaders'

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman speaks to the media at the Pyongyang Airport in Pyongyang, before he leaves North Korea Friday, March 1, 2013. Ending his unexpected round of basketball diplomacy in North Korea on Friday, Rodman called leader Kim Jong Un an "awesome guy" and said his father and grandfather were "great leaders." (AP Photo/Kyodo News) JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT, NO LICENSING IN CHINA, HONG KONG, JAPAN, SOUTH KOREA AND FRANCE

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, left, and former NBA star Dennis Rodman watch North Korean and U.S. players in an exhibition basketball game at an arena in Pyongyang, North Korea, Thursday, Feb. 28, 2013. Rodman arrived in Pyongyang on Monday with three members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team to shoot an episode on North Korea for a new weekly HBO series. (AP Photo/VICE Media, Jason Mojica)

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman, left, speaks to the media at the airport in Pyongyang, before he leaves North Korea Friday, March 1, 2013. Rodman hung out with North Korea's Kim Jong Un during his improbable journey to Pyongyang, watching the Harlem Globetrotters with the leader and later drinking and dining on sushi with him.(AP Photo/Kim Kwang Hyon)

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman speaks to the media at the Pyongyang Airport before he leaves North Korea Friday, March 1, 2013. Rodman hung out with North Korea's Kim Jong Un during his improbable journey to Pyongyang, watching the Harlem Globetrotters with the leader and later drinking and dining on sushi with him.(AP Photo/Kim Kwang Hyon)

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) ? Ending his unexpected round of basketball diplomacy in North Korea on Friday, ex-NBA star Dennis Rodman called leader Kim Jong Un an "awesome guy" and said his father and grandfather were "great leaders."

Rodman, the highest-profile American to meet Kim since he inherited power from father Kim Jong Il in 2011, watched a basketball game with the authoritarian leader Thursday and later drank and dined on sushi with him.

At Pyongyang's Sunan airport on his way to Beijing, Rodman said it was "amazing" that the North Koreans were "so honest." He added that Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, North Korea's founder, "were great leaders."

"He's proud, his country likes him ? not like him, love him, love him," Rodman said of Kim Jong Un. "Guess what, I love him. The guy's really awesome."

At Beijing's airport, Rodman pushed past waiting journalists without saying anything.

Rodman's visit to North Korea began Monday and took place amid tension between Washington and Pyongyang. North Korea conducted an underground nuclear test just two weeks ago, making clear the provocative act was a warning to the United States to drop what it considers a "hostile" policy toward the North.

Rodman traveled to Pyongyang with three members of the professional Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, VICE correspondent Ryan Duffy and a production crew to shoot an episode on North Korea for a new weekly HBO series.

Kim, a diehard basketball fan, told the former Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls star that he hoped the visit would break the ice between the United States and North Korea, said Shane Smith, founder of the New York-based VICE media company.

Dressed in a blue Mao suit, Kim laughed and slapped his hands on a table during the game at Jong Ju Yong Gymnasium as he sat nearly knee to knee with Rodman. Rodman, the man who once turned up in a wedding dress to promote his autobiography, wore a dark suit and dark sunglasses, but still had on his nose rings and other piercings. A can of Coca-Cola sat on the table before him in photos shared with AP by VICE.

Smith, after speaking to the VICE crew in Pyongyang, said Kim and Rodman "bonded" and chatted in English, though Kim primarily spoke in Korean through a translator.

Thursday's game ended in a 110-110 tie, with two Americans playing on each team alongside North Koreans. After the game, Rodman addressed Kim in a speech before a crowd of tens of thousands of North Koreans and told him, "You have a friend for life," VICE spokesman Alex Detrick told AP.

At an "epic feast" later, the leader plied the group with food and drinks and round after round of toasts were made, Duffy said in an email to AP.

Duffy said he invited Kim to visit the United States, a proposal met with hearty laughter from the North Korean leader.

Kim said he hoped sports exchanges would promote "mutual understanding between the people of the two countries," the official Korean Central News Agency said.

North Korea and the U.S. fought on opposite sides of the three-year Korean War, which ended in a truce in 1953. The foes never signed a peace treaty, and do not have diplomatic relations.

Rodman's trip is the second attention-grabbing American visit this year to North Korea. Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, made a four-day trip in January to Pyongyang, but did not meet the North Korean leader.

The Obama administration had frowned on the trip by Schmidt, who was accompanied by former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, but has avoided criticizing Rodman's outing, saying it's about sports.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2013-03-01-NKorea-Rodman/id-166fea9ac7a34a64b251bcf060bebe92

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Green Blog: Some Far Out (at Least for Now) Energy Ideas

The just-concluded annual meeting of ARPA-E, an agency founded to nurture interesting energy ideas that may or may not work, featured an exhibition hall with scores of displays staffed by hopeful entrepreneurs.

Many of them seemed to be Ph.D. engineers; in some cases, you needed a Ph.D. yourself to understand what was being presented. But here are three simpler ones that seemed enticing, even if their practicality has yet to be demonstrated.

Some bacteria and algae turn sunlight into oils that can be burned in a car engine or used as raw material at a refinery in place of crude oil. Yet production of reasonable quantities at a reasonable cost has so far been elusive. Tobacco, meanwhile, is easy to grow but has no healthy use. Can the two be merged?

The research consortium Folium (from the Latin word for leaf), which includes the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Kentucky, has taken genes from those types of bacteria and algae and inserted them into tobacco plants. In the first year of work, it produced a crop and then used organic solvents to extract the oils out of the leaves. (Check out the video above.)

Further work on the project, which received $4.8 million from ARPA-E, will determine whether the oils can be used directly as fuel or must go to a refinery. But the tobacco is already yielding one product that could substitute for diesel oil, said Peggy G. Lemaux, a researcher at Berkeley.

Making these oils from tobacco, as opposed to some other crops, would not interfere with food production, Dr. Lemaux noted. And tobacco is already in surplus because of the decline of the cigarette market, so a large infrastructure is already in place, she said.

Researchers have modified the plants so that they have less chlorophyll, the chemical that converts sunlight into stored energy. Normally, chlorophyll is helpful in photosynthesis and makes leaves dark enough that the area beneath them is in shadow, killing off competing species. But ?that doesn?t make sense in a monoculture,?? Dr. Lemaux said, so the chlorophyll is reduced. With less chlorophyll, light not absorbed by the top layer of leaves can penetrate down to lower levels.

Among the challenges, however, is raising the amount of oil produced per pound of tobacco.

In another project, Proton Energy Systems received $4.6 million to work on using electric current to break up water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

One of the problems with integrating renewable energy into the electric system is that wind and sun are intermittent, creating challenges for grid operators who need to provide a constant supply of electricity. Proton came up with a product that is the direct opposite of a fuel cell, which converts hydrogen to electric current and water. The oxygen and hydrogen atoms are instead split up in a chemical reaction, and the hydrogen can either be turned back into electricity in a fuel cell or used for industrial purposes.

Proton is currently is working with the town of Hilo in Hawaii on an installation that would make hydrogen for a bus powered by a fuel cell. But the Proton equipment would also be connected to the local grid: upon receiving a signal, it would pull more current from the grid, or less, to keep supply and demand exactly balanced.

The system could store energy produced by the wind and sun when the electricity wasn?t needed, and balance the system on a moment-to-moment basis.

At another booth, a company called Otherlab was showing off a concept for a different kind of vehicle tank to hold natural gas. Today?s tanks for compressed gases are almost always spheres or cylinders, a geometry that affords maximum space. But it can be hard to find space for a cylinder or a sphere on a car, where every inch of space is usually spoken for by some mechanical system.

So Otherlab, which received $250,000 from ARPA-E, proposes a ?conformable tank,? meaning a coiled pipe that would store gas in a flat area. The company had an eye-catching display of a coiled tube storing an example of a large volume of material: the human gastrointestinal tract.

Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/some-far-out-at-least-for-now-energy-ideas/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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The Bachelor Women Tell All Preview: All About Tierra!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/03/the-bachelor-women-tell-all-preview-all-about-tierra/

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8 Most Popular Diets Today | Fitness Health Daily News

People are obsessed with diets. They are constantly seeking the right diet to help them lose weight. There are currently eight popular diets that have worked effectively for many people and providing more options for dieting.
1. Atkins Diet focuses on controlling the levels of insulin in the body through the food consumed. It is based on the consumption of proteins in the diet to reduce the levels of insulin in the bloodstream. The increasing of the proteins leads to weight loss in many

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Source: http://fitnesshealthdailynews.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/8-most-popular-diets-today/

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Friday, 1 March 2013

Where the wild things go? when there's nowhere else

Where the wild things go when there's nowhere else

Public release date: 28-Feb-2013
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Contact: Morgan Kelly
mgnkelly@princeton.edu
609-258-5729
Princeton University

Ecologists have evidence that some endangered primates and large cats faced with relentless human encroachment will seek sanctuary in the sultry thickets of mangrove and peat swamp forests. These harsh coastal biomes are characterized by thick vegetation particularly clusters of salt-loving mangrove trees and poor soil in the form of highly acidic peat, which is the waterlogged remains of partially decomposed leaves and wood. As such, swamp forests are among the few areas in many African and Asian countries that humans are relatively less interested in exploiting (though that is changing).

Yet conservationists have been slow to consider these tropical hideaways when keeping tabs on the distribution of threatened animals such as Sumatran orangutans and Javan leopards, according to a recent Princeton University study in the journal Folia Primatologica. To draw attention to peat and mangrove swamps as current and possibly future wildlife refuges, Katarzyna Nowak, a former postdoctoral researcher of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, compiled a list of 60 primates and 20 felids (the large-cat family that includes tigers and leopards) known to divide their time between their natural forest habitats and some 47 swamp forests in Africa and Asia.

[Images can be seen at http://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2013/02/28/where-the-wild-things-go-folia-primatologica/. To obtain high-res images, contact Princeton science writer Morgan Kelly, (609) 258-5729, mgnkelly@princeton.edu]

Because swamp forests often lack food sources, fresh water and easy mobility, few mammals are exclusive to these areas, Nowak reported. Consequently, conservation groups have not intensely monitored the animals' swamp use.

But the presence of endangered cats and primates in swamp forests might be seriously overlooked, Nowak found. About 55 percent of Old World monkeys primates such as baboons and macaques that are native to Africa and Asia take to the swamps either regularly, seasonally or as needed. In 2008, the Wildlife Conservation Society reported that the inaccessible Lake Tl swamp forest in the Republic of the Congo was home to 125,000 lowland gorillas more than were thought to exist in the wild. Among big cats, the Bengal tiger, for instance, holds its sole ground in Bangladesh in the Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest.

Life in the swamps can still be harsh for some animals. Species such as the crab-eating macaque and fishing cat can adapt somewhat readily to a life of swimming and foraging for crustaceans. Meanwhile, Zanzibar's red colobus monkey driven to coastal mangroves by deforestation can struggle to find the freshwater it needs, as Nowak reported in the American Journal of Primatology in 2008. Such a trend could result in local extinction of the red colobus nonetheless, she said.

Nowak concludes that swamp forests beg further exploration as places where endangered species such as lowland gorillas and flat-headed cats have preserved their numbers and where humans could potentially preserve them into the future.

###

The paper, "Mangrove and Peat Swamp Forests: Refuge Habitats for Primates and Felids," was published in the journal Folia Primatologica.

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Where the wild things go when there's nowhere else Public release date: 28-Feb-2013
[ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Morgan Kelly
mgnkelly@princeton.edu
609-258-5729
Princeton University

Ecologists have evidence that some endangered primates and large cats faced with relentless human encroachment will seek sanctuary in the sultry thickets of mangrove and peat swamp forests. These harsh coastal biomes are characterized by thick vegetation particularly clusters of salt-loving mangrove trees and poor soil in the form of highly acidic peat, which is the waterlogged remains of partially decomposed leaves and wood. As such, swamp forests are among the few areas in many African and Asian countries that humans are relatively less interested in exploiting (though that is changing).

Yet conservationists have been slow to consider these tropical hideaways when keeping tabs on the distribution of threatened animals such as Sumatran orangutans and Javan leopards, according to a recent Princeton University study in the journal Folia Primatologica. To draw attention to peat and mangrove swamps as current and possibly future wildlife refuges, Katarzyna Nowak, a former postdoctoral researcher of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, compiled a list of 60 primates and 20 felids (the large-cat family that includes tigers and leopards) known to divide their time between their natural forest habitats and some 47 swamp forests in Africa and Asia.

[Images can be seen at http://blogs.princeton.edu/research/2013/02/28/where-the-wild-things-go-folia-primatologica/. To obtain high-res images, contact Princeton science writer Morgan Kelly, (609) 258-5729, mgnkelly@princeton.edu]

Because swamp forests often lack food sources, fresh water and easy mobility, few mammals are exclusive to these areas, Nowak reported. Consequently, conservation groups have not intensely monitored the animals' swamp use.

But the presence of endangered cats and primates in swamp forests might be seriously overlooked, Nowak found. About 55 percent of Old World monkeys primates such as baboons and macaques that are native to Africa and Asia take to the swamps either regularly, seasonally or as needed. In 2008, the Wildlife Conservation Society reported that the inaccessible Lake Tl swamp forest in the Republic of the Congo was home to 125,000 lowland gorillas more than were thought to exist in the wild. Among big cats, the Bengal tiger, for instance, holds its sole ground in Bangladesh in the Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest.

Life in the swamps can still be harsh for some animals. Species such as the crab-eating macaque and fishing cat can adapt somewhat readily to a life of swimming and foraging for crustaceans. Meanwhile, Zanzibar's red colobus monkey driven to coastal mangroves by deforestation can struggle to find the freshwater it needs, as Nowak reported in the American Journal of Primatology in 2008. Such a trend could result in local extinction of the red colobus nonetheless, she said.

Nowak concludes that swamp forests beg further exploration as places where endangered species such as lowland gorillas and flat-headed cats have preserved their numbers and where humans could potentially preserve them into the future.

###

The paper, "Mangrove and Peat Swamp Forests: Refuge Habitats for Primates and Felids," was published in the journal Folia Primatologica.

[ | E-mail | Share ]
?

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-02/pu-wtw022813.php
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The Engadget Mobile Podcast, live at 10:15AM ET at MWC 2013!

We would say it's been an absolutely epic and crazy Mobile World Congress, but we'd be lying. Instead, we'll talk to you about what we saw, felt and heard -- some of it good, and some just outright disgusting. There's a span of two weeks to cover, so it should be a healthy podcast with lots of stuff to talk about. As a disclaimer, our connection here in Barcelona isn't incredibly strong, so there is a small possibility that our bandwidth may go out on occasion. If you don't mind that chance, however, join us at 10:15AM ET!

February 28, 2013 10:15 AM EST

Filed under: Announcements, Mobile

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/28/engadget-mobile-podcast/

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'Creepy' Facebook apps tells you which friends to date

Social media

Rosa Golijan TODAY

6 hours ago

On The Rebound

"Yes, it's creepy," admits the man who co-created an app that goes through up to six years of your Facebook friends' relationship histories to determine who's ready for a new significant other. "Of course it's creepy!"

"But here's the thing," Anthony Coombs, who created the On The Rebound Facebook app with two friends, continued. "Let's be honest. You meet someone. If you friend them on Facebook, the first thing you do is check their relationship status. You're going to check and see if they are single ... and then creepily troll through their profile."

"Instead of taking the time to do this on a lonely Thursday or Friday .... we'll do this for you," the 32-year-old added, the slightest bit of a smile in his voice.

Coombs came up with the idea for On The Rebound after a missed opportunity. He'd been interested in a girl for the longest time, but she was already in a relationship. "I was the confidant, someone she talked to," he explained. "When the relationship ended, I specifically did not ask her out [...] I'm aware of when people are on the rebound." So he waited for his romantic interest to be ready for a new relationship.

On The Rebound

Unfortunately Coombs waited too long. "I'm not sure how long I waited," he said, "but during this time she ended up hooking up with a guy I knew and they're still together."

When Coombs shared the tale with his friend Jon Tran, the latter immediately started wondering about how someone could use data to figure out when people are most likely to enter a relationship. Together with designer Taylor Lecroy, the two started working on an app the same night.

Over the course of the next two-and-a-half months, the men interviewed relationships experts across the country to figure out how age and gender affect relationships. "People of different ages, who are at different stages in life, react differently to relationships ending," Coombs explained, "and relationship length matters, too."

On The Rebound sifts through relationship data when you connect it to your Facebook account and then it spits out a detailed breakdown of your friends' romantic histories. How long have they been single? Have they had a large number of relationships in the last year? How long does it take, on average, before they jump from one to the next? Based on all this information and some magical formulas, On The Rebound can assign "Rebound Ratings" to your pals and offer advice. "Hopefully he's moved on from his ex by now," the app might point out regarding one friend. "Trust me, he's using you," it might say about another "Use him back!"

Of course, as a disclaimer on the On The Rebound website cautions, the app "is for entertainment purposes only" ? so be careful about following all of its advice to the letter.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.

Source: http://www.today.com/tech/creepy-facebook-app-tells-you-which-friends-date-1C8624099

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