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NEW ROOM !

2008-04-14T09:23:00.003+04:00

Dear Visitor,

It's new address:

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Pizza for breakfast?

2008-03-18T17:48:00.002+04:00

I know what you're thinking: pizza? For breakfast? But the truth is that you can crack open last night's leftovers in the a.m. if you want to.

I know lots of women who skip breakfast, and they have a ton of different excuses for doing it. Some say they don't have time, others think they're "saving" calories by eliminating a meal, still others just don't like breakfast food.

But the bottom line is, eating in the morning is crucial when you're trying to trim down. "Eating just about anything in the range of 300 to 400 calories would be better than nothing at all," says SELF contributor Katherine Brooking, R.D., who developed the super-easy eating plan for this year's SELF Challenge. And even pizza can be healthy if it's thin-crust, loaded with veggies, and you stick to one slice.

Breakfast is one meal I never miss (my favorite morning combo includes Fage nonfat yogurt topped with fresh fruit and low-carb granola, yum!), and the same goes for most weight loss success stories.

Research shows that eating breakfast revs up your metabolism, keeps you from overeating later in the day and may even help sleekify your abs. Researchers at the University of Southern California at Los Angeles found that breakfast skippers have bigger tummies than those who regularly have a morning meal.

So eat something in the morning, anything. I know plenty of pals who end up forgoing it altogether to have just coffee or cola. I say, try heating up last night's leftovers-it may sound crazy, but if it works for you, do it!

Bonus: I find if I tell myself, "You can always eat it tomorrow," I put away the leftovers instead of eating more that night. Try it...you may save yourself some prebedtime calories. And watch your body reap the fat-burning benefits. What are your favorite breakfast foods?

Want to buy a mammoth?

2008-03-15T09:26:00.003+04:00

California resident Nancy Fiddler has put for sale on eBay a mastodon skeleton that takes up most of her garage. The minimum bid -- $115,000 (57,000 pounds).

Her family's relationship with the Ice Age relative of the elephant has run its course.

Fiddler said they need the money an online auction could bring, and her son would prefer to build hot rod cars in the space the creature now occupies.

The Fiddlers also would like to use their sauna, which in the last four years has served as an additional repository for the huge plastic casts containing the animal's bones.

"We needed a safe, dry place," Fiddler said, explaining why they chose to sacrifice the sauna. "The mastodon takes precedence."

Mastodons, which stood 10 feet (3 metres) tall with trunks and tusks, migrated to North America about 15 million years ago and ranged all over the continent with saber tooth tigers, giant sloths and American camels. All met their extinction about 10,000 years ago.

A ranch hand discovered a mastodon tooth on the Fiddler ranch in northeastern California in 1997. Excavation revealed a rare, nearly complete mastodon skeleton that included everything but the tusks.

"It's a beautiful specimen," said paleontological consultant Bruce Hanson, who helped move the skeleton to the Oakland Museum of Natural History, where it was on display for several years.

After the museum made a replica, the Fiddlers moved the mastodon to the tasting room of a California wine bar. Then it found its way to their garage.

One paleontologist said he was sceptical that the Fiddlers would get as much as they want for the mastodon.

"What is it going to do? Sit on someone's mantle?" said Mark Goodwin of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. "I would prefer to see it donated to a museum. This is our fossil heritage."

Battling cell phone spam

2008-03-14T19:38:00.001+04:00

Mobile phone users are receiving more unwanted and costly text messages. » Any way to fight it?

Contain your Wi-Fi signal

2008-03-12T12:03:00.001+04:00

Reader Mike Waters writes: I am concerned about Wi-Fi security. One of the most basic ways to secure a wireless signal seems like it would be to reduce the strength in "uncontrolled" areas so no signal can be received. I would like to be able to REDUCE the range of my home Wi-Fi network so it just covers my house! As it is I can receive signals almost 2 blocks away! Is there any safe, reliable way to do this? Remove tha antenna from the hub, wear a tinfoil hat?

Sure enough, there is, but not on every router. Hop into your router management system (either through a program you installed when you set up your router initially or by typing the IP address of the router into your web browser), and poke around. Every router is different, but you'll likely find the option to reduce radio transmission power under advanced settings or somewhere else in the wireless configuration section. On Linksys routers, for example, look for "Output Power" under the Advanced Wireless tab. Remember, though, that not all routers include this feature (not even all routers from the same vendor).

Like Mike suggests, lowering the total power output of your router can do a good job at keeping the signal from spreading too far outside your house and down the street. However, this method comes with some caveats. The big one: By lowering signal strength you may inadvertently lower the signal too much so that you don't cover your entire house. Wireless signal is finicky, and the just-fine signal strength on one floor may be barely acceptable a single story up. You may very well drop your connection altogether in the far corners of your home, so experiment before you etch this setting in stone.

The other caveat is that even if your signal doesn't drop out, it will likely slow down throughout your house, even when you are relatively close to the router. As signal strength decreases, the signal-to-noise ratio falls as well, which means you'll lose more data and suffer through more re-transmissions as interference gets worse, lowering the overall speed of the connection. (Neighbor networks may overpower yours, even.) This may not be a big deal, in fact you may not even notice it, or it may have such an impact that it makes your network unusable. Again, you'll have to experiment to find a setting that keeps the network relatively confined to your house while still giving you enough bandwidth to work comfortably in.

Regardless of whether you throttle your wireless radio's power output, don't rely on this as your sole means of Wi-Fi security. Use wireless encryption, set a strong administrator password, and change default settings as described here.

Healthy fast-food breakfasts

2008-03-11T17:26:00.002+04:00

You know those time-crunched mornings when you're starving and an Egg McMuffin seems like the only fast-enough solution? But you know it's a 300-calorie, 12-grams-of-fat freeway to diet disaster? Turn into the McDonald's anyway (or a handy facsimile). There actually are fast-food ways to start the day that won't wreck your waistline.

These choices will tame your appetite (with extra protein), curb afternoon cravings (with a hit of fiber), and even help you concentrate (that protein-fiber combo supplies the brain with a steady stream of energy). Use this cheat sheet when you need a wakeup fast.

McDonald's
There are a couple of options with enough fiber and protein to fill you up and keep you going:

Fruit n' Yogurt Parfait with Granola
160 calories, 2g fat (1g saturated), 5mg cholesterol, 85mg sodium, 1g fiber, 4g protein
Snack Size Fruit and Walnut Salad
210 calories, 8g fat (1.5g saturated), 5mg cholesterol, 60mg sodium, 2g fiber, 4g protein

Starbucks
You'll find two good high-flavor choices here:

Spinach, Roasted Tomato, Feta, and Egg Wrap -- it's a little high in fat but compensates with lots of fiber and protein.
240 calories, 10g fat (3.5g saturated), 140mg cholesterol, 730mg sodium, 7g fiber, 13g protein
A Skinny Latte and a package of SB's dried fruit and nut mix. The latte's made with nonfat milk and a shot of sugar-free syrup. (Try the caramel or hazelnut: yum!)
Latte (12-oz. "tall"): 90 calories, 0g fat (0g saturated), 5mg cholesterol, 125mg sodium, 0g fiber, 0g protein
Fruit/nut packet: 150 calories, 9g fat (1g saturated), 0mg cholesterol, 100mg sodium, 2g fiber, 4g protein

Jamba Juice
Two groups of smoothies will be your wake-up call as long as you add a soy protein booster. For just 30 more calories you'll get an extra 7g of tummy-taming, brain-fueling protein.

Any 16-oz. "Jamba Light" smoothie
150-160 calories, 0-0.5g fat (0g saturated), 5mg cholesterol, 210-220mg sodium, 2-3g fiber, 6g protein
Any 16-oz. "All Fruit" smoothie
200-220 calories, 0-0.5g fat (0g saturated), 0mg cholesterol, 5-20mg sodium, 4g fiber, 1-2g protein

Dunkin' Donuts
Make this your last resort but if it's the only choice, go for:

Egg and Cheese English Muffin Sandwich
280 calories, 9g fat (4.5g saturated), 140mg cholesterol, 1010mg sodium (yikes -- that's why it's your last resort), 1g fiber, 15g protein
If the smell of doughnuts gets to your head, order 4 Powdered Cake doughnut holes (Munchkins in DD-speak).
260 calories, 15g fat, 7g saturated fat, 10mg cholesterol, 210mg sodium, 2g fiber, 3g protein

Burger King
Keep driving until the competition appears. BK is behind on banning risky trans fats, and we recommend avoiding it until the place smartens up.

Is breakfast really worth the bother? You bet. Not only does eating it help keep you slimmer and smarter, but skipping it can make your RealAge as much as 3 years older. So it's definitely worth knowing your best AM road-food options.

Testing electric toothbrushes

2008-03-09T10:35:00.001+04:00

I'm fanatical about dental hygiene, and one of the few places technology really collides with this area (that is, the mouth) is in the realm of electric toothbrushes.

I put three of the highest of high-end electric toothbrushes to the test over the last two months. Here are my thoughts, but please remember, this is just the opinion of one man and one mouth.

Philips Sonicare FlexCare RS930 with sanitizer - Sonicare is one of the best known lines of electric toothbrushes, and it's come a long way since its earliest days. The brush head vibrates back and forth rapidly but in a narrow range, using sonic technology to help get gunk off of teeth. It's a very light and maneuverable brush, and after your 2-minute cleaning cycle, your mouth really does feel clean. (Obviously I have no scientific and quantitative measure to determine exactly how clean each of these brushes got my teeth.)

Like the other two brushes, the FlexCare includes a built-in timer. This one pauses at 30-second intervals to let you know when to move to a new quadrant of your mouth. While the FlexCare is a capable brush, it's the sanitizer that seals the deal. This is a small unit attached to the charging base that blasts ultraviolet light onto the brush heads to kill bacteria on them. I wish you didn't have to disassemble the brush to use the sanitizer and it was easier to tell if the UV light was actually on, but otherwise I was impressed with the device. Bonus: The FlexCare is the only brush in this roundup that uses a lithium-ion battery instead of Ni-MH. Price tag: $169

Ultreo - The new kid on the block. Unlike all other brushes, Ultreo really uses ultrasound to clean teeth, and you can see the difference by just looking at the brush head. In the center of the bristles, there's a bare, orange pad. According to Ultreo, this pad actually cleans your teeth even if the brush isn't touching them. Of course, the bristles don't hurt either.

Overall, I liked the Ultreo fairly well. It's light and comfortable, and the charging base is incredibly inconspicuous. It was extremely gentle compare to other brushes, which might be why my teeth just didn't seem quite as clean after several weeks of testing. Unlike the other brushes, the Ultreo doesn't offer any additional operation modes (like a "sensitive" setting), and the charging indicator was very difficult to read. It's perfectly capable, but I preferred the FlexCare in the end. Price tag: $169

Oral-B Triumph with SmartGuide ProfessionalCare 9900 - I've used a Triumph (sans SmartGuide) in the past, so I have tons of tooth-on experience with this model. The Triumph offers a round brush head that rotates back and forth (not around and around) in a tight range. It provides good cleaning and is easy to maneuver in your mouth.

But the Oral-B brush is loud and vibrates a lot. It feels like someone's going to work in your mouth with a small jackhammer. That said, the results are good - teeth end up nice and clean - but using it is not exactly pleasant.

The 9900 includes a small monitor that you can put in your bathroom so you can time your brushing for the recommended two minutes. The timer didn't do a whole lot for me, but I did appreciate having a waterproof clock next to the sink.

Still, I wouldn't mind the Triumph if it wasn't for one big problem - the charging base collects all manner of white toothpaste residue and gunk, which gets all over the bottom of your toothbrush and the countertop and creates a huge mess. One bright spot: You can find the Triumph with the SmartGuide for a mere $100 if you shop around. Price tag: Less than $100

White killer whale spotted

2008-03-08T04:06:00.002+04:00

The white killer whale spotted in Alaska's Aleutian Islands sent researchers and the ship's crew scrambling for their cameras.

The nearly mythic creature was real after all.

"I had heard about this whale, but we had never been able to find it," said Holly Fearnbach, a research biologist with the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle who photographed the rarity. "It was quite neat to find it."

The whale was spotted last month while scientists aboard the Oscar Dyson, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship, were conducting an acoustic survey of pollock near sea lion haulout sites.

It had been spotted once in the Aleutians years ago but had eluded researchers since, even though they had seen many of the more classic black and white whales over the years.

Fearnbach said the white whale stood out.

"When you first looked at it, it was very white," she said Thursday.

Further observation showed that while the whale's saddle area was white, other parts of its body had a subtle yellowish or brownish color.

It likely is not a true albino given the coloration, said John Durban, a research biologist at NOAA's Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle. That's probably a good thing -- true albinos usually don't live long and can have health problems.

Durban said white killer whales have been spotted elsewhere in the area twice before: in 1993 in the northern Bering Sea around St. Lawrence Island and in 2001 near Adak in the central Aleutians. There have also been sightings along the Russian coast.

While Alaska researchers have documented thousands of black and white killer whales in the Bering Sea and the Aleutians during summer surveys, this was something new and exciting, Durban said.

"This is the first time we came across a white killer whale," he said.

The scientists observed several pods over a two-week period. The white whale was in a family group of 12 on a day when the seas were fairly rough. It was spotted about 2 miles off Kanaga Volcano on Feb. 23.

The ship stayed with the whale for about 30 minutes.

"Everybody actually came out and was taking pictures," Fearnbach said. "It was a neat sighting for everybody."

The whale appeared to be a healthy, adult male about 25 to 30 feet long and weighing upward of 10,000 pounds.

Ancient tomb found

2008-03-07T16:31:00.003+04:00

Road construction on the western Greek island of Lefkada has uncovered and partially destroyed an important tomb with artifacts dating back more than 3,000 years, officials said on Wednesday.

The find is a miniature version of the large, opulent tombs built by the rulers of Greece during the Mycenaean era, which ended around 1100 B.C. Although dozens have been found in the mainland and on Crete, the underground, beehive-shaped monuments are very rare in the western Ionian Sea islands, and previously unknown on Lefkada.

The discovery could fuel debate on a major prehistoric puzzle — where the homeland of Homer's legendary hero Odysseus was located.

"This is a very important find for the area, because until now we had next to no evidence on Mycenaean presence on Lefkada," excavator Maria Stavropoulou-Gatsi told The Associated Press.

Stavropoulou-Gatsi said the tomb was unearthed about a month ago by a bulldozer, during road construction work.

"Unfortunately, the driver caused significant damage," she said.

She said the tomb contained several human skeletons, as well as smashed pottery, two seal stones, beads made of semiprecious stones, copper implements and clay loom weights. It appeared to have been plundered during antiquity.

With a nine-foot diameter, the tomb is very small compared to others, such as the Tomb of Atreus in Mycenae, which was more than 46 feet across and built of stones weighing up to 120 tons.

But it could revive scholarly debate on the location of Odysseus' Ithaca mentioned in Homer's poems — which are believed to be loosely based on Mycenaean-era events. While the nearby island of Ithaki is generally identified as the hero's kingdom, other theories have proposed Lefkada or neighboring Kefallonia.

Stavropoulou-Gatsi said the discovery might cause excitement on Lefkada but it was too soon for any speculation on Odysseus.

"I think it is much too early to engage in such discussion. The location of Homer's Ithaca is a very complex issue," she said.

Fake memoir exposed

2008-03-05T13:00:00.002+04:00

Two years after the fall of James Frey, a publisher has again been conned by a memoirist with a life that proved too bad to be true.

But as with Frey's "A Million Little Pieces," the debunking of Margaret B. Jones' "Love and Consequences" is unlikely to change an industry where the handshake and the heartfelt vow have long been good enough to commit a story to print.

"The author-editor relationship is so much one of trust and I don't think that can change," says Nan Talese, who published Frey's book through her own imprint at the Broadway Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

"It's a business where honesty prevails 99 percent of the time," says literary agent Laurence J. Kirshbaum, the former head of Warner Books. "We have to rely on the close, good-faith relationship between author, agent and publisher. The fact that there's a glitch once in every 150,000 titles doesn't mean you change the whole system."

In "Love and Consequences," Jones writes about growing up as a half-white, half-Native American girl in South-Central Los Angeles in the foster home of Big Mom. One of her foster brothers, she writes, was gunned down by Crips gang members outside their home. Jones also claimed she carried illegal guns and sold drugs for the Bloods gang.

Less than a week after the book was published, Jones' story came apart after her older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw an article about the author in The New York Times and contacted Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA). Margaret B. Jones is actually a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is white and grew up in a well-off area of San Fernando Valley in California with her biological family. She attended a private Episcopal day school and never lived with a foster family or sold drugs for a gang.

The publisher has recalled all copies of the book and canceled Jones' tour, which was to begin Monday. Penguin's senior vice president of publicity, Marilyn Ducksworth, said that anyone who bought "Love and Consequences" would receive a full refund by returning it to the retailer.

Praised as "humane and deeply affecting" by The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, the memoir had a first printing of 24,000, and about 19,000 had been shipped. Sales figures were unavailable; as of Monday night, the book ranked No. 450 on Amazon.com.

Riverhead also published Frey's "My Friend Leonard," a best-selling sequel to "A Million Little Pieces" that itself included numerous fabrications. Riverhead eventually dropped Frey, who is scheduled to publish a novel, "Bright Shiny Morning," this spring with HarperCollins.

Riverhead vice president and publisher Geoffrey Kloske said that no one asked Seltzer for official paperwork such as school records, which might have discredited her story, but he noted that the author submitted letters and photographs and a recommendation from a former professor.

"She even had someone claiming to be one of her former siblings. There was a substantial amount of supporting evidence," he says. "We rely on our authors. Hopefully, this will inform our future actions, but we're going to continue to rely on them to tell us the truth, and promise to tell us the truth."

Asked if Riverhead was considering legal action — author honesty was contractually obligated — Kloske declined comment.

Paul Bogaards, head of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf, said that after the revelations emerged about Frey the publisher held an editorial meeting. A more cautious approach was urged — "The more fantastic the life, the more questions need to be asked," Bogaards says — but no formal changes were enacted.

"If an author is determined to defraud the public, he or she will find a way to do so," Bogaards says. "I don't see us, or anyone else, really doing anything differently. Look, this is a business where publishers don't even test recipes in the cookbooks."

Best delivery pizza

2008-03-03T11:40:00.002+04:00

With all the options available from the nationwide pizza chains—thin crust, deep dish, stuffed crust, etc.—things can get a little confusing. Who better than Slice to coach you through the pizza playbook? Here is a careful analysis of the various crusts, toppings, and specialty pizzas from Pizza Hut, Domino's, and Papa John's.

My colleagues and I spent hundreds of dollars on delivery pizza from the major chains in order to study their plays. Armed with napkins, paper plates, a stack of soft drinks, and plenty of antacid, we plowed through piles of crusty, cheesy, saucy stuff, to find the best pizza for you to order. We ordered a selection of each chain's specialty pizzas, as well as one cheese pizza to judge the foundations of each contestant's line-up.

DOMINO'S

Strengths: Fast delivery; cool online Pizza Tracker; many crust options; low price.
Weaknesses: Underwhelming flavor; overly sweet sauce.
Available crusts: Classic Hand Tossed, Crunchy Thin Crust, Ultimate Deep Dish, Brooklyn Style, Crispy Melt.
Online ordering process: Awesome. Simple and intuitive, and allows you to add, remove, and edit pizzas easily while giving you the option to update pricing info without forcing a full page reload. Remembers your favorites. And has the great Pizza Tracker that updates in real time, so you can see exactly where your order is in the entire mouse-to-house enterprise.

MVP

The Philly Cheese Steak Pizza: This pizza, surprisingly, had the most going for it. It'd normally be an affront to both dishes—managing to muck up both iconic American foods—but its steak, Provolone and American cheeses, onions, green peppers, and mushrooms worked well together and had the best flavor among the Domino's line-up.
Recommended crust: Classic Hand Tossed is hearty enough to stand up to the topping load but not so thick as to throw things out of balance.

Second String

The Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza: I never thought we'd pick hybrids as the top two players on Team Domino's, but this pie was a strong second made with mozzarella, cheddar, ground beef, and bacon. Our analysts determined that its strength came from ... the bacon, of course.
Recommended crust: Try a Crunchy Thin Crust if you really want to emphasize the bacon-cheeseburger-ness of this specialty pizza.

The ExtravaganZZa: Good ratio of meat and vegetable toppings. The crisp vegetables are a nice foil to the otherwise doughy texture of the crust. Plus, the saltiness of the meat toppings masks the sweet sauce.
Recommended crust: Ultimate Deep Dish is a must in supporting the weight of pepperoni, ham, Italian sausage, beef, onions, green peppers, mushrooms, black olives, and extra cheese.

The Least Valuable Player

The Crispy Melt: Looks good on paper: a Crispy Thin Crust base and an equally thin layer of crisp dough on top that sandwiches sauce, cheese, and toppings of your choice. But this pizza doesn't complete the play. Too much dry, flavorless crust. Special notes: Only available in large, but you were going to order that anyway, right?

The Vegi Feast: Flavorless vegetables serve only to add texture to this pizza. Only order it to please your whiny vegetarian friends.

PAPA JOHN'S

Strengths: Higher-quality toppings; the most specialty pizzas; decent crust; ample toppings; excellent presentation.
Weaknesses: Higher cost. Only three crust styles. Again, the most specialty pizzas (some of them are pretty wack).
Available crusts: Original, Thin, Perfect Pan.
Online ordering process: Lame. The site itself looks like ass, and navigation is frustrating. Forces you to log in just to see ordering menu. Choosing/adding toppings is confusing.

MVP

The Works: This was the most visually pleasing pizza we encountered while scouting pizza pies. The crust had a rich, deep-golden-brown color around the edges and the toppings were artfully arranged: pepperoni, ham, spicy Italian sausage, onions, green peppers, baby portabella mushrooms, and black olives. All in a square pizza cut in a novel way. Amount of toppings exceeded those on comparable Domino's ExtravaganZZa and Pizza Hut Super Supreme. Example: Instead of laying pepperoni slices flat, several slices of the topping were nested together and placed on the pizza in concave hills of meat held in place by plenty of melted cheese. This seemed to increase the amount of pepperoni that could be placed on the pie. Small chunks of sausage dotted the pie evenly, around and hiding under pepperoni slices. Vegetables had better flavor than either Domino's or the Hut.
Recommended crust: Perfect Pan was light and bready, but here its airiness collapsed under the weight of the toppings. A denser Original crust might be the way to go

Second String

The Meats: Pepperoni, sausage, hickory-smoked bacon, and ham give this pizza plenty of flavor and is sure to please any carnivores you're eating with. Like The Works above, the sliced meats are arranged carefully to allow for ample loads. Looks are deceiving here, but in a good way: Meat appears above the cheese and
Recommended crust: We tried Original by chance, and it stood up well to the carnal onslaught. is hidden below it, so you get more than what you see. Be sure to keep plenty of beer or liquids on hand; the saltiness of the meat will make you thirsty.

The Least Valuable Players

Regular Cheese Pizza: We had high hopes for this one, based on the look and taste of The Works pie. But the plain cheese pizza from Papa John's really does need to be topped if it's going to have any flavor. Disappointing.
Recommended crust: N/A

BBQ Chicken and Bacon: Seemed promising. I mean, bacon? 'cue? We figured it was PJ's version of California pizza, but the substitution of barbecue sauce for the usual tomato sauce was a fake out we couldn't get our heads around. And the sweet intensity of the sauce drowned out any chicken flavor—not surprising as it's all white-meat chix.
Recommended crust: N/A

Hawaiian BBQ Chicken: See above, and add pineapple.
Recommended crust: N/A

The Towel Boys

We had to designate these specialty pizzas "towel boys," since they're not even in the game. We couldn't even bring ourselves to order them. I mean, could you imagine yourself ordering the following for your Super Bowl party?

Spinach Alfredo
Spinach Alfredo Deluxe
Spinach Alfredo Chicken Tomato
Chicken Alfredo Supreme

PIZZA HUT

Strengths: Innovative specialty pizzas; the most crust styles.
Weaknesses: Slow delivery; high price; innovative specialty pizzas (hello? Stuffed Crust?).
Available crusts: Hand-Tossed Style, Pan Pizza, Stuffed Crust, Thin 'n Crispy, Crunchy Cheesy Crust, Pizza Mia.
Online ordering process: Very good. Site itself looks beautiful. And ordering is just as intuitive and easy as Domino's, but gets upstaged by the Domino's Pizza Tracker. Allows you to store a "Pizza Playlist" (favorites) and your credit card info for even faster ordering.

MVP

Pizza Mia: OK. One of my colleagues in charge of getting pizzas went a little nuts and, unbeknownst to us, ordered one of Pizza Hut's new Pizza Mia pies with bacon and black olives. What kinda combo is that?!? But you know ... it worked! This was the best of the Pizza Hut pies we tasted. It was actually good and not just "good for Pizza Hut." The crust had a nice crispness to it and was thin but still just bready enough. The olives were flavorful without being overpowering, and the bacon wasn't half bad. The sauce is slightly sweet but not too much so, and the balance of crust, sauce, and cheese was pretty much on. We were all stunned that this thing came out of Pizza Hut. And, it's reasonably priced—much more so than the other pies we ordered.
Recommended crust: N/A. If you order a Pizza Mia, you get the special Pizza Mia crust, "created for the taste expert" and made with "fine white Great Plains flour."

Second String

The Super Supreme: Just barely makes it into the game. After the Pizza Mia, this is the best Pizza Hut pie we tried. Toppings aren't as flavorful or as abundant as Papa John's, and crust is greasy and spongelike. Sauce is slightly bitter.
Recommended crust: We ordered ours as a Pan Pizza, but this one would benefit from the Hand-Tossed Style crust. Notice how that's "Hand-Tossed Style." Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

The Least Valuable Player

Anything with the Crunchy Cheesy Crust: Have you ever had really bad garlic bread—you know, really dry with just too much of that garlic powder–salt mixture? That's what this is like. It wasn't discernably more crunchy than any other Hut pizza we had and was in fact nowhere near as crisp as the Pizza Mia.
Recommended crust: N/A

OVERALL ANALYSIS

For overall marks, we were most impressed with Papa John's. Its pizzas seemed to be made with more care, were tastier overall, and seemed to use better ingredients—and the delivery driver arrived quickly.

However, our favorite single pizza was, strangely enough, the olive-and-bacon Pizza Mia from Pizza Hut.

Domino's only seems worth ordering this Sunday if you want lots of inexpensive pizza.

Shark attacks on the rise

2008-02-28T11:10:00.002+04:00

A diver who suffered a fatal shark bite in the Bahamas this week is part of a trend of increasing attacks around the world despite plummeting populations of the majestic fish.

If sharks are so threatened in the world's waters, why are attacks on humans on the rise?

Because the global population of humans is growing fast, so more people go to the beach, said George Burgess, curator of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History. And nowadays, beach-goers don't just go for a dunk. They hang out in shallow water (home for many sharks) for long periods of time to surf, windsurf, boogie-board, kayak and dive.

The number of worldwide shark attacks overall increased from 63 in 2006 to 71 in 2007, continuing a gradual upswing over the past four years, Burgess said.

There have been five unprovoked shark attacks so far this year (most shark attacks are unprovoked), Burgess said. However, the death of Markus Groh, 49, an Austrian lawyer, on Monday is under investigation and might be classified as provoked as he was part of an uncaged tourist dive off the Bahamas where chum is thrown into open water.

"There are more people in the water than there ever have been," Burgess told LiveScience. "We can pretty much predict that next year there will be even more attacks. Even if shark populations are declining, which we know they are, even in a local situation if populations have been depleted, there is still a probability of getting an attack."

Shark stats

Sharks are disappearing from the world's oceans due to overfishing, says Julia Baum, a researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego. Baum and some of her shark-tracking colleagues made comments to reporters earlier this month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Sharks killed one human in 2007, according to the International Shark Attack File, but humans killed an estimated 38 million sharks for their fins each year, Baum said. That's as many sharks as the entire human populations of the 35 largest cities in the United States. Other estimates are nearly double that.

Some nations have banned shark fishing, but the bans are hard to enforce. And it's a free-for-all in international waters, Baum said.

The classic sharks, aka the "great sharks" such as the great white shark, scalloped hammerhead, mako sharks, thresher sharks, bull sharks and dusky sharks, are in trouble, she said. Deepwater species such as seal sharks, silky sharks, sleeper sharks and spined pygmy sharks are also at risk, said shark biologist Colin Simpfendorfer of James Cook University.

A study Baum conducted at her previous job at Dalhousie University showed all great shark species in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean have declined by more than 50 percent since the early 1970s.

Everyone agrees that the great sharks' numbers are declining, but some experts think Baum's estimates are faulty and the real situation is less dire, Burgess said.

Little is known about deepwater sharks, even after an assessment of them by IUCN-The World Conservation Union, said Colin Simpfendorfer of James Cook University. Almost half of the known species of sharks occur in deep water and they are more vulnerable to fishing than shallow water sharks (the great sharks), he said.

Data from two case studies, one in southeastern Australian waters and the other in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, showed reductions in abundance of about 90 percent in many species of sharks in less than 20 years, Simpfendorfer said.

New listings could help

The scale of the problem of disappearing sharks is global due to shark finning, the process of cutting off a shark's fins and throwing the rest of the animal overboard still alive, leaving it to die, Baum said.

Finning makes use of only 2 to 5 percent of the animal, but shark fins are now one of the most highly valued marine commodities. A bowl of shark fin soup can sell for $100, so there is high incentive for fishermen to fin.

The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service is proposing to effectively close down much of the coastal large shark fisheries, Baum said. "This would be a very positive step forward for shark management in the U.S.," she said.

The European Union has acted to restrict pressure on deepwater sharks, Simpfendorfer said.

And white sharks have been listed as vulnerable by the IUCN Red List, said shark researcher Salvador Jorgensen of Stanford University.

In the 2008 IUCN Red List, forthcoming later this year, five additional great shark species will be listed in the threatened categories, including the shortfin mako shark and three species of thresher shark, each of which will be listed as vulnerable. The scalloped hammerhead will be listed as globally endangered, Baum said.

"Sharks evolved 400 million years ago, and yet we could now lose some species in the next decade, so that would be just the blink of an eye in evolutionary time," Baum said.

Sharks are thought to be crucial to the entire marine ecosystem: they are top predators and help to keep smaller sharks and rays from devouring too many scallops, clams and other commercially important species of marine life.

You'll live

Meanwhile, if you do suffer a shark bite, your odds of living are greater than 90 percent. The rate of shark-attack fatalities hit an all-time low in 2007 for the past 20 years, Burgess said.

In fact, the trend for shark-bite fatalities in the 20th century is "down, down, down, decade by decade," Burgess said. The reason is better medical care.

As a result of multiple wars in the last century, medicine has learned how to do a much better job of saving people with traumatic injuries, Burgess said. "The whole process from water onto operating table or stitches occurs with greater rapidity and more professionalism," he said.

The real story isn't shark attacks, Burgess said. "The real story is what is happening to skates, sharks and rays on a worldwide basis. We have witnessed, in the last 20 to 30 years, huge declines in these animals worldwide."

Peru's oldest monument

2008-02-27T17:28:00.002+04:00

LIMA, Peru - A team of German and Peruvian archaeologists say they have discovered the oldest known monument in Peru: a 5,500-year-old ceremonial plaza near Peru's north-central coast.

Carbon dating of material from the site revealed it was built between 3500 B.C. and 3000 B.C., Peter Fuchs, a German archaeologist who headed the excavation team, told The Associated Press by telephone Monday.

The discovery is further evidence that civilization thrived in Peru at the same time as it did in what is now the Middle East and South Asia, said Ruth Shady, a prominent Peruvian archaeologist who led the team that discovered the ancient city of Caral in 2001. Shady serves as a senior adviser to Peru's National Culture Institute and was not involved in the project.

The find also raises questions about what prompted "civilizations to form throughout the planet at more or less the same time," Shady said.

The circular, sunken plaza, built of stones and adobe, is part of the Sechin Bajo archaeological complex in Andes foothills, 206 miles northwest of Lima, where Fuchs and fellow German archaeologist Renate Patzschke have been working since 1992.

It predates similar monuments and plazas found in Caral, which nonetheless remains the oldest known city in the Americas dating back to 2627 B.C.

The plaza served as a social and ritual space where ancient peoples celebrated their "thoughts about the world, their place within it, and images of their world and themselves," Fuchs said.

In an adjacent structure, built around 1800 B.C., Fuchs' team uncovered a 3,600-year-old adobe frieze — six feet tall — depicting the iconic image of a human sacrificer "standing with open arms, holding a ritual knife in one hand and a human head in the other," Fuchs said.

The mythic image was also found in the celebrated Moche Lords of Sipan tombs, discovered on Peru's northern coast in the late 1980s.

Walter Alva, the Peruvian archaeologist who uncovered the Lords of Sipan tombs, said the plaza found in Fuchs' dig was probably utilized by an advanced civilization with economic stability, a necessary condition to construct such a ceremonial site.

The excavation was the fourth in a series of digs at the Sechin Bajo complex that Fuchs and Patzschke began on behalf of the University of Berlin in 1992. Deutsche Forschung Gemeinschaft, a German state agency created to sponsor scientific investigations, has financed the most recent three digs.

The find "shows the world that in America too, human beings of the New World had the same capacity to create civilization as those in the Old World," Shady said.

Her discovery, Caral, made headlines in 2001 when researchers carbon-dated material from the city back to 2627 B.C., proving that a complex urban center in the Americas thrived as a contemporary to ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt — 1,500 years earlier than previously believed.

8 lower-stress careers

2008-02-26T21:51:00.002+04:00

It's 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, and you're glued to the computer screen, biting your nails, pulse racing. No, it's not an exciting moment in your weekend-long Halo 3 tournament, or even a big sell on eBay. You're trying to meet yet another deadline for work. Sound familiar? If long hours and an unwieldy workload are stressing you out, maybe it's time to consider a career change.
Understanding the Enemy
Job stress is one of the most common complaints among Americans, and research indicates that it has become a more widespread problem in recent years. In 1992, the United Nations named job stress "The 20th Century Disease," and the World Health Organization has called it a "World Wide Epidemic." Also, studies have shown that too much negative stress can contribute to health problems ranging from migraine headaches and depression to life-threatening illnesses such as heart attacks. Is that pension plan really worth it if you won't be alive to cash it in?
Turn Off the Career Pressure-Cooker
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What's an overworked guy or gal to do? Though it may seem out of the question after a 60+ hour workweek, redirecting some of your energy toward identifying and training for a new career may be the best investment you can make. The careers listed below are not anxiety-free (every job by nature has some elements of positive and negative stress), but they do offer a combination of freedom, creativity, and personal satisfaction that can help keep your pulse rate normal
1. Accountant
If you're well-organized and have a knack for calculations, a balanced profit and loss sheet can offer a restful escape from the stress of complex office politics. You don't even have to leave your computer to earn an online accounting degree, which can be found at hundreds of accounting schools nationwide.
2. Preschool Teacher
Working with young children can definitely be a challenge. Yet introducing preschoolers to the world of education through art projects, group play, and music can be extremely therapeutic as well. Earn your degree in early childhood education and you could get paid to help three- and four-year-old kids on a daily basis. Even if you have to stay up late to get a teaching degree online, you can make up for that lost sleep when your students enjoy their post-lunchtime naps.
3. Nursing Assistant
Caring for patients as a nursing assistant delivers the feel-good perks of a medical career without the stress of med school or week ends on-call. A nursing degree could set you up to enter a career field projected to see 264,000 new job openings over the next 8 years.
4. Financial Planner
Though spending your own money can produce high levels of anxiety, helping others manage their funds can be just the opposite. A degree in finance can help you learn the basics of tax law, insurance, and investing principles to assist others as they prepare for retirement or plan their estate. To minimize the stress of funding your own education, keep costs down by researching your financial aid options for an online finance degree or an MBA.
5. Massage Therapist / Physical Therapy Assistant
Whether giving and receiving backrubs at a massage therapy school, or practicing flexibility techniques in a physical therapy assisting program, you can learn how to help people maximize relaxation. And if you incorporate some of these exercises into your own daily routine, you could have a recipe for a tension-free workday.
6. Pastry Chef
It's hard to get stressed when your office smells of butter, sugar, and cinnamon. Although some pastry chefs work odd hours, the love and creativity they put into their work can be extremely liberating. Most pastry chefs get their start in culinary school, where they can refine and hone their artistic skills.
7. Graphic Design
Being creative under pressure isn't easy, but earning a graphic design degree could help you join the ranks of the designers who are self-employed. Working for yourself can give you a tremendous amount of flexibility, and allow you to balance your personal and professional lives as you see fit.
8. Desktop Support
Desktop or computer support specialists use their expertise to help the rest of us deal with the stress of malfunctioning technology. With a bachelor's degree in computer science (or simply experience and technical training for some positions), you could enjoy low-stress super-hero status by saving hard drives from evil viruses.
Derail Your Stress Train
Though many factors can contribute to on-the-job stress, remember that you always have some control over how you react to it. As you begin your journey toward a lower-stress career, make sure you cultivate some personal stress-reducing habits as well. A little career training can go a long way in helping you launch your new low-stress career.

The perks of caffeine

2008-02-26T17:19:00.002+04:00

Talk about happy trends. More and more yum-ola foods that used to be considered bad news are turning out to be good for you. First it was wine. Then olive oil. Chocolate. Guacamole. And now coffee. (Hey, can ice cream be far behind?!)

What restored coffee's reputation? Caffeine. After years of being viewed with suspicion, caffeine has pulled a scientific switcheroo. Besides helping students pull all-nighters and weekend warriors jumpstart their jump shots, there's now evidence that it defends against diabetes, Parkinson's, asthma symptoms, post-workout soreness, and even hunger pangs. Cool.

It's not totally benign, of course - is anything? So the RealAge experts advise limiting yourself to about 250 mg a day (the average cup of joe has about 100 mg) to avoid jitters and a possible boost in blood pressure. But few labels list caffeine content, so stick this on the fridge. It covers the caffeine sources generating the most buzz, plus some timeless favorites. We checked the calories too, BTW, but most are pretty harmless.

DIET COKE Everybody's default diet drink
THE CAFFEINE FIX 45 mg
THE CALORIES 0
THE OTHER STUFF A lot of flavorings and colorings,
not much else-call it caffeine lite

WATER JOE For the purist: plain H2O with a jolt
THE CAFFEINE FIX 60 mg 16.9-ounce bottle
THE CALORIES 0
THE OTHER STUFF Artesian water and caffeine—that's it.
No additives, no carbonation

RED BULL The energy drink that started it all
THE CAFFEINE FIX 80 mg per 8-ounce can
THE CALORIES 110
THE OTHER STUFF Has taurine, a "detox," amino acid;
B vitamins; loads of sugar—so beware
the crash after the rush

TAB ENERGY A revved-up version of old Tab cola
THE CAFFEINE FIX 95 mg per 10.5-ounce can
THE CALORIES 5
THE OTHER STUFF Sweet and pink, it's spiked with ginseng
and guarana, a mild caffeine-like stimulant

ENVIGA Controversial new green tea drink
THE CAFFEINE FIX 100 mg per 12-ounce can
THE CALORIES 5
THE OTHER STUFF Laced with 200 mg of calcium and
green tea antioxidants but in trouble for
claiming that it makes the body burn up
extra calories

ROCKET
CHOCOLATES Candy with more zip than a cup of joe
THE CAFFEINE FIX 150 mg per piece
THE CALORIES 70
THE OTHER STUFF Comes in trendy flavors like mocha latte;
individually wrapped so you can stash in
a pocket—but can you eat just one?

FUSION ENERGY 7/Eleven's new-ish "functional" brew
THE CAFFEINE FIX 250 mg per 12-ounce cup
THE CALORIES 0
THE OTHER STUFF Freshly-ground coffee brewed with an
alertness-boosting blend of ginseng,
guarana, and yerba mate

STARBUCKS Coffee, just coffee
THE CAFFEINE FIX 280 or so per 12-ounce cup
THE CALORIES 0
THE OTHER STUFF Starbucks coffee averages twice the
caffeine of a regular 8-ounce cup of java,
but the hit can vary wildly-in one study,
by 200 mg on different days

SPIKE SHOOTER Heavy-hitter energy drink
THE CAFFEINE FIX 300 mg per 8.4-ounce can
THE CALORIES 0
THE OTHER STUFF Spiked with tyrosine, yohimbine, and
a huge dose of vitamin B12; label warns
you not to drink more than 1 a day

Big night for dark films

2008-02-25T10:14:00.002+04:00

The Coen brothers completed their journey from the fringes to Hollywood's mainstream on Sunday, their crime saga "No Country for Old Men" winning four Academy Awards, including best picture, in a ceremony that also featured a strong international flavor.

Javier Bardem won for supporting actor in "No Country," which earned Joel and Ethan Coen best director, best adapted screenplay and the best-picture honor as producers.

Accepting the directing honor alongside his brother, Joel Coen recalled how they got their start in a career that has seen them advance from oddballs with a devoted cult following to broader audiences. He noted they have been making films since childhood, including one at the Minneapolis airport called "Henry Kissinger: Man on the Go."

"What we do now doesn't feel that much different from what we were doing then," Joel Coen said. "We're very thankful to all of you out there for continuing to let us play in our corner of the sandbox."

Daniel Day-Lewis won his second best-actor Oscar for the oil-boom epic "There Will Be Blood," while "La Vie En Rose" star Marion Cotillard was a surprise winner for best actress, riding the spirit of Edith Piaf to Oscar triumph over Julie Christie, who had been expected to win for "Away From Her."

All four acting prizes went to Europeans: Frenchwoman Cotillard, Spaniard Bardem, and Brits Day-Lewis and Tilda Swinton, the supporting-actress winner for "Michael Clayton."

The only other time in the Oscars' 80-year history that all four acting winners were foreign born was 1964, when the recipients were Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Peter Ustinov and Lila Kedrova.

As a raging, conniving, acquisitive petroleum pioneer caught up in California's oil boom of the early 20th century, Day-Lewis won for a part that could scarcely have been more different than his understated role as a writer with severe cerebral palsy in 1989's "My Left Foot."

"My deepest thanks to the academy for whacking me with the handsomest bludgeon in town," Day-Lewis said.

The Coens missed out on a chance to make Oscar history — four wins for a single film — when they lost the editing prize, for which they were nominated under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes.

"The Bourne Ultimatum" won the editing Oscar and swept all three categories in which it was nominated, including sound editing and sound mixing.

Past winners for their screenplay to 1996's "Fargo," the Coens joined an elite list of filmmakers to win three Oscars in a single night, including Francis Ford CoppolaThe Godfather Part II"), James Cameron ("Titanic") and Billy Wilder ("The Apartment"). ("

With $64 million domestically, "No Country" is the biggest box-office hit for the Coens, whose tales often are an acquired taste appealing to narrow crowds. Their films include the modest hits "Fargo" and "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and such lesser-known yarns as "The Hudsucker Proxy" and "The Man Who Wasn't There."

Cotillard, the first winner ever for a French-language performance, tearfully thanked her director, Olivier Dahan.

"Maestro Olivier, you rocked my life. You have truly rocked my life," said Cotillard, a French beauty who is a dynamo as Piaf, playing the warbling chanteuse through three decades, from raw late teens as a singer rising from the gutter through international stardom and her final days in her frail 40s.

"Thank you, life; thank you, love. And it is true there (are) some angels in this city."

A relatively fresh face in Hollywood, Cotillard has U.S. credits that include "Big Fish," "A Good Year" and the upcoming "Public Enemies," featuring Johnny DeppChristian Bale. and

With a heartbreaking turn as a woman succumbing to Alzheimer's in "Away From Her," Christie had been expected to win her second Oscar. She won best actress 42 years ago for "Darling."

Heavies ruled the acting prizes. Along with Day-Lewis' greedy oilman, Bardem played an unshakable executioner in "No Country" and Swinton played a malevolent attorney in "Michael Clayton." Bardem, referring to the sinister variation of a page-boy bob his character sported, said: "Thank you to the Coens for being crazy enough to think I could do that and for putting one of the most horrible haircuts in history over my head."

Host Jon Stewart joked that Bardem's haircut in the film combined "Hannibal Lecter's murderousness with Dorothy Hamill's wedge-cut."

Mickey Mouse gained a rival as Hollywood's favorite rodent as the rat tale "Ratatouille" was named best animated film, the second Oscar win in the category for director Brad Bird.

Bird thanked his junior-high guidance counselor, who expressed repeated skepticism over his desire to become a filmmaker.

"It went on like this until we were sick of each other," said Bird, who also won the animation Oscar for 2004's "The Incredibles" and shared a nomination for original screenplay for "Ratatouille," a $200 million blockbuster. "I only realized just recently that he gave me the perfect training for the movie business."

The ceremony's montage of photos and film clips of stars, filmmakers and others in cinema who died in the past year ended with a scene from "Brokeback Mountain" featuring Heath Ledger, who died of a prescription drug overdose last month.

Glen Hansard of the Irish band the Frames and Marketa Irglova, both non-actors who starred in the musical romance "Once," won the best-song Oscar for "Falling Slowly," one of several tunes they wrote for the film.

"What are we doing here? This is mad," Hansard said, recounting the low-budget history of "Once." "It took us three weeks to make. We made it for a hundred-grand. We never thought we'd come into a room like this and be in front of all you people."

The song won over three nominated tunes from "Enchanted" written by composer Alan Menken, an eight-time Oscar winner, and lyricist Stephen Schwartz, a three-time winner, whose previous academy prizes included their song and score collaborations for "Pocahontas."

The sound-mixing win for "The Bourne Ultimatum" extended the years of Oscar futility for Kevin O'Connell, a nominee for "Transformers," who holds an academy record: 20 nominations, no wins.

Michael Moore, who assailed President Bush over the Iraq War in his Oscar speech for documentary winner "Bowling for Columbine" five years ago, missed out on a chance to take the podium again. His health-care study "Sicko" lost the documentary prize to "Taxi to the Dark Side," a war-on-terror chronicle that centers on an innocent Afghan cab driver killed while in detention.

Box-office dud "The Golden Compass" scored an upset for visual effects over the blockbusters "Transformers" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End."

Other winners included "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" for costume design, "La Vie En Rose" for makeup and "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street" for art direction.

The Oscar broadcast began with a fanfare and an effects-laden opening segment showing key characters and creatures from past films lining Hollywood Boulevard.

Stewart started his opening monologue with a wisecrack about the 100-day writers strike that ended just in time for the Oscars to come off as usual.

"These past three and a half months have been very tough. The town was torn apart by a bitter writer's strike, but I'm happy to say that the fight is over," Stewart said. "So tonight, welcome to the makeup sex."

___

On the Net:

Academy Awards:

http://www.oscars.org

What caused stealth crash?

2008-02-24T16:15:00.002+04:00

The US military was investigating on Saturday after a B-2 stealth bomber crashed on take-off from the Pacific island of Guam, the first such incident involving the futuristic craft.

Both pilots on board ejected safely as the 1.2-billion-dollar radar-evading plane, with its distinctive triangular shape, went down at Andersen airbase on the remote island, the US air force said.

"Two pilots from the 509th Bomb Wing were on board and ejected. They have been evaluated by medical authorities and are in good condition," it said.

"Emergency responders are on scene. A board of officers will investigate the accident," said the headquarters of the US air force in the Pacific.

It was the second US air force crash this week after two F-15C jets collided during training over the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, killing a fighter pilot.

Crowds gathered at the crash site after the bomber, one of just 21 in the air force inventory, went down at about 10:45 am (0045 GMT).

A thick plume of smoke rose over the airbase and officials closed one of its two runways, diverting planes to Guam International Airport, the Pacific Daily News website said.

"Everybody was on their cellphones and the first thing everyone wanted to know was did the pilots make it out in time," said an eye-witness quoted by the website.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, here with visiting US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, confirmed the crash but did not give further details.

"We are grateful for the safety of the pilots," said Mike Cruz, acting governor of the US territory.

"The Air Force and Guam have a long-standing relationship and we help each other in this community we share, especially during times like these."

The long-range bomber was visiting from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Operated exclusively by the US, the B-2 has never crashed since first seeing combat in the air war over Kosovo in 1999.

The 172-foot (52-metre) wide stealth bomber, which can carry nuclear as well as conventional weapons, has also been used in US campaigns over Iraq and Afghanistan.

It emits minimal exhaust, noise and heat, making it hard to detect by radar or infra-red.

Guam, in the northwest Pacific, and neighbouring US territories including the Northern Mariana Islands are considered by Washington as strategic locations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Guam, population 170,000, is home to one of the largest US military naval bases in the region and 8,000 marines will soon be relocated there from Japan.

The US and Japan are spending 15 billion dollars on the relocation of the marines from Japan, which is expected to further boost Washington's military strength in the Asia-Pacific

Games could save music biz

2008-02-23T09:30:00.002+04:00

The music industry is changing, and fast. The old model based around full album consumption simply doesn't work anymore. Single track downloads grew by 53 percent in 2007 to $2.9 billion and digital sales account for 30 percent of sales in the US and 15 percent worldwide, all while CD sales continue to dive like broken Xbox 360s, falling between 10 to 20 percent in 2007. Heck, 2008 had one of the least-watched Grammy ceremonies in television history.

And yet in less than three months, Harmonix's video game Rock Band notched 2.5 million song downloads at around two bucks per -- twice as much as a regular iTunes song retails. Everyone who buys Rock Band downloads at least two songs, on average. With a little over one million copies of the game sold, that's some sexy math.

The relationship between games and music is only getting peachier: coming this June, Activision is planning to release a Guitar Hero game dedicated to Aerosmith and "celebrated artists that the band has either performed with or has been inspired by in some way." Clearly, bands are taking notice of gaming's reach and influence. Here's a look at the past, present and future of the mutually beneficial relationship between music and games.

Related: Songs Featured in Rock Band on Yahoo! Music

Early Days: iD's Nine Inch Nails

One of the standout events in the merger between games and popular music came when Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame scored iD's seminal shooter, Quake. Worlds collided, as music fans who'd never looked twice at gaming suddenly took interest in online fragfests. Ironically, Reznor has since become a staunch opponent of the music industry's old guard, going so far as to leak his own tracks and remixes.

See NIN Artist Page

Old Tunes, New Audience

Where new audiences might once have been introduced to classic tunes through movies (think Martin Scorsese and his love for The Rolling Stones, or Wes Anderson's faithful use of The Kinks), now new generations get their musical education from games.

WATCH GTA: SAN ANDREAS TRAILER

Rockstar lived up to their name and built radio stations right into the Grand Theft Auto series that cemented gamers' love for tracks like Ice Cube's 'It Was A Good Day' and introduced many to stuff like Gary Numan's 'Cars'.

See Today Was A Good Day Song Page

See Cars Song Page

Rocking in the free market

Dueling arena-rocking franchises Rock Band and Guitar Hero have only amped up that trend by going far beyond the niche track selections of older rhythm games. While labels struggle to sell CDs, Rock Band has already pushed well over 2 million songs. That sales market developed overnight; Rock Band has only been in stores for a few months. But it's consistent with the music industry's current trend towards single-track downloads, which have been increasing weekly.

Snacks that promote sleep

2008-02-19T15:08:00.003+04:00

One of the best natural sedatives is tryptophan, an amino acid component of many plant and animal proteins.

Tryptophan is one of the ingredients necessary for the body to make serotonin, the neurotransmitter best known for creating feelings of calm, and for making you sleepy.

However, the trick is to combine foods that have some tryptophan with ample carbohydrate. That’s because in order for insomnia-busting tryptophan to work, it has to make its way to the brain.

Unfortunately, all amino acids compete for transport to the brain. When you add carbs, they cause the release of insulin, which takes the competing amino acids and incorporates them into muscle…but leaves tryptophan alone, so it can make its way to the brain, be converted to serotonin, and cause sleepiness.

Serotonin-producing bedtime snacks should be no more than 200 calories and should be eaten at least 30 minutes prior to bed.

Here are a few great ideas:

Bedtime Snacks for Adults

--6-8 oz container of non-fat, flavored yogurt topped with 2 tablespoons low-fat granola cereal
--Sliced apple with 1-2 teaspoons natural peanut butter
--3 cups low-fat popcorn – sprinkled with optional 2 tablespoons parmesan cheese

Bedtime Snacks for Teens

--One cup healthy cereal with skim milk
--Low-fat granola bar
--Scoop of vanilla or strawberry low-fat ice cream

Bedtime Snacks for Children

--1/2 cup low-fat vanilla pudding
--1/2 banana with 1-2 teaspoons peanut butter
--One cup skim milk with a bunch of grapes (or other fruit)

No-Bake Macaroni and Cheese

2008-02-19T09:57:00.002+04:00

8 ounces whole-wheat elbow noodles
1 (10 ounce) package frozen chopped broccoli
1 3/4 cups low-fat milk, divided
3 tablespoons flour
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground white pepper
3/4 cup shredded extra-sharp Cheddar cheese
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

Nutrition Info

Per Serving

Calories: 396 kcal
Carbohydrates: 57 g
Dietary Fiber: 7 g
Fat: 10 g
Protein: 22 g
Sugars: 8 g

2. Cooking Directions

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Cook pasta for 4 minutes. Add frozen broccoli and continue cooking, stirring occasionally, until the pasta and broccoli are just tender, 4 to 5 minutes more.
Meanwhile, heat 1 1/2 cups milk in another large pot over medium-high heat until just simmering. Whisk the remaining 1/4 cup milk, flour, garlic powder, salt and pepper in a small bowl until combined. Add the flour mixture to the simmering milk; return to a simmer and cook, whisking constantly, until the mixture is thickened, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and whisk in Cheddar, Parmesan and mustard until the cheese is melted.
Drain the pasta and broccoli and add to the cheese sauce. Return to the heat and cook, stirring, over medium-low heat, until heated through, about 1 minute.

Yield: 4 servings

3. Still Hungry?

Not only is this ultra-creamy version of mac-and-cheese nearly as fast as the boxed variety, but your family will be able to pronounce every ingredient. If they aren't broccoli fans, substitute a frozen vegetable of your choice.

What flower colors mean

2008-02-15T06:01:00.002+04:00

You want to give your sweetie a bouquet of flowers on Valentine's Day. That's a classy move. Think twice, though, before plucking any random bunch of blooms. If your special someone is among the thousands of searchers hitting the Web for "meaning of flowers," he or she may have a funny reaction to that clutch of striped carnations. (What you just said: "Sorry I can't be with you.")

To save you the horror of broadcasting the wrong message with yellow chrysanthemums ("slighted love"), yellow hyacinths ("jealousy"), or bright and shiny marigolds ("cruelty, grief, and jealousy," oh my!), we've paired the week's most searched-on flowers with their generally accepted meanings. Select with confidence...

Roses - Love
Orchids - A belle
Iris - My compliments
Daisies - Innocence
Tulips - Declaration of love
Calla Lily - Beauty
Amaryllis - Splendid beauty
Hydrangea - Heartfelt
Anthurium - Hospitality
Daffodils - Chivalry

Chrysanthemums - Fidelity
Carnations - Pride and beauty
Lilacs - Youthful innocence
Birds of Paradise - Joyfulness
Tiger Lily - Wealth, pride
Peony - Bashful
Anemone - Anticipation
Sunflowers - Pure thoughts
Aster - Patience
Gladiolus - Strength of character

When it comes to sheer flower power, the rose is the "American Idol," the Michael Jordan, and the Beatles of botany, all rolled into one sweet-smelling, thorny cache. No flower comes close to its popularity. It draws its own "meaning" searches ("rose color meaning"), cooks up its own candy queries ("chocolate roses"),and sprinkles the Search box with its velvety parts ("rose petals").

If you're thinking of a dozen long-stemmed messages de amor for February 14, here are the week's most searched-on types of roses and their secret meanings...

Red Roses - Love and romance
Black Roses - Vengeance
Blue Roses - Mystery and intrigue
Pink Roses - Gratitude and appreciation
Purple Roses - Love at first sight

White Roses - Innocence and purity
Green Roses - Fertility
Yellow Roses - Joy and friendship
Lavender Roses - Enchantment
Orange Roses - Enthusiasm, passion

Dollar bill's secrets revealed

2008-02-13T13:22:00.002+04:00

Conspiracy theorists take note: The myths surrounding one of America's oldest and most enduring national symbols are about to be debunked ... if you believe the government, that is.

The keepers of the Great Seal of the United States, the familiar emblem on the back of the $1 bill, want you to know what it is not. It is not a sign that Freemasons run the country, it has nothing to do with the occult, and it does not contain clues to a fabulous hidden treasure.

It is rather the nation's stamp of authority, sovereignty and power, gracing our cash and embossing the most important of documents from its home at the State Department, which has held it since the days of Thomas Jefferson, the first secretary of state.

Not that the Seal's symbols — the all-seeing eye, the unfinished pyramid, the Latin phrases, the bald eagle clutching an olive branch and arrows and the number 13 — aren't powerful.

They are, historians say. Yet their meanings have been misidentified, misunderstood and misrepresented almost since the Continental Congress first commissioned the Seal in 1776.

It would be another six years before the original design was approved and another 128 before it evolved into its current form. Along the way, a movement to decipher the Seal's meaning with ancient Egyptian, mystical and otherwise otherworldly explanations has gained currency.

The Internet age has seen an explosion in such conspiracy theories, many which have now been ingrained in public consciousness through the popular "National Treasure" movie franchise that serves up a combination of Masonic lore and historical myths in blockbuster Hollywood fashion.

Among them:

_That the Seal proves the domination of the United States by a powerful, quasi-religious cult. The Ancient Scottish Rite of Freemasonry is a perennial favorite of conspiracy theorists as some Founding Fathers were Masons and the Seal uses several Masonic symbols.

_That the Seal draws on Satanism or polytheistic ritual to promote a universal new world order under which Earth would be ruled by a single omnipotent government.

_That repeated references to 13 — the number of steps in the unfinished pyramid, stars in the constellation over the eagle's head, arrows in the eagle's claw, stripes on the eagle's shield, letters in the phrase "Annuit Coeptis" — demonstrate the power of 13 American families.

_That there are two seals: one in which the eagle's head faces the arrows for times of war and another in which the eagle's head faces the olive branch for times of peace.

All rubbish, according to historians, who say the Seal's symbolism is far less ominous or revelatory than many believe.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the Seal's 66th and current custodian, on Tuesday inaugurated a new exhibition to commemorate its 225th birthday and trace the history and evolution of the symbolism.

"This exhibit honoring the Great Seal affirms our continued belief in the values of our founding," she said. "The Great Seal symbolizes the unity, strength and independence of a new nation, the United States of America."

The Seal will remain at the State Department but the interactive exhibit is designed to travel and curators hope it will dispel the rumors and educate Americans about the real meaning of the symbols.

Among the highlights:

_That known Masons like the first U.S. president, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin had no role in designing the final seal, which uses elements of traditional heraldry, such as the unfinished pyramid to symbolize a work in progress, arrows for war and an olive branch for peace. Masons share some of those symbols, but they have never been exclusively the domain of the order.

_That the phrase "Novus Ordo Seculorum" below the Roman numerals for 1776 at the base of the pyramid translates as "A New Order of the Ages" that began with independence and does not imply the United States will be the lynchpin of a sinister "New World Order."

_That the words "Annuit Coeptis" ("Providence favors") and the eye of providence that hovers over the pyramid refer to unexpected interventions of fate that assisted the colonists in creating a new country.

_That the references to 13 refer to the number of colonies that formed the original United States.

"People are just not aware of the complexity and intent of the symbolism and what our Founding Fathers were trying to do with it," said Priscilla Linn, senior curator at the U.S. Diplomacy Center. "The hidden treasure in the Seal is the courage and presence of mind of the people who created it and created these values for the whole country."

The great Ferris wheel race

2008-02-12T11:22:00.000+04:00

When it comes to status symbols, nothing beats a circle. There is a global race to create the biggest Ferris wheel, and while these attractions are built for fun, the stakes are serious. “These wheels have almost replaced the skyscraper as icons,” says Dennis Speigel, president of the consulting firm International Theme Park Services. When the Singapore Flyer makes its debut this month, it will be the world’s tallest, at 541 ft.—at least until late 2008, when the 607-ft.-high Great Dubai Wheel opens. In 2009, the 682-ft.-high Beijing Great Wheel will surpass both.

The larger these monstrous rides become, the greater their capacity and potential profit—and the more seriously builders take them. To start, they don’t call them Ferris wheels. “We categorize them as ‘observational wheels’ because of the capsules,” says Alexander Pieper, spokesman for the Great Wheel Corporation, which developed the Singapore, Dubai and Beijing wheels.

To keep the floor horizontal, motors turn each bus-size glass capsule 360 degrees in one direction while the rim rotates a full revolution in the other. Unlike typical rigid Ferris wheels, observational wheels have cables tensioned as for the spokes of a bicycle. The slow speed allows passengers to enter and exit while the wheel stays in motion.

• Click to enlarge

The ultimate power walk

2008-02-10T10:16:00.000+04:00

Call it the ultimate power walk. Researchers have developed a device that generates electrical power from the swing of a walking person's knee. With each stride the leg accelerates and then decelerates, using energy both for moving and braking.

Max Donelan and colleagues reasoned that a device that helps the leg decelerate could generate power without requiring much additional energy from the person.

It's sort of like the way that some hybrid-electric cars produce electricity from braking.

With the device, a minute of walking can power a cell phone for 10 minutes, Donelan, of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, said in a telephone interview. Other potential uses include powering a portable GPS locator, a motorized prosthetic joint or implanted drug pumps.

Donelan and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Michigan report development of the new device in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The first practical use for the generator is likely to be in producing power for artificial limbs, said Donelan, who with his co-authors has founded a company to develop the device commercially.

The generator weighs about 3.5 pounds so users do burn energy carrying it on their knee, but they don't notice whether it is switched on or off when walking on a treadmill, he said.

However, they miss it when it's removed because they get used to its extra braking action, he added.

With one generator on each knee, people walking on a treadmill were able to generate about 5 watts of power.

Lawrence C. Rome of the University of Pennsylvania called the development "extremely clever."

Other people have thought of rotational devices around joints, Rome said, "but what's really clever is these guys only turn on resistance when person trying to brake, so it helps you."

Rome, who was not part of the research team, previously developed a backpack that generates electricity from the movement of the person carrying it.

The backpack was comfortable so it was an easy sell, he said. Whether the new knee generator is practical will depend on it being comfortable so people will want to wear it, he said in a telephone interview.

Arthur Kuo, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan and a co-author of the report, called the device "a cocktail-napkin idea."

"There is power to be harvested from various places in the body, and you can use that to generate electricity. The knee is probably the best place," Kuo said in a statement. "During walking, you dissipate energy in various places, when your foot hits the ground, for example. You have to make up for this by performing work with your muscles. ... We believe that when you're slowing down the knee at the end of swinging the leg, most of that energy normally is just wasted."

The prototype is bulky, he said, but the energy generation part itself has very little effect on the wearer.

"We hope to improve the device so that it is easier to carry, and to retain the energy-harvesting capabilities," he said.

Internet blackout explained

2008-02-09T13:57:00.000+04:00

An abandoned anchor was responsible for cutting one of the undersea Internet cables severed last week, causing disruptions across the Middle East and parts of Asia, the cable's owner said Friday.

A FLAG Telecom repair crew discovered the anchor near where the fiber-optic cable was severed Feb. 1 in the Persian Gulf, 35 miles north of Dubai, between the Emirates and Oman.

Weighing more than 5.5 tons, the anchor has been pulled to the surface. The company did not immediately explain whether the anchor moved and snapped the cable or whether the cable itself was drifting when it was sliced.

It remains unclear exactly how any of the cuts occurred.

It also was unclear whether FLAG knew what vessel the anchor belonged to. Rough weather was reported nearby at the time of the cut, but conditions have improved since.

Meanwhile, a second FLAG repair ship continued work on two undersea cables that were cut Jan. 30. They are about 5 miles off the north coast of Egypt, near the port city of Alexandria, and run between Egypt and Palermo, on the Italian island of Sicily.

Repairs at both locations are expected to be done by Sunday.

One of the two Mediterranean cables was owned by FLAG. The other, identified as SEA-ME-WE 4, or South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable, was owned by a consortium of 16 international telecommunication companies.

Egypt's telecommunication ministry said no ships were registered near the location at the time.

The cuts slowed businesses, hampered personal Internet usage and caused a flurry of Internet blogger speculation, including mentions of sabotage. Government authorities and FLAG, which stands for Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe, have refused to comment on the speculation.

Reports of additional cuts in Middle East Internet cables could not be confirmed.

FLAG, in a statement posted on the company Web site, said it has surveyed the cable cut off Egypt with remotely operated robots.

The FLAG spokesman said this week that it was laying a new cable underwater between Egypt and France that would be "fully resilient" against cuts such as last week's and "provide a diversity in routes."

He did not say what that resilience entailed, but said it would take months to set up the new cable.

"It is difficult to comment right now on this," said a FLAG spokesman, reached over the telephone. "We are doing our own investigation."

He spoke on condition of anonymity, in line with company policy.

Ovum analyst Matt Walker said undersea cable networks are highly vulnerable to deliberate attack and need enhanced security.

"If ports, railways, gas pipelines and other types of networks are being secured against possible sabotage, we must similarly increase the security of undersea optical highways," Walker said.

The cuts also underlined the threats that Internet disruptions could pose to organizations and businesses worldwide. Large-scale Internet disruptions are rare, but East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006.

"The economic cost of losing, or even just slowing down, international communications is extremely high," said Walker. "This risk has to be factored into the calculations behind the investment level and design of undersea optical networks."

FLAG said it has fully restored circuits to some customers and switched others to alternative routes.

State Telecom Egypt said it sealed a $125 million contract Jan. 31 with French-American telecommunications equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent, for a new 1,900-mile-long undersea cable between Egypt and France.

Named TE North, it will link Sidi Kerir on Egypt's northern coast to the French port of Marseilles.

It will have multiple times the bandwidth capacity of existing cables and enable Telecom Egypt to "expand international connectivity, providing diversity from existing cable routes." Egyptian media have said the new Telecom cable would take more than 18 months to complete.

Most-delayed airports

2008-02-06T09:37:00.000+04:00

If you're sitting on the tarmac, waiting for your plane to take off in Chicago or London or Asia, take heart. Things could be much worse. You could be in Brazil.

In our tallying of the world's most delayed airports, the flight hubs in that country appeared at or near the top of our lists for both late arrivals and departures. At Brasilia International Airport, the world's worst for on-time departures, slightly less than 27 percent of all flights took off within 15 minutes of their scheduled departure time in 2007, according to FlightStats, a service that tracks historical and real-time flight information.

In Pictures: The World's Most-Delayed Airports

At Sao Paolo's Guarulhos and Congonhas International Airports only 41 percent and 43 percent of all flights, respectively, left on time, making them the third and fourth worst cities for departures. (Rio de Janeiro's main airport has roughly the same miserable departure reliability, though it didn't meet our criteria because of its relatively small size.) Sao Paolo is also one of the worst places in the world for arrivals. Just 54 percent of the flights at Congonhas and 59 percent of the flights at Guarulhos arrived as scheduled last year.

Brazil, of course, isn't the only country with a poor track record for flight delays. At Beijing Capital International Airport, which is expanding in preparation for the summer Olympics later this year, just 33 percent of its flights took off on time in 2007, putting it just behind Brasilia on our list of worst departures. Egypt's Cairo International, Africa's second busiest airport behind Johannesburg, only saw 47 percent of its flights take off on time last year. The average wait: 43 minutes. And at sprawling Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris – the worst place in Europe to catch a timely flight – barely 50 percent of its commercial passenger planes left as scheduled.

Airport authorities typically use arrival times when tracking late flights, which are considered delayed if they reach their destination at least 15 minutes behind schedule. According to conventional wisdom, pilots can make up for lost time on the ground once they're in the air. But travelers find few things more frustrating than having to wait more than necessary at their gate or on the runway. So we've included departure delays in our rankings.

Of course we looked at arrivals as well. If you flew to Mumbai or Delhi last year, more often than not your plane did not arrive on time. The international airports in those cities were the world's worst for timely arrivals. Officials from the India delegation of the International Civil Aviation Organization say modernization efforts are underway at many of the country's major airports to keep pace with India's explosive economic growth.

In the U.S., New York City has become synonymous with delayed flights as commercial and corporate jets crowd limited airspace over the city. With just 58 percent of its flights arriving on time in 2007, LaGuardia airport beat out Newark International (slightly more than 58 percent arrived as scheduled) for the worst airport in the U.S. for arrivals. They round out the top five of the world's worst airports for delayed arrivals. Incidentally, John F. Kennedy International – New York's largest airport with 44 million passengers annually – was barely behind them, with more than 40 percent of its flights arriving late.

Robert Poole, founder of the Reason Foundation and a frequent adviser to the U.S. government on transportation issues, says that, in New York, airlines have caused the delay problem by substituting smaller planes for larger ones. At JFK, the number of planes with less than 100 seats has grown by 128 percent during the last 5 years.

"The best remedy for this is to make airlines pay a market price for using the runways," says Poole. To solve the problem, the Bush administration has proposed implementing "congestion pricing," where airlines would pay an additional fee if they schedule flights during peak hours. Predictably, airlines are very much against the idea. Stay tuned, as the fight will surely heat up in 2008.

A word about the methodology of our rankings: We considered only those international airports that served at least 10 million passengers in 2006, according to Airports Council International, a Geneva-based industry group for the world's airport operators. (Data for 2007 has not yet been released). For flight arrival and departure statistics, we relied primarily on information supplied by FlightStats, which has data for all of 2007. The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics and the Association of European Airlines have not yet released their flight punctuality statistics for the end of 2007, though we also examined what they do have on record for last year. Of the 100-plus airports we considered, those in European and American cities tended to have fairly mediocre records for on-time arrivals and departures.

Where are the least delayed airports in the world? Korea and Japan. Nearly 95 percent of commercial flights at Seoul's Gimpo International Airport arrived on time last year, making it the world's most efficient airport for arrivals. It was followed by Jeju International (94 percent on-time arrivals), the third largest airport in South Korea.

In Japan, Osaka Itami International airport had the most timely arrivals – just 8 percent of its flights didn't land on schedule in 2007. But the country had by far the best track record for on-time departures – six of its airports are in the top 10. Osaka Itami leads the pack, with 97% on-time departures in 2007; Tokyo's Haneda airport, which saw more than 66 million people pass through its terminals, was second best. Only 7 percent of the flights departed late there.

As policymakers try to figure out how to make flights more efficient in New York and other U.S. cities, seems like the obvious place to look for guidance is the Far East.

6 eats that ruin sleep

2008-02-05T12:57:00.000+04:00

At some point or another, it happens to everyone: You can't sleep. When you finally drop off, the alarm buzzes a microsecond later. Then you can't get up. And then it gets worse: When you finally drag yourself out of bed, you look like youknowhat.

Can't imagine why the sleep gods had it in for you? Think about what you ate the night before, says Elizabeth Somer, RD, author of The Food & Mood Cookbook. Any of the following--much less a combo platter--can leave your body on uneasy street for hours.

1. Spicy Foods Garlic, chilies, cayenne, and other intense spices are yummy going down but can keep you up with heartburn or indigestion. Avoid MSG too, as it can trigger dreams that are a bit too vivid.

2. A Big Dinner An overtaxed digestive system takes hours to settle down and there's nothing restful about that. When sleep's critical, make lunch your largest meal and enjoy a light 500-calorie dinner early in the evening.

3. Raucous Veggies Eat those good-for-you-but-gassy foods--beans, cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts--in the middle of the day. A tankful of gas can keep anyone up at night.

4. Speed Eating Relax and enjoy meals to avoid swallowing air, another common cause of midnight tummy trouble.

5. Nightcaps Alcohol may make you drowsy at first but later on it disturbs sleep patterns and leads to awakenings and restlessness. A 4-ounce glass of wine with dinner won't hurt, as long as it's not within two hours of bedtime.

6. Coffee after breakfast Caffeine can linger in your body for as long as 12 hours. So if you're often wide-eyed at bedtime, make sure you're caffeine-clean for at least 12 hours. (Skip tea, chocolate, cola, or other caffeine culprits too.) Still watching the clock at 2 a.m.? Wean yourself off even morning java, then stay caffeine-free for two weeks. If you definitely sleep better, you have your answer: Caffeine is not your friend. If the results are mixed, "Try adding back a cup or two of coffee or tea in the morning and watch what happens," says Somer. "But if sleeplessness comes back, cut it out."

Getting 6 to 8 hours of sleep a night doesn't just make your eyes bright, your skin happy, and your mind sharp, it can also make your RealAge as much as 3 years younger.

14 best free games

2008-02-03T09:53:00.001+04:00

Everybody likes to get something for nothing, and gamers are certainly no exception. Fortunately for you, we've taken it upon ourselves to sort the wheat from the chaff and present 14 of the best free web-based and downloadable games around, from the simple to the complex, the casual to the hardcore, and the high-budget to the bedroom-developed. There are only two things they all have in common: they're all free, and they're all awesome.

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RuneScape

Do you yearn to join the ten million players of World of Warcraft, but can't stomach the $15/month fees? Check out RuneScape instead. Just as complex and huge as Warcraft, RuneScape features both free and paid membership plans, so you can sink your teeth into its virtual world without expense. It also runs in your web browser, so there's no need for specialized gaming hardware, either.

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N

Second only to pirates in the hearts of game fans worldwide, ninjas are inarguably cool. The ninja star of N is just a few pixels tall, but thanks to a detailed physics system he's completely realistic. N's fiendish levels will have you bouncing all over the place as you try to snag the gold squares that (for some reason) litter N's world before you miss a jump and plummet to your death. It's so good, it's on its way to handhelds and Xbox Live Arcade as a full release later this year, but you can play it right now for nothing. You will die. Oh yes, you will die. But you'll like it.

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Desktop Tower Defense

You haven't lived until you've experienced the crippling compulsions of a fully-fledged Tower Defense addiction. Oddly, this desktop delight evolved from a Warcraft 3 map into a web-based tower-placing, creep-fighting game that's a cinch to learn and harder to quit than meth. No, we're not exaggerating. Like all good drugs, the first hit's free - but like no good drugs, all the other ones are, too.

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Psychonauts

Very likely one of the best Xbox games you've never played, the PC version of this 2005 classic is available for free through the GameTap service. It's a bizarre platform game where you delve into the depths of other characters' minds, attempting to fix their innumerable (and inevitably serious) psychological problems. It's designed by master craftsman Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Monkey Island), and absolutely drips with his trademark offbeat wit. Sounds odd? You should try playing it. And because it's free, there's no reason not to.

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Perfect Pizza

Can you make the perfect pizza? Find out with this addictive, quick-to-play hit. It's simple: just drop the toppings onto the pizza as accurately and as quickly as you can. Hit your targets and you'll be rewarded - fail, and you'll, well, fail. It's the perfect way to fill in a few spare minutes at work. Unless you work at a pizza joint, of course.

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Reflections

Sometimes, the best ideas are the simplest. Reflections will take you back to your physics class, but in a good way: it's a puzzle game featuring lasers, mirrors, and bulbs. All you have to do is arrange the mirrors so that the lasers light up all the bulbs. Sound easy? Ha! Try playing it first. If you're looking for something to get your brain working, Reflections is the perfect choice - and did we mention it's free?

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Rose & Camella

"The womanly battle begins!" You're a young woman who just married into a rich family only to have your new husband drop dead. Challenged for your right of inheritance, there's only one way to settle matters: a slap fight. That premise hides an elegant game of attack, evasion and counter-attack that would do a pro fencing match proud. With its mouse-driven gesture-based controls, it's more like playing a Wii or DS game than a browser-based one - you'll need serious dexterity to keep up with the higher difficulty levels.

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Dwarf Fortress

"Losing is fun," proclaims Dwarf Fortress, and is it ever right. Although it looks like someone vomited punctuation marks all over your monitor, and learning the game can take weeks, this indie-developed fortress management game is by far the most fun you can have with a dwarf. Once you've accidentally flooded your fortress with lava, cracked open the entrance to Hell, or had your entire dwarf population munched by a bloodthirsty carp, we're sure you'll agree. Take it from us: once a major publisher snaps this game up and releases it on the DS - and it's bound to happen - its developers will be millionaires.

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Nanaca Crash!

Sense is not a quality with which free web-based games are over-endowed. Nanaca Crash is perhaps the game which best exemplifies this fact. The object is to ensure a man, upon being struck by a speeding bicycle, is thrown as far as possible. Along the way you have to contend with bystanders, power-ups, special attacks, and music that steps beyond the irritating and into a brave new world of infuriating catchiness.

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Grand Theft Auto

Believe it or not, there actually were Grand Theft Auto games before number 3. Several of them. Here's the first, released by Rockstar as a free download. It's a 2D, top-down action game that, although it doesn't look much like the more recent 3D console extravaganzas, nevertheless bears many of the hallmarks of the series. Remember: call out Gouranga, and be happy!

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Orbiter

Admit it, you've always wanted to be an astronaut, you've just never got around to filling out the paperwork. No such effort is needed to play Orbiter, and neither do you need to pay an application fee - you just need to download this dauntingly realistic sim. Included are real craft like the shuttle Atlantis, the International Space Station, and the Hubble Space Telescope - everything you need to fly your own NASA missions. Except those cool arm patches. You're on your own with those.

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Fancy Pants Adventure

"Fancy" is right. This superb line-drawn platformer is probably the best presented of all the games on this list, from its painstakingly animated (and stylishly clad) hero to the laid-back, offbeat soundtrack. Maybe this is what Sonic the Hedgehog would have looked like if it had been developed in 2008.

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Portal: The Flash Version

Be honest: would you ever have thought you could recreate Valve's Game of 2007 contender in a web browser? This little masterpiece has it all: all the physics, all the portals, all those cute little cameras that follow you around. Yeah, it starts easy, especially if you've played the PC game, but it'll be kicking your butt before you know it. If you're stuck at work and jonesing for a Portal fix, look no further.

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Thule Trail

You remember playing Oregon Trail in school, right? Well, you probably do if you're above a "certain age." Thule Trail is a modern interpretation of the concept, but instead of settlers heading across the continent in a wagon, you're taking a Prius from Chicago to Atlantis for a music festival. Contend with passengers bickering over music, wrong turns, and cool retro sound effects - but just be sure to get there in time.

Ice cream cone pizza

2008-01-28T14:35:00.000+04:00

You see, Kornet Pizza makes pizza cones (pictured). And I've been dying to try one of these things since I first heard about them in April of 2004, when Kono Pizza first surfaced in Italy. Since then, they also appeared as a short-lived street-food fad in South Korea.

And now, my mom emails me, basically telling me that one of my white whales of pizza, one of my holy grails of food, had been just a 20-minute drive away at the mall—and likely was there the whole time I was in the KC metro area for Christmas.

Not only that, but the article that my mom referenced from the local paper said that this is the first U.S. branch of Kornet Pizza. Would you look at that—and in the very mall I used to rat around as a teen-ager.

All any of us non–Kansas City people can do is wait till Kornet Pizza franchises open in our neck of the woods.

50th Birthday of the LEGO Brick

2008-01-28T10:35:00.000+04:00

The 50th birthday of the LEGO brick is in January 2008 and there is plenty to celebrate. Children all over the world have played with LEGO bricks for the past 50 years, and LEGO is still right at the top of many wish lists – just as it always has been. Industry and trade associations also recognize the LEGO success. Just before the turn of the millennium the LEGO brick was voted “Toy of the Century”, one of the highest awards in the toy industry, by both Fortune Magazine in the US and the British Association of Toy Retailers.

The LEGO history began in 1932 in Denmark, when Ole Kirk Christansen founded a small factory for wooden toys in the unknown town of Billund in the south of the country. To find a name for his company he organized a competition among his employees. As fate would have it however, he himself came up with the best name: LEGO – a fusion of the Danish words “LEg” and “GOdt” (“play well”).

Barely 15 years later Christiansen discovered plastic as the ideal material for toy production, and bought the first injection moulding machine in Denmark. His courage, input and investment paid off: in 1949 he developed the LEGO brick prototype, which continues to excite countless children and adults to this very day. Over the years he perfected the brick, which is still the basis of the entire LEGO game and building system today. Of course there have been small adjustments in shape, colour and design from time to time, but today’s LEGO bricks still fit bricks from 1958.

Production of LEGO bricks with Acrylonitrile Butadine Styrene (ABS) began in 1963. This matt finish plastic is extremely hard, has a scratch and bite-resistant surface, and is ideal for keeping the bricks connected. LEGO labs regularly monitor the high quality of the ABS for the bricks.

LEGO bricks are produced in special plants in Denmark, the Czech Republic and Mexico. The ABS compound is not delivered in a liquid form, but rather as granules, which are heated to 232° C until they melt. Injection moulding machines weighing up to 150 tons then press the hot and “gooey” plastic mass into LEGO brick shapes. The shapes dry and harden and, voilà – you have the famous LEGO brick!

There are 2,400 different LEGO brick shapes, which are produced with the greatest of precision and subjected to constant controls. Each injection mould is permitted a tolerance of no more than one thousandth of a millimetre, so that bricks of every colour and size stay firmly connected, allowing LEGO fans to build entire cities from all kinds of LEGO elements.

LEGO bricks in boxes that are not sold are melted again and turned into new bricks, in accordance with waste prevention and environmental responsibility.

About the LEGO Group
The LEGO Group with its headquarters in Billund, Denmark, is the fifth largest toy manufacturer in the world in terms of sales. Besides traditional LEGO bricks, its portfolio comprises 25 additional product lines sold in more than 130 countries. Worldwide, the LEGO Group today has 4,500 employees. The name of the company, founded in 1932, is made up of the two Danish words “leg” and “godt”, meaning “play well”.

Explaining UFO sightings

2008-01-26T09:09:00.000+04:00

On an otherwise unremarkable January night in , dozens of people looked to the sky and saw a vast vessel with a combination of red, white and yellow lights flying fast over the area's farms. One observer said the vessel was a mile long. Several said they saw fighter jets chasing it. One said he feared the object's appearance might mean "the end of times."

A pilot, a cop and some businessmen, housewives, and children all say they saw a UFO on Jan. 8. The spaceship moved over the area for several seconds, witnesses said, and then zoomed away 300 times faster than a Cessna jet can travel.

UFO sightings make the news several times a year. In 2007 eight such episodes attracted headlines. Most sightings take place in the South and West.

UFO spotters endure endless jokes about their experiences. But even people who debunk the very notion of UFOs take them seriously. "No one should make fun" of Stephenville's UFO spotters, says Theodore Schick of Muhlenberg College, a liberal arts school in Allentown, Pa. They "had a real experience that's out of the ordinary." But Schick and experts in physics and human psychology say the experiences have scientific explanations. Scientists now probe the most microscopic aspects of the brain and the farthest reaches of the galaxy.

Evolution provides a good starting place for explaining why people have paranormal experiences.

For all but the last 10,000 years of human history, man survived by hunting and gathering plants. To interpret a mysterious world, man projected his own fears and understandings onto his environment. In the "enchanted" view of the world, every part of nature—rocks, trees, hills, water—was alive and filled with spirit. Even in the age of science, the human brain still projects ideas and images on the world. Next Page »

Travel well on a weak dollar

2008-01-23T09:26:00.001+04:00

Nashville, Tenn.-based Tim Leffel, author of "Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune," skipped London and Lisbon this summer, and instead, took his wife and daughter on a two -week trip to Guatemala. There, they stayed in a "gorgeous" hotel that featured a panoramic view of a volcanic lake for $60 a night. He estimates the cost of the entire trip, during which they visited Mayan ruins and colonial towns, and ate inexpensive but tasty meals, was $3,000.

"People don't think of [Guatemala] as a family destination," Leffel says, but, as in other Central and South American countries, "it's an easy trip, and the dollar is still strong."

There's little doubt the iconic museums and landmarks of Europe are a huge draw for Americans planning international vacations. But with the dollar worth significantly less than the euro, that trip to Paris or Barcelona can take a toll on one's bank account, diminishing buying power for everything from the price of crepes to admission to the Tate Modern to a room at the Four Seasons.

Still, a weak dollar and steep prices won't likely keep the 63 million Americans that travel abroad each year from doing so. For those who can't contain their wanderlust, but are watching their wallets, industry experts recommend choosing a destination where the dollar remains strong, considering packages or cruises where rates are set far in advance, and exploring unconventional locales. With proper planning, you can expect to be pleasantly surprised.

Choosing A Destination

One euro is worth roughly 1.50 U.S. dollars. However, in history-rich countries like Thailand, Morocco and Hungary, the local currency is worth substantially less than the dollar, allowing a savvy American tourist the opportunity to experience a new culture for a reasonable cost.

At the Oriental, a luxury hotel in Bangkok, a room with river views, a personal butler and daily fresh flowers is available in May via an Internet special for $269 a night, or about 7,990 Thai bahts. A similar room in London's Hyde Park Oriental is available during the same time period for about $1,330 per night. Though the food offered by local street vendors and small restaurants is renowned for its worldliness, a haute cuisine meal of duck egg confit, duo of lamb, French farmhouse cheeses and petits fours can be had in Bangkok for 1,050 baht, or $35. The strength of the dollar in a country like Thailand means a substantial savings in luxury accommodations and food unavailable in other high-traffic vacation spots.

Though considering exchange rates is a crucial part of stretching your dollar while on vacation, Henry Harteveldt, a travel-industry analyst for Forrester Research, warns against choosing a destination based on that factor alone. Instead, he recommends also comparing airfare prices through websites like kayak.com and contacting a travel agent who might be able to secure insider deals with hotels and airlines unavailable to the general public.

Value is also a highly important factor. Vacationing in a country where the dollar is strong but amenities and services are poor, attractions are lacking, or security and safety are an issue may save money, but will likely cause unnecessary stress.

For some, the best way to avoid this is to choose a cruise. Bob Whitley, president of the United States Tour Operators Association, says that's because "you know exactly what your vacation is going to cost." Since packages and cruises are negotiated in advance of the actual travel date, and are sometimes in dollars, they are immune to currency fluctuations. A good deal often includes the cost of food and accommodations in addition to travel.

New Sights And Cultures

Bargains can also be found off the beaten track. Tourists have become more adventurous, with river cruises along waterways like the Yangtze, Nile and the Rhine, which frequently encourage exploring villages along the way.

While European spots remain popular among travelers – a package to Italy has been the bestseller for the tour operator Globus since 2004 – the company has seen a trend toward vacationing in Central and South America. Their hottest sellers in this category include a trip to Machu Pichu and a cruise around the Galapagos Islands.

Though the weak dollar may prompt Americans to try alternatives like these, Harteveldt speculates the easy exchange of information and experiences across borders has also served to expand travelers' horizons.

"If you see [someone] ziplining across a rainforest or traipsing through China, it inspires you," he says, referring to reality television and cable programming. "More of the world is being opened up."

3 paths to a glamorous job

2008-01-16T17:53:00.001+04:00

Nine-to-five doesn't sound so bad when deciding on the fashion trend of the moment, filming MTV's next hit video, or writing the next must-read book. Here are glimpses of three people with glamour jobs and how they got there. They even offer advice on how you can get there, too.

Glamour Gig: Fashion Editor
Glamour Gal: Sasha Charnin Morrison, Us Weekly magazine

Morrison is no stranger to the pages of fashion magazines, as her stepmother was once the creative director at Vogue. But before Morrison started collecting her own credentials from the likes of Seventeen, Harper's Bazaar, and most recently, Allure, the New York City native wanted to be a singer, majoring in drama at New York University.

After graduation, however, Morrison says her practical side won out and she decided to pursue a job in magazines. Interestingly enough, she found her drama background prepped her for the competitiveness of the publishing industry. "It prepared me for learning how to speak to people, get over the fear of having a story idea rejected, and to do whatever I needed to get that story idea [approved]," she says.? "It gave me such a great spine and the tools necessary to handle what the industry throws at me."

Best Perk: You may be surprised to learn that a job within as an editor within the fashion industry doesn't involve a closet of free clothes. "You get the reward of knowing that [a vendor] sold 50,000 units of something after it appeared in our magazine," she admits. "To hear that the magazine has that kind of effect on people is mind-boggling."

Her Advice: "There are no Cliff's Notes on this," she cautions. "You really have to teach yourself, in addition to everything else you learn in school. The big jobs can come early, but the junior jobs are so important because you get a sense of the history of fashion."

Glamour Gig: Music Video Director
Glamour Guy: Julien Christian Lutz, a.k.a. "Little X"

Little X is the man behind the music videos you love, as evidenced by his two MTV Video Music Award wins for "Best Male Video" and "Best Dance Video" for Usher's song "Yeah." X also has directed videos for the likes of P. Diddy, 50 Cent, John Mayer, and Alicia Keys.

Originally from Toronto, X rose through the ranks by packing his bags for New York and work-work-working. "It's that 'immigrant hustle,'" he says. "I didn't know anybody, didn't have any friends or girls to distract me, so I had nothing to do but be in the office."

But it wasn't just hard work at his internship under the tutelage of Hype Williams that got X where he is today. It was the painstaking persistence he showed in vying for that internship. X sent a package to Hype comprised of amateur videos and a T-shirt line he created in high school. Then he called, and called, and called.

Best Perk: Traveling. "I've been to Africa, India, Japan, England, Los Angeles, Brazil, Mexico, and I'm based in New York," he says. "Shooting on location is always a leadership lesson. I'm a director and I need to set the tone."

His Advice: "Do as many internships as you can," he says. "Get on set, pick up a video camera, show it to everybody you know, and get your hustle on. No one's going to say, 'Hey, you look like a talented guy -- want a job?'"

Glamour Gig: Author
Glamour Gal: Karen Salmansohn (www.notsalmon.com)

Salmansohn took a big risk when she left her successful advertising career to write books. Pegged by critics as "Deepak Chopra meets Carrie Bradshaw," Salmansohn is the author of such tongue-in-cheek illustrated books as "How to Change Your Life By Doing Absolutely Nothing" and "How to Make Your Man Behave in 21 Days or Less Using the Secrets of Professional Dog Trainers." Her latest book is "The Bound Back Book: When Life Throws You Curveballs, Hit Them Out of the Park."

In what seems to be a recurring theme in Salmansohn's success story, her career jump-started when she got an unexpected lift. "I was working at MTV doing freelance writing for the filmettes that go on between videos," explains Salmansohn, who counts Jon Stewart, Madonna, Jay Leno, and Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Graydon Carter among her fan base. "This guy I barely knew got on the elevator with me, and he said, 'What's new?' and I said, 'I just finished my first novel.'" By the time Salmansohn arrived on the first floor, she had scored a book agent's name and number. "I always joke that if MTV had its offices on the third floor instead of the 24th, I might never have gotten a book deal."

Best Perk: A life of reading, writing, and no arithmetic. "I get to sit in cafes all day and drink coffee," says the Emerson College film studies grad. "Even if I went on 'Oprah' and became a million-dollar writer, I'd still be doing what I do today -- I'd just be doing it in more expensive clothes."

Her Advice: "Create a career pickup line," she says. "Know what you can say in 30 seconds to sell yourself quickly. It's all based on what your unique selling point is."

A language riddle

2008-01-14T16:09:00.000+04:00

I've always mused about this significant quandary!
Here are some of the provided words that are in the English Dictionary and no other words rhyme with them.
It is sometimes said that the words:

orange, purple, and silver are the only words which rhyme with no other words.

Non-rhyming English words of two syllables or fewer

almond

aspirin

bachelor

chaos

chimney

circus

different (whether pronounced as two- or three-syllable word)

film

hostage

javelin

justice (only rhymes with proper nouns)

laundry

luggage

monster

month

citrus

office

olive

orange (only rhymes with proper nouns)

pint

penguin

pizza

promise (only rhymes with proper nouns)

purple

shadow

silver

transfer

vacuum

Fats that make you skinny

2008-01-13T09:28:00.000+04:00

1. Coconut Oil
Why it makes you skinny:
Most oils, including corn and olive, are broken down into fatty acids that circulate through your body after you eat them, allowing hungry fat cells to suck them up and store them. Coconut oil, however, is rich in a type of fat rarely found in other foods, called medium-chain triglycerides (MCTs). "When you eat MCTs, they go straight to the liver instead of going directly into circulation. There, they're burned up like kindling for a fire," says Cherie Calbom, author of The Coconut Diet.

Plus, your body requires extra energy to digest MCTs. Including them can increase your daily burn by 45 calories, says Marie-Pierre St-Onge, Ph.D., assistant professor of nutrition at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

How to use it:
Spread coconut oil on toast instead of butter, melt it on veggies or use it for sautéing. But don't deep-fry with it; coconut oil breaks down at high temperatures. Look for virgin oil (nonvirgin is processed and tastes nasty) at health-food stores. Beware: Coconut oil is saturated and can raise cholesterol and triglycerides, so alternate it with other oils.

2. Enova
Why it makes you skinny:
Traditional fats contain three fatty acids, but Enova, an oil, has just two, so your body treats it differently. It's processed in much the same way as coconut oil, traveling directly to the liver, where it's burned off and used for energy.

When people on low-calorie diets consumed 15 percent of their daily calories from Enova (between three and eight teaspoons), they lost 1 percent more weight and nearly 3 percent more body fat than those who ate a similar amount of vegetable oil.

How to use it:
Enova's neutral taste makes it perfect for salad dressings. You can also bake and sauté with it, but don't use it for frying, says Kyle Shadix, R.D., of the Art Institute of New York City/New York Restaurant School, as it can change taste and color when overheated. One caveat: Enova is expensive — it costs about $6.65 for a 20-ounce bottle, compared to about $1.60 for the same size bottle of vegetable oil.

3. Nut Butters
Why they make you skinny:
Research has shown that people who eat nut butters often weigh less than those who shun them. It's likely that the combination of protein, fat and fiber keeps you full, so you'll eat less overall.

Whole nuts are effective, too: Purdue University researchers found that people who added peanuts to their diet for 19 weeks boosted the amount of calories they burned at rest by 11 percent. Why? The unsaturated fat in peanuts and nut butters burns faster than other fats.

How to use them:
Nut butters add flavor to Asian noodles, satays or dipping sauces, or you can use them as a spread for your morning muffin. Chunky varieties are better, since they have more fiber than creamy versions. But a little goes a long way, says New York-based nutritionist Bonnie Taub-Dix, R.D. "The ideal amount is one to two tablespoons, not the whole jar." Use natural versions that are free of added oils and hydrogenated fats.

When Good Fats Go Bad
All fats contain nine calories per gram. To get weight-loss benefits, you have to substitute these for fat that's already in your diet, not tack them onto what's on your plate.

6 ways to lower energy bills

2008-01-12T09:17:00.000+04:00

The Rocky Mountain Institute recently compiled energy usage information for the typical American household. We found more than 30 ways that most people can reduce the amount of energy they use at home -- without freezing in the dark.

Last week, my colleague shared with you nine no-cost ways to cut your home's energy consumption, reduce your carbon footprint, and save money.

That's good news this time of year as home heating costs soar and we start to pay off all our holiday credit card bills.

Here are six more easy ways to reduce your home energy use and pad your pocketbook. For the average homeowner, each of these actions should keep a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere for less than $20 (about the price of a high-quality carbon credit):

	CO₂ saved (lbs/year)	$ saved ($/year)	Cost of saved carbon ($/ton/CO₂)
Install a programmable thermostat	1,071	$58.10	$9.34
Seal large air leaks in your home	1,489	$80.76	$10.07
Insulate your water heater	263	$14.95	$12.66
Add insulation in your attic	2,142	$116.20	$15.56
Seal and insulate your HVAC ducts	1,512	$81.90	$17.64
Install efficient showerheads	370	$21.01	$18.02
Total saved per year:	6,847	$372.92

Remember that these calculations are based on the "average" American home. Since everybody's home is a little bit different, you may want to consider a more detailed energy audit before undertaking home improvements.

That way you can make sure you're choosing the steps that will save you the most money and have the deepest impact on your house's greenhouse gas emissions.

Man undergoes surgery for facial tumors

2008-01-11T05:01:00.000+04:00

Huang Chuncai rests before his second operation to remove his tumours, which currently weigh around 10kg (22lbs), at a hospital in Guangzhou, southern China's Guangdong province, January 5, 2008. Huang, a 32-year-old native from a remote village in China's southern province of Hunan, says he is relieved after a part of his facial tumours, which originally weighed about 23kg (50.7 lbs), was removed last year. His second operation will remove another part of the tumours, which weighs 4.5kg (9.9lbs). Huang suffers from Neurofibromatosis, which is a genetic disorder of the nervous system that primarily affects the development and growth of nerve tissues

Everest conqueror dies

2008-01-11T04:35:00.000+04:00

Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who conquered Mount Everest to win renown as one of the 20th century's greatest adventurers, has died, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark announced Friday. He was 88.

The gangling New Zealander devoted much of his life to aiding the mountain people of Nepal and took his fame in stride, preferring to be called "Ed" and considering himself just an ordinary beekeeper.

"Sir Ed described himself as an average New Zealander with modest abilities. In reality, he was a colossus. He was an heroic figure who not only 'knocked off' Everest but lived a life of determination, humility, and generosity," Clark said in a statement.

"The legendary mountaineer, adventurer, and philanthropist is the best-known New Zealander ever to have lived," she said.

Hillary's life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement — and by his personal humility. Humble to the point that he only admitted being the first man atop Everest long after the death of climbing companion Tenzing Norgay.

He had pride in his feats. Returning to base camp as the man who took the first step onto the top of the world's highest peak, he declared: "We knocked the bastard off."

The accomplishment as part of a British climbing expedition even added luster to the coronation of Britain's Queen Elizabeth II four days later, and she knighted Hillary as one of her first act.

But he was more proud of his decades-long campaign to set up schools and health clinics in Nepal, the homeland of Tenzing Norgay, the mountain guide with whom he stood arm in arm on the summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.

He wrote of the pair's final steps to the top of the world: "Another few weary steps and there was nothing above us but the sky. There was no false cornice, no final pinnacle. We were standing together on the summit. There was enough space for about six people. We had conquered Everest.

"Awe, wonder, humility, pride, exaltation — these surely ought to be the confused emotions of the first men to stand on the highest peak on Earth, after so many others had failed," Hillary noted.

"But my dominant reactions were relief and surprise. Relief because the long grind was over and the unattainable had been attained. And surprise, because it had happened to me, old Ed Hillary, the beekeeper, once the star pupil of the Tuakau District School, but no great shakes at Auckland Grammar (high school) and a no-hoper at university, first to the top of Everest. I just didn't believe it.

He said: "I removed my oxygen mask to take some pictures. It wasn't enough just to get to the top. We had to get back with the evidence. Fifteen minutes later we began the descent."

His philosophy of life was simple: "Adventuring can be for the ordinary person with ordinary qualities, such as I regard myself," he said in a 1975 interview after writing his autobiography, "Nothing Venture, Nothing Win."

Close friends described him as having unbounded enthusiasm for both life and adventure.

"We all have dreams — but Ed has dreams, then he's got this incredible drive, and goes ahead and does it," long-time friend Jim Wilson said in 1993.

Hillary summarized it for schoolchildren in 1998, when he said one didn't have to be a genius to do well in life.

"I think it all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it," he said before planting some endangered Himalayan oaks in the school grounds.

The planting was part of his program to reforest upland areas of Nepal.

Hillary remains the only non-political person outside Britain honored as a member of the Britain's Order of the Garter, bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II on just 24 knights and ladies living worldwide at any time.

He reached the summit of Everest four days before Elizabeth was crowned Queen of Britain and the Empire on June 2, 1953. She immediately knighted the angular, self-deprecating Hillary, who was just 33.

Throughout his 88 years, he was always the atypical "typical New Zealander" who spoke his mind.

In his 1999 book "View from the Summit," Hillary finally broke his long public silence about whether it was he or Norgay who was the first man to step atop Everest.

"We drew closer together as Tenzing brought in the slack on the rope. I continued cutting a line of steps upwards. Next moment I had moved onto a flattish exposed area of snow with nothing by space in every direction," Hillary wrote.

"Tenzing quickly joined me and we looked round in wonder. To our immense satisfaction we realized with had reached the top of the world."

Before Norgay's death in 1986, Hillary consistently refused to confirm he was first, saying he and the Sherpa had climbed as a team to the top. It was a measure of his personal modesty, and of his commitment to his colleagues.

He later recalled his surprise at the huge international interest in their feat. "I was a bit taken aback to tell you the truth. I was absolutely astonished that everyone should be so interested in us just climbing a mountain."

Hillary never forgot the small mountainous country that propelled him to worldwide fame. He revisited Nepal constantly over the next 54 years.

Without fanfare and without compensation, Hillary spend decades pouring energy and resources from his own fund-raising efforts into Nepal through the Himalayan Trust he founded in 1962.

Known as "burra sahib" — "big man," for his 6 feet 2 inches — by the Nepalese, Hillary funded and helped build hospitals, health clinics, airfields and schools.

He raised funds for higher education for Sherpa families, and helped set up reforestation programs in the impoverished country. About $250,000 a year was raised by the charity for projects in Nepal.

A strong conservationist, he demanded that international mountaineers clean up thousands of tons of discarded oxygen bottles, food containers and other climbing debris that litter the lower slopes of Everest.

His commitment to Nepal took him back more than 120 times. His adventurer son Peter has described his father's humanitarian work there as "his duty" to those who had helped him.

It was on a visit to Nepal that his first wife, Louise, 43, and 16-year-old daughter Belinda died in a light plane crash March 31, 1975.

Hillary remarried in 1990, to June Mulgrew, former wife of adventurer colleague and close friend Peter Mulgrew, who died in a passenger plane crash in the Antarctic. He is survived by his wife and children Peter and Sarah.

His passport described Hillary as an "author-lecturer," and by age 40 his schedule of lecturing and writing meant he had to give up beekeeping "because I was too busy."

By that time he was touring, lecturing and fund-raising for the Himalayan Trust in the United States and Europe for three months at a time, speaking at more than 100 venues during a tour.

He was known as ready to take risks to achieve his goals, but always had control so that nobody ever died on a Hillary-led expedition.

He was at times controversial. He decried what he considered a lack of "honest-to-God morality" in New Zealand politics in the 1960s, and he refused to backtrack when the prime minister demanded he withdraw the comments. Ordinary New Zealanders applauded his integrity.

He got into hot water over what became known as his "dash to the Pole" in the 1957-58 Antarctic summer season aboard modified farm tractors while part of a joint British-New Zealand expedition.

Hillary disregarded instructions from the Briton leading the expedition and guided his tractor team up the then-untraversed Shelton Glacier, pioneering a new route to the polar plateau and the South Pole.

In 2006 he climbed into a row over the death of Everest climber David Sharp, stating it was "horrifying" that climbers could leave a dying man after an expedition left the Briton to die high on the upper slopes.

Hillary said he would have abandoned his own pioneering 1953 climb to save another life.

"It was wrong if there was a man suffering altitude problems and was huddled under a rock, just to lift your hat, say 'good morning' and pass on by," he said. "Human life is far more important than just getting to the top of a mountain."

Named New Zealand's ambassador to India in the mid-1980s, Hillary was the celebrity of the New Delhi cocktail circuit. He later said he found the job confining.

He introduced jetboats to many Ganges River dwellers a decade earlier, in 1977, when his "Ocean to the Sky" expedition traveled the Ganges by jetboat to within 130 miles of its source.

The last segment was by foot, and two mountain peaks near Badranath, where the Ganges rises, were also climbed. He sought adventure in places as distant from each other as the Arctic and Antarctic.

Hillary didn't place himself among top mountaineers. "I don't regard myself as a cracking good climber. I'm just strong in the back. I have a lot of enthusiasm and I'm good on ice," he said.

Despite his fame, he spoke of being "really embarrassed" even when introduced at a lecture.

"I really am an ordinary person with a few abilities which I've tried to use in the best way I can," he said.

The first living New Zealander to be featured on a banknote, he helped raise nearly $530,000 for the Himalayan Trust by signing 1,000 of the sparkling new five-dollar bills sold at a charity auction in 1982. They were snapped up by collectors round the world.

Honored by the United Nations as one of its Global 500 conservationists in 1987, he was also awarded numerous honorary doctorates from universities in several parts of the world.

One of his accolades was the Smithsonian Institution's James Smithson Bicentennial Medal for his "monumental explorations and humanitarian achievements," awarded in 1998.

Throughout his life Hillary remembered his first mountain he climbed, the 9,645-foot Mount Tapuaenuku — "Tappy" as he called it — in Marlborough on New Zealand's South Island. He scaled it solo over three days in 1944, while in training camp with the Royal New Zealand Air Force during World War II. "Tapuaenuku" in Maori means "footsteps of the Rainbow God".

"I'd climbed a decent mountain at last," he said later.

Like all good mountaineers before him, Hillary had no special insight into that quintessential question: Why climb?

"I can't give you any fresh answers to why a man climbs mountains. The majority still go just to climb them."

3 signs of a miserable job

2008-01-10T21:00:00.000+04:00

"Awful," "dreary," and "miserable" are adjectives that many people use to describe their jobs at one time or another. Dissatisfaction on the job is common and often temporary. But not many people take time to analyze what makes a job miserable, and how to fix it.

Fortunately Patrick Lencioni has done much of that work in his book "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job."

Job Misery Is Universal

The author notes that a "miserable" job differs from a "bad" job, as one person's dream job may not appeal to another worker. A miserable job, however, has some universal traits.

"A miserable job makes a person cynical and frustrated and demoralized when they go home at night," Lencioni says. "It drains them of their energy, their enthusiasm, and self-esteem. Miserable jobs can be found in every industry and at every level."

Lencioni blames much of the problem on managers, who are a key factor in the job satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) of their employees. A recent Yahoo! HotJobs survey points to a similar conclusion: 43% of workers said discontent with their boss was the main reason they planned to look for a new job in 2008.

The Three Signs

Lencioni identifies the three signs of job misery as anonymity, irrelevance, and "immeasurement."

Anonymity: Employees feel anonymous when their manager has little interest in them as people with unique lives, aspirations, and interests.

Irrelevance: This condition occurs when workers cannot see how their job makes a difference. "Every employee needs to know that the work they do impacts someone's life -- a customer, a coworker, even a supervisor -- in one way or another."

Immeasurement: This term describes the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contributions or success. As a result they often rely on the opinions of others -- usually the manager -- to measure their success.

Three Remedies for Job Misery

For workers who may be experiencing the signs of job misery, Lencioni recommends three steps to improve the boss-employee dynamic and enhance job satisfaction.

1. Assess your manager. Is the boss interested in and capable of addressing the three factors mentioned above? "Most managers really do want to improve, in spite of the fact that they may seem disinterested or too busy," Lencioni says.

2. Help your manager understand what you need. This could mean reviewing with your manager what the key measurements for success are for your job. Lencioni also suggests asking your boss, "Can you help me understand why this work I'm doing makes a difference to someone?"

3. Act more like the manager you want. "Employees who take a greater interest in the lives of their managers are bound to infect them with the same kind of human interest they seek," the author says. Or find ways to let your manager know how his or her performance makes a positive difference for you.

Be Realistic

Richard Phillips, founder of Career Advantage Solutions, agrees that "managing up" is a good way to improve job satisfaction, but he cautions employees to be realistic in their expectations.

"Managers are not mind readers," he says. "Take the responsibility to communicate upon yourself, and remember there has to be an ongoing dialogue, or change is unlikely to happen."

Where to go in 2008

2008-01-09T08:49:00.000+04:00

Choosing the world’s next big travel destinations is never an easy feat, especially when there’s seemingly so little left of the globe to discover. But when our editors got into a room to hash out our top picks for 2008, we realized that we could have done a Top 13 this year, as all eyes will be on Beijing (when it hosts the Summer Olympic Games), and there’s never been a better time to visit Quebec City, (which celebrates its 400th birthday in 2008) or Liverpool (the year’s European Capital of Culture). In the end, the ten destinations that rank among our Top 10 Places to Go in 2008 include renascent cities like New Orleans and emerging countries like Bhutan that are fast becoming the world’s next travel hotspots. Get there now, before the crowds do . . . in 2009.

1. Bhutan

Cradled by the majestic Himalayas in a remote corner of Southern Asia, the “Land of the Thunder Dragon” has long held steadfast to its rich culture and Buddhist heritage. Though an isolated locale and high tourist entry tariffs (of up to $200 per person per night) keep crowds at bay, these factors have also permitted this last Shangri-La to keep its traditions intact. And, while the Kingdom of Bhutan is charging ahead into the 21st century (thanks largely to the advent of hydroelectric power), they consider happiness a better gauge of accomplishment, with a nationwide poll in 2002 reporting only 3% of the population feeling down. If the lush valleys and snowcapped mountains, ancient temples and monasteries, and expansive markets full of cheerful locals haven’t lured you to Bhutan yet, reconsider in 2008, when the 101st anniversary of the country’s monarchy will be commemorated by a year-long celebration.

2. Greenland

Though Greenland promoters prefer to avoid using the term “catastrophe tourism” to describe its surging popularity, new weekly flights from Baltimore (late-June through early August in 2008) have indeed made this Danish province the most accessible place to bear first-hand witness to the inconvenient truths of climate change. The five-hour flight lands in Kangerlussuaq, a jumping off point for musk oxen safaris, cultural tours of Inuit settlements, and day trips to the foot of a melting 250-foot high polar icecap. While endangered polar bears are rarely sighted these days, the midnight sun practically guarantees encounters with reindeer, seals, and the narwhal whale, with its nine-foot horn. Fauna-sightings notwithstanding, it's the Arctic island's Ilulissat ice fjord, which has retreated six miles in just a few years, and Warming Island, which is thought to have been part of mainland Greenland until the connecting ice thawed, that tend to leave visitors dumbstruck.

3. Lisbon

The cheapest capital in Western Europe (according to the 2007 Mercer Consulting survey) is worth a visit not only for its affordability – a huge plus when considering the anemic exchange rate of the U.S. dollar against the Euro these days – but for its dramatic hillside villages, fashionable cobblestone enclaves, and innovative cuisine. No longer just a stopover on the road to Porto, the capital of Portugal is fast becoming Europe’s next “it” city, which means crowds and inflated prices are bound to follow. Visit in 2008 before the buzz signals the hordes, and bask in the medieval streets of the Amalfa district, hip boutiques of the Bairro Alto, and trendy waterfront restaurants in the Docas area (where John Malkovich co-owns a trendy sushi joint). It may be the last year you'll enjoy any solitude in the peak summer season.

4. Mozambique

Safely removed from decades of civil war, Mozambique is poised to become Africa’s next big tourist destination. The country’s recent economic success is finally permitting its natural assets – 1,500 miles of unspoiled tropical shoreline, clear blue seas, and pristine reef-fringed archipelagos – to shine. Upscale, eco-friendly properties like Azura at Gabriel’s (azura-retreats.com) are opening along the Bazaruto and Quirimbas archipelagos, the government is pouring money into restoring the million-acre Gorongosa National Park, and tour operators are organizing diving excursions to introduce visitors to the area’s endangered sea cows, whale sharks, and Staghorn coral. It’s been a long haul for this former Portuguese colony, but there’s no question that the nation is a rising star in the travel world. Go now before the masses descend.

5. New Orleans

Many have already returned to New Orleans since Katrina, but recent events give every indication that 2008 is poised to be the best year the city has seen since the hurricane. Combine a rebuilding boom with powerhouse couple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie moving in to the French Quarter and a revitalized Canal Street beckoning musicians and ramblers back to its pretty riverside promenade, and you've got the makings of a fully revitalized city. Plus, with the some of the nation’s most-beloved festivals getting underway in the first part of the year (Mardi Gras in February and Jazz Fest in late April–early May) it’s easy to make the Big Easy a must this year to listen to the best live music around, sample superb Creole cuisine, embrance the fun-loving local attitude, and herald the rebirth of one of the country’s most storied and fascinating cities.

Biggest TV unveiled

2008-01-08T10:37:00.000+04:00

It's the elephant in the living room: Panasonic's 150-inch plasma has all but stolen the show here at CES 2008. When people ask you "What's the coolest thing you've seen at the show so far?" they invariably follow that up with "Except for the 150-inch TV."

And sure enough, the thing is a marvel to behold. It's so big, it's hard to take it in, really. With a viewing area that measures 11 feet by 6 1/4 feet and 8.84 million pixels of resolution, the TV (which has no model number and no date for being commercialized) is regularly thronged by crowds of slack-jawed onlookers, unable to comprehend the thing.

It's so big that all the other flat-panel companies have simply removed signage that might indicate how big (er, small) their sets are in comparison. There are obviously some big sets here from Pioneer, LG, and Sharp, but exactly how big their biggest sets are remains a mystery. Next year I will have to bring a tape measure.

Still don't think it's big? After all, maybe that woman is incredibly short, right? Wrong. Here's a picture of it next to last-year's largest, the 103-inch plasma:

With the war on screen size all but lost for 2008, a more interesting one is shaping up on thickness, with vendors battling to see just how thin they can make their displays. Virtually every vendor is offering a screen (LCD or plasma) less than 2 inches thick. LG's is 1.7 inches thick. Hitachi's plasma is 1.5 inches and its LCD is just 0.75 inch. Sharp also has a 0.8-inch-thick LCD (52 inches diagonally, too). But it's Pioneer's 0.35-inch plasma that takes the weight loss crown, even if it is a prototype.

Other TV trends continue apace: A big one is OLED, which both Sony and Samsung are moving forward impressively. Side by side, Samsung's technology demo of OLED vs. LCD is striking; the difference in color and brightness is astonishing. Meanwhile, Sony was demonstrating a 27-inch OLED set, too. (In related news, you'll finally be able to buy the 11-inch OLED here in the United States, for just $2,500.)

Also emerging: Wireless HD. While I'm not sold on the need for this technology, more and more products keep showing up with it. Will we replace HDMI cables with wireless connections? Your sense of tidiness is probably salivating over the prospect already.

Seven simple dinners

2008-01-08T01:28:00.000+04:00

Monday Cowboy Tacos
Tuesday Chicken N Biscuits
Wednesday Low-Fat Fettuccine Carbonara
Thursday Chicken-Chile Stromboli
Friday Linguine with Ratatouille Sauce
Saturday Shrimp Chili Cornbread Casserole
Sunday Tortilla Soup

How to jump-start your day

2008-01-08T00:04:00.000+04:00

Low energy really puts a drag on your day, keeping you from enjoying your daily activities. The causes of low energy are numerous, but it usually points to the stress of living in this modern world.

Coping with stressful situations requires a lot of energy, leaving the average person drained and even depressed. Discover six amazing ways you can restore your energy below.

1. Energize with a Blockbuster Breakfast
We have all heard that "you are what you eat," but it's also true that you are when you eat. The human body follows a circadian rhythm, and because of this, the same foods eaten at breakfast and lunch are assimilated differently than when they are eaten later. Start the day right with a breakfast that gives you the energy you need to function strong all day long.

Studies have shown that when you eat your daily protein and fat at breakfast, you tend to lose weight and have more energy; conversely, eating the same things at dinner increases your tendency toward weight gain, increased blood pressure, and heart disease.

2. Sustainable Energy with Snacks
Most people eat too many foods that supply a rapid burst of energy in the form of simple carbohydrates and sugars - which burn out fast, leaving us depleted - rather than foods with a more sustainable energy content.

Eat a snack at mid-morning and another one at mid-afternoon. Good ones to choose are nuts, seeds, fruits, or protein-rich foods like hummus made from beans; these will help you sustain your energy and prevent low blood sugar from setting in. Make your own trail mix with almonds, pine nuts, walnuts, dried cranberry, raisins, or any other combination.

3. Ginseng Restores Failing Energy
The most famous of energy tonics, Panax ginseng has been prized and used for 5,000 years in Asian medical traditions. Ginseng's popular uses include increasing physical and mental endurance, decreasing fatigue, and gently boosting energy. Unlike coffee, which stimulates the central nervous system, ginseng elevates energy gently. People taking ginseng often report overall improvement in wellbeing. Available as powder, capsule, and tea, you can find ginseng in your local health food store.

4. Flush Out Toxins
One cause of low energy is a buildup of toxins in the system. Water is very important in properly flushing the system and hydrating the cells to prevent buildup of toxic waste products. Drink at least eight glasses of water per day at room temperature. Better yet, drink teas made with herbs such as peppermint, chrysanthemum, and dandelion that gently cleanse your body.

5. Proper Posture Promotes Energizing
Your mother was looking out for your health when she told you to stop slouching. Slouching not only makes you look older than you are, it also leads to a huge drop in energy by decreasing your oxygen intake. When you compress the diaphragm and ribs, full respiration cannot take place and the blood flow is slowed to your brain and extremities. To get proper posture, pull your chin inward and pretend there is a string pulling straight up from the top of your head.

6. Raise Your Energy with Exercise
Getting enough exercise is crucial to maintaining a high energy level. Exercise helps us deal with daily stresses; without it, the body is rapidly depleted of vital energy. There are many opportunities throughout your day to be active. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Park a few blocks away from your destination. Walk briskly, run, or ride your bike instead of driving. Sweep the floor with a broom instead of a vacuum. Cut your lawn with a manual mower. Take a break from sitting to stretch or do a set of squats.

To really jumpstart your energy, try this: Jump rope for five minutes every hour throughout the day and drink a glass of water afterward. This will increase your circulation, get more oxygen in your body, and remove toxins from your body.

I hope that this article helps you maintain your vitality! I invite you to visit often and share your own personal health and longevity tips with me.

May you live long, live strong, and live happy!

Famous ship's final voyage

2008-01-07T23:57:00.000+04:00

One of the world's most famous cruise ships -- the Queen Elizabeth 2 -- set sail Sunday on its final global voyage before being turned into a floating hotel, British media reported.

The vessel left with a fireworks send-off from the southern English port city of Southampton for her last winter trip, the domestic Press Association news agency said.

Her sister ship, the recently-named Queen Victoria, set off on her first world cruise at the same time. Both ships will travel in tandem across the north Atlantic Ocean to New York.

US cruise operator Carnival sold the QE2 for about 50 million pounds (67 million euros, 99 million dollars) in November last year to Istithmar, the investment arm of state-owned tourism company Dubai World.

On return from her final world cruise in April, she will be refurbished and turned into a five-star hotel at a specially-constructed pier on the world's largest man-made island, The Palm Jumeirah.

Launched by her namesake in September 1967, the QE2 is previous owner Cunard's longest-serving ship. The 963-feet (294-metre) long ship weighs 70,000 tonnes and can carry up to 1,778 passengers and more than 1,000 crew.

She has travelled 5.5 million nautical miles -- the equivalent of travelling to the moon and back 13 times -- undertaken 25 world cruises, crossed the Atlantic more than 800 times, and carried more than two million passengers.

The most attractive voice

2008-01-07T23:52:00.001+04:00

Anthropologist Coren Apicella wanted to learn the role a person's voice plays in his or her attractiveness to potential mates.

Last summer, she flew halfway around the world with a tape recorder to study the Hadza people of Tanzania.

Listen Now

In the first phase of her research, Apicella invited a group of Hadza men into her Land Rover and recorded them saying "hello" in Swahili. Then she played some of the voices for a group of Hadza women, asking them which they preferred.

Apicella found the women preferred the men with the lower voices.

And that paralleled another of her findings. The Hadza men with deeper voices also had more children than their squeaky counterparts. But she says voice alone probably doesn't explain that.

"Why there's this relationship, we're not entirely sure yet," Apicella said. "It could be that these men have greater access to mates. Maybe these men that have deeper voices have higher levels of testosterone. Or maybe they're better hunters and they're able to bring more food home to their wives."

And what did Hadza men prefer in a voice? It turns out they found the women with higher pitch most attractive.

But surprisingly, the men said those same women wouldn't necessarily be the best food gatherers.

"We found that the men actually thought the women with the lower-pitched voice or the deeper voices were the better gatherers," Apicella said.

Still, psychologist Susan Hughes says this research suggests you can tell a great deal about a potential mate just from his or her voice.

"I think this study does speak to the fact that voices are signaling some biologically relevant information to potential mates," Hughes said — information like fertility or the ability to put food on the table.

But Hughes, a professor at Albright College in Pennsylvania, says it's unclear if men and women in all cultures would share the preferences of the Hadza.

Time to dump your job?

2008-01-07T14:06:00.000+04:00

We've all been there. Sunday night rolls around and suddenly we're covered with hives. Or we find ourselves frantically searching WebMD for some exotic new disease to call in sick with the next morning.

Such suffering doesn't necessarily mean you should dust off your resume and start looking for greener pastures. Some workplace woes are fixable. The trick is knowing which ones are changeable -- and how to mend them.

The Magic is Gone

So you've been at your job a couple years and now you're bored. Or frustrated. Or disgruntled. Sound familiar? It's possible you've just fallen into the age-old workplace habit of griping for griping's sake, says Cynthia Shapiro, author of "Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know -- And What to Do About Them."

Instead of complaining, Shapiro advises, try to tap into what you originally appreciated about your gig and company. If you come up empty, take a long, hard look at your job: Has it changed for the worse since you started? Has the company? Have you changed, perhaps outgrowing the work? If the answer's yes to any of these, it's indeed time fly like the wind.

"I Hate My Boss" Syndrome

Sure, a lot of bosses are crummy managers, but many are manageable. "If your boss looks like he's terrible, it's probably just that you're terrible at managing up," says Penelope Trunk, author of "Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success."

The solution, says Trunk, is to tell your boss what you need to succeed in your job -- be it more lead time on deadlines or more backup when the workload is piled sky high. But remember, it's not all about you. It's about supporting your boss and doing a bang-up job so that she impresses her superiors. Keep your boss happy, and you hold the keys to the kingdom.

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"I Think My Boss Hates Me" Syndrome

But what if you are doing a heckuva job, only to be snubbed when your boss hands out the plum projects, pay raises, and promotions? Maybe you're constantly getting the difficult clients dumped in your lap. Or you just received a poor performance review, seemingly out of the blue.

If no matter how hard you shine, you're ignored or sidelined by management, it's time to wake up and smell the pink slip. "That is not just job ennui," says Shapiro. "That is danger -- you're in the exit lane." And while it may be tempting to sulk, your focus should be on looking for a new employer. Pronto.

The Titanic Is Sinking

When the company's in trouble, your job is, too. If you haven't been paid in three weeks or the CEO is starting to blog about how the company is willing to do anything to boost profitability (translation: layoffs ahead), make like the Lutz family in "The Amityville Horror" and get out now.

Your Health Is Failing

"If you tell someone you're in an abusive relationship with a guy and he's making you physically ill, they're like, 'Get out, get out,'" says Trunk. "But, if you tell them your job's making you sick, they say, 'I know, I hate my job, too.'"

As Trunk implies, we're freakishly loyal to jobs that beat us down. Either that, or we're utterly complacent. But it's a safe bet that there's no rule in your employee handbook saying you have to put up with work-related migraines, insomnia, and ulcers. If Sunday night dread is costing you a small fortune in doctor's visits and prescription drugs, it's high time you got out of Dodge.

Quick Tips for Jumping Ship

1. Look into a department transfer. Sometimes a change of scenery or job duties within a company is all you need to feel the love again.

2. Before you quit, line up a new gig. When it comes to negotiating salary, employed people have more bargaining power, says Shapiro. A candidate in search of his next paycheck is likelier to accept a lower wage, and hiring managers know this.

3. If you think your job is on the line, start interviewing ASAP. You can't lose here. Either you get a new gig, your boss wishes you well, and you part ways (proof your job was in jeopardy, says Shapiro). Or you resign, and your boss offers you a raise and promotion so that you'll stick around.

Surviving a breakup

2008-01-07T13:52:00.000+04:00

Given the choice, most people say they would much rather break up with someone than get broken up with. But if you've recently initiated a breakup, you know how tough it can be.

Just because you summoned the courage to end your dead-end relationship doesn't mean you're not feeling a little heartache yourself (or experiencing some guilt for causing your ex heartache). But fear not, my brave friend. You are not alone. Following are some do's and don'ts that should make moving on that much easier.

Don't: Call, email, text or visit your ex in a moment of weakness

Even though you brought on the breakup, there may still be times when you miss your ex.

Even though you brought on the breakup, there may still be times when you miss your ex. A song might come on the radio that reminds you of them. Something funny will happen and you'll want to share it. Or maybe you're just having a bad day and want to reach out and reconnect.

STOP RIGHT THERE. Missing your ex is one thing. Contacting your ex is a no-no. In fact, reconnecting with your ex is the absolute worst thing you can do right now. So before you have that moment of weakness, remove your ex's number from your cell phone, delete their email address, and take them off your social networking contacts. (Right now.)

Do: Ask friends for help

Because you initiated the breakup, your friends may not know that you're hurting. But if you are, it's important to ask for help, a.k.a. recruit your Boo-Hoo Crew. You'll want to choose a least three friends who know you well enough to know when you need comfort versus when you need a kick in the pants.

Your Boo-Hoo Crew should always know (and be able to remind you) why your ex wasn't good for you

Your Boo-Hoo Crew should always know (and be able to remind you) why your ex wasn't good for you then, and why they're definitely not worth pining over now.

Don't: Second-guess your decision

After a breakup, it's all too easy to second-guess yourself and your choices. Did I do the right thing? Should I have given him/her another chance? Maybe there was more I could do to make it work... The truth is, you can make yourself crazy second-guessing your decision. But what's done is done. You had your reasons, made your decision, and now it's time to accept and move on.

Do: See your breakup for what it really is

You may not know it right now, but in ending your relationship with the wrong person, you're paving the way to meet the right one. Chances are good that you won't meet Mr. or Ms. Right overnight, but that doesn't mean the breakup was a bad decision.

By walking away from that wrong relationship, you're headed towards a life that's more honest and authentic for you.

By walking away from that wrong relationship, you're headed towards a life that's more honest and authentic for you. What better way to eventually attract your perfect partner than by living and loving your own life?

Don't: Badmouth your ex

In the aftermath of a breakup it's all too easy to badmouth your ex, spilling their dirty little secrets to anyone who will listen. Don't do it. Badmouthing your ex may feel good momentarily, but the fallout from those harmless snarky comments can be detrimental to your healing process, not to mention your dating future. Breakup karma is a bitch you don't want coming after you, so zip the lip and move on with dignity.

Do: Become a breakup rock star

And speaking of moving on, did you know that you can not only survive your breakup but actually thrive? By applying the lessons you learned from your last relationship, and refining what you want out of life and eventually from your perfect partner, you have the chance to reclaim yourself and become the ultimate breakup rock star. So go ahead, rock on!

Next-generation cell phones?

2008-01-06T10:27:00.000+04:00

Back in the day, the big players in the cell phone arena held their fire until spring, when the curtain rises on the bi-annual CTIA wireless conference. Lately however, a little electronics show in Vegas—the eight-headed beast known as Consumer Electronics Show—has stolen CTIA's thunder. Here's a sneak preview of what to expect come January, including buzz of a touch-screen (maybe) BlackBerry, a possible new slider from Helio, and more.

CES 2007 served as the launching pad for several hot new phones (remember the mobile TV handsets from LG and Samsung?), and I'm expecting more of the same for the 2008 edition. The big phone manufacturers have been tight-lipped about their CES lineups, but a few interesting rumors have bubbled up to the surface.

Touch-screen BlackBerry?

One of the most intriguing is word, courtesy of The Boy Genius Report, of a new BlackBerry: the 9000 (or the 9000 series, to be exact), which is rumored to come with a speedy Intel XScale processor, HSDPA access (which would make it the first BlackBerry capable of running on 3.5G GSM networks), Wi-Fi, GPS, a full gigabyte of onboard memory, a 3.2-megapixel camera, and a jumbo 480-by-320-pixel screen. Pretty nice, but here's the hottest morsel about the 9000: It might be the first BlackBerry to chuck the keypad for a full-on touch screen. That said, I'm hearing conflicting reports about whether the 9000 actually ditches the physical keypad, so don't get your hopes up.

Here's another interesting rumor that might see daylight at CES: A new line of Motorola phones—and no, I'm not talking the RAZR3. Word has it that Moto may soon unveil the ZiNE: a new series of touch-screen multimedia handsets with Wi-Fi, GPS, and eight-megapixel cameras. Gizmodo reports that Motorola has gone so far as to file a trademark for the "ZiNE" name, so there is a bit of substance behind the buzz. Will the supposed ZiNE phones arrive in time for CES? We'll have to wait and see.

Rumored Helio "Mysto" might materialize

Helio's been known to make waves at CES, and it may do so again with the rumored Mysto. CrunchGear got its hands on spy shots of the alleged, Samsung-made slider, which I'm guessing will boast features such as Helio's cool, GPS-aided Buddy Beacon, plus streaming audio, music downloads, and 3G access. The Mysto rumors have been percolating for a couple of months now, so the phone may be ripe for a CES debut.

In addition to new handsets, CES will be buzzing with talk of three big stories that, taken together, could fundamentally change the wireless business in the United States: specifically, Google's proposed open-source Android platform (and the prospect of Android-powered phones in mid-2008), Verizon's just-announced pledge to open its network to third-party handsets and applications (which may—or may not—lead to more phone and app choices for Verizon subscribers), and January's FCC auction of the 700MHz wireless spectrum (bidders include such 800-pound gorillas as Google, Verizon Wireless, and AT&T). Likely cocktail-party discussions: Is Google's Android just smoke and mirrors? Is Verizon only paying lip service to the idea of open networks? Open questions all, but it's clear that the old "the carrier is king" notion here in the States is poised for a major shake-up.

iPhone 2.0?

Of course, the elephant in the room comes courtesy of a company that won't even be exhibiting at CES. Macworld 2008 is set for January 15, just days after after the festivities in Vegas have come to a close, and all eyes are on Steve Jobs, who may—or may not—have a new iPhone to announce. The CEO of AT&T just confirmed that a 3G iPhone is in the works for 2008, so there's a chance that the iPhone 2.0 will be ready for its close-up in time for Jobs' Macworld keynote. The announcement of the original iPhone stopped CES dead in its tracks last January, so I'm sure everyone in the cell phone industry—whether they admit it or not—will be looking over their shoulders for the looming news from San Francisco.

That's my (long-winded) take on what we might see from cell phones at CES. What are you hoping will come out of the show?

Best places to refresh

2008-01-04T14:20:00.000+04:00

Life-Changing Escapes for a New You

Sure, you could return to your favorite winter beach spot to kick off the new year. Or you could take a vacation that will enrich your mind, body, and soul. Sherman’s Travel uncovered 10 life-changing escapes, with a splurge and a value option for each. Climb a volcano, explore the Nile, or learn to drive a race car. What are you waiting for?

1. Spa Renewal

Phuket, Thailand: Some spa programs are easy: a little massage here, a big salad there. Not the Five-day Puriti Purification Program at Trisara, a luxurious resort located near the Phuket airport on a secluded beachfront sanctuary. The immersive plan starts with a physical and includes daily fitness activities, body treatments, and yoga. You’ll eat raw organic food on the first and last days and only fresh vegetable juices and organic Chinese herbal supplements in between. But the tropical gardens are so beautiful and the private pools so relaxing that you won’t crave a thing—except, possibly, more purification. $4,120/5 days or $7,350/10 days; trisara.com

St. George, Utah: Red Mountain Spa is set in the stunning and serene southwestern Utah desert—an ideal spot for moonlight hikes, rock climbing, biking, tennis, swimming, and enough other activities to exhaust the tireless. The JumpStart 2008 package for January and February includes guided walks, tai chi, unlimited fitness classes, gourmet meals, and cooking demonstrations. Also available are extras such as day trips to Zion National Park and horseback riding. Save time for treatments at the Sagestone Spa, especially the Adobe Lavender Hydrating Cocoon. From $239/3 days (the minimum stay); redmountainspa.com

2. Health and Wellness

Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa: Guests come to The Raj for Ayurveda, the ancient whole-body Indian health-care philosophy and practice. This award-winning spa on 100 beautiful Midwestern acres has antiaging and weight-loss regimens, along with treatments for ailments like Alzheimer’s and hypertension. A one-week stay includes two to three hours of daily treatments, yoga, health coaching, and cooking classes. French provincial rooms are elegant and comfortable. $4,700/1 week; theraj.com

Mysore, India: Indus Valley Ayurvedic Center, an innovative clinic and spa resort, offers traditional, therapeutic treatments in a palm tree–lined setting in the Chamundi Hills. The weeklong program includes sessions with a doctor, massages, yoga, lessons in Ayurvedic practices, and detoxing treatments. Accommodations are in the lovely main house or in cottages scattered throughout the grounds. From $1,160/1 week; ayurindus.com

3. Academic Excursions

Southeast Asia: Stanford University’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia Suitcase Seminar, led by a former Stanford art history professor, includes tours of the Forbidden City in Hue and Buddhist temples in Luang Prabang. The 20-day trip is immersive, featuring traditional welcoming ceremonies, water-puppet performances, and visits to monasteries and the Phnom Penh university. Dec. 28-Jan. 16 and Feb. 15-Mar. 5; from $7,765, which includes visas and airfare from San Francisco or L.A.; stanfordalumni.org

The Nile: Smithsonian Journeys’ Splendors of the Nile is a 12-day excursion that includes a stunning visit to the Pyramids of Giza. A Smithsonian Egyptologist brings to life the region’s religion, art, and recent archaeological discoveries. Four nights are spent in hotels in Cairo and Luxor, four on the Mirage II ship cruising the Nile, and the last at Aswan’s Elephantine Island Resort. Various departures Jan.-Apr. and Sept.-Nov.; from $1,849, based on double occupancy; smithsonianjourneys.org

4. Extreme Sports

Dalton, New Hampshire: Learn to drive like a pro during a three-day course at Team O’Neil Rally School. The first two days cover basics like braking technique and skid control, and on day three you’ll move on to closed loops of real roads with gravel, trees, and other obstacles. Instructors are on hand at all times, and safety is a major consideration. One-, two-, and four-day sessions are also available, and students typically stay in one of many hotels in Littleton. $2,950 covers tuition only; teamoneil.com

La Jolla, California: Make your Peter Pan fantasies come true at Torrey Pines Gliderport, one of the oldest paragliding schools in the country. You’ll spend the first few days of the basic training program on the ground learning to control, launch, and fly the wing. Then you’re ready for your first solo flight off a 300-foot cliff. You’ll soar for three to five minutes and land on the beach below. The course lasts from three to five days, depending on individual ability and agility, but has one flat rate. There are no accommodations, but there are several hotels in the area. $895 covers tuition only; flytorrey.com

5. Volunteer Vacations

Kali Gandaki Valley, Nepal: Volunteers on the Chairro Gompa Restoration Project help redevelop an ancient Buddhist monastery (gompa) under the snow-capped Himalayas. The setting is stunning, encompassing a high-desert moonscape and colorful, orchard-filled valley. You’ll work on projects that can vary from building to restoration and art conservation. During the afternoons, you’re free to hike the villages, pick apples, visit schools, or keep working. You’ll stay in a modern, family-run guesthouse with comfortable but simple rooms. $2,495, fully tax-deductible; crtp.net

Costa Rica: The Sea Turtle Conservation Project in Costa Rica helps protect the critically endangered Leatherback Turtle, whose eggs are poached for their aphrodisiacal properties. Volunteer duties include digging out eggs from nests and transferring them to a hatchery, as well as night patrols. This is a trip for beach lovers, not luxury seekers, as lodgings are rustic, with volunteers living together on the beach in a cabin or tent. But those turtles sure are cute! $995 for 1 week; i-to-i.com

Can '71 skyjacker be found?

2008-01-02T14:45:00.000+04:00

The FBI is making a new stab at identifying mysterious skyjacker Dan Cooper, who bailed out of an airliner in 1971 and vanished, releasing new details that it hopes will jog someone's memory. The man calling himself Dan Cooper, also known as D.B. Cooper, boarded a Northwest flight in Portland for a flight to Seattle on the night of Nov, 24, 1971, and commandeered the plane, claiming he had dynamite.

In Seattle, he demanded and got $200,000 and four parachutes and demanded to be flown to Mexico. Somewhere over southwestern Washington, he jumped out the plane's tail exit with two of the chutes.

On Monday, the FBI released drawings that it said probably are close to what Cooper looked like, along with a map of areas where Cooper might have landed.

"Who was Cooper? Did he survive the jump? We're providing new information and pictures and asking for your help in solving the case," the FBI said in a statement.

The FBI said that while Cooper was originally thought to have been an experienced jumper, it has since concluded that was wrong and that he almost certainly didn't survive the jump in the dark and rain. He hadn't specified a route for the plane to fly and had no way of knowing where he was when he went out the exit.

"Diving into the wilderness without a plan, without the right equipment, in such terrible conditions, he probably never even got his chute open," Seattle-based agent Larry Carr said.

He also didn't notice that his reserve chute was intended only for training and had been sewn shut.

Several people have claimed to be Cooper over the years but were dismissed on the basis of physical descriptions, parachuting experience and, later, by DNA evidence recovered in 2001 from the cheap tie the skyjacker left on the plane.

In 1980, a boy walking near the Columbia River found $5,800 of the stolen money, in tattered $20 bills.

"Maybe a hydrologist can use the latest technology to trace the $5,800 in ransom money found in 1980 to where Cooper landed upstream," Carr said. "Or maybe someone just remembers that odd uncle."

Poor sleep linked to diabetes

2008-01-02T09:36:00.000+04:00

When Shakespeare called sleep the "chief nourisher of life's feast," he may have been well ahead of his time, medically at least. Researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Center report that disrupting sleep damages the body's ability to regulate blood sugar levels, potentially raising the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.

More than 18 million Americans have diabetes and the most common form is type 2, in which the body either becomes resistant to insulin or doesn't produce enough of it to regulate sugar in the bloodstream.

In a small experiment, researchers led by Dr. Esra Tasali, an assistant professor of medicine, found that disrupting the deepest sleep periods of volunteers rapidly resulted in reduction in their ability to regulate blood-sugar levels.

The findings are reported in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers studied the sleep patterns of nine volunteers, five men and four women, all of normal weight, in good health and aged 20 to 31.

Normal sleep is divided into several stages, with the so-called slow-wave sleep considered the deepest.

Whenever the volunteers went into slow-wave sleep the researchers made noise — enough to disturb the sleep though not to fully awaken them.

After just three days the ability of the volunteers to regulate blood sugar was reduced by 25 percent, the researchers reported.

Earlier studies have indicated that lack of sleep can reduce the ability to regulate sugar, and this report adds evidence that poor sleep quality is also a diabetes risk.

"This decrease in slow-wave sleep resembles the changes in sleep patterns caused by 40 years of aging," Tasali said in a statement. Young adults spend 80 to 100 minutes per night in slow-wave sleep, while people over age 60 generally have less than 20 minutes. "In this experiment," she said, "we gave people in their 20s the sleep of those in their 60s."

"Since reduced amounts of deep sleep are typical of aging and of common obesity-related sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnea, these results suggest that strategies to improve sleep quality, as well as quantity, may help to prevent or delay the onset of type 2 diabetes in populations at risk," said co-author Dr. Eve Van Cauter, a professor of medicine.

Coming attractions for 2008

2007-12-31T12:07:00.001+04:00

1/18

Cloverfield Shrouded in mystery since the untitled teaser trailer appeared last summer, producer J.J. Abrams' modern take on the monster movie has had people everywhere buzzing about just what it is that's tearing New York City apart. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board
1/25

Rambo After surprising a lot of people with the success of Rocky Balboa, writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone goes for the one-two punch, bringing back his other iconic character, John Rambo, for a rescue mission in the Burmese jungle. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board
3/14

Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who For the first animated feature based on a book by Dr. Seuss, the creators of Ice Age have recruited two comic heavyweights to lend their voices: Jim Carrey, as the elephant Horton, and Steve Carell as the microscopic fellow only Horton can hear. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board
5/2

Iron Man Marvel Comics' steel-plated superhero is coming to the big screen, with a stellar cast and amazing effects. Robert Downey Jr. brings humor and humanity to the role of Tony Stark, the billionaire who builds and wears the indestructible armor. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board
5/9

Speed Racer The Wachowski Brothers, the creative duo behind The Matrix, return to directing with an altogether different visual extravaganza, the live-action version of a classic anime series. The trailer promises eye-popping sights and a whole lot of speed. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board
5/16

The Chronicles of Narnia:
Prince Caspian The four Pevensie children return to the magical world of Narnia to find 1,300 years have passed and an evil king rules the land. They will need the help of the mighty lion Aslan to restore the young Prince Caspian to his rightful place on the throne. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board
5/30

Sex and the City Four years after their series left the air, Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha are hitting the silver screen. The teaser trailer shows Sarah Jessica Parker looking fabulous in haute couture, her underwear, and (gasp!) a wedding dress. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board
6/27

WALL-E From the director of Finding Nemo, Pixar's next groundbreaking animated film tells the story of a little who spends centuries cleaning up garbage all by himself who finally gets a chance to see what the galaxy has to offer by way of adventure. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board
6/27

Wanted Angelina Jolie is back in action as a mystery woman named Fox who indoctrinates James McAvoy into a secret fellowship of assassins so highly trained they bend the very laws of physics, with Morgan Freeman as their gun-wielding guru. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board
7/10

The Dark Knight Continuing the story of director Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, Christian Bale returns as the Caped Crusader, this time facing his arch-nemesis, the scarred and scary Joker, played with psychotic menace by Heath Ledger. Watch Trailer
Movie Info | Cast | Production Photos | Message Board

2008 PC preview

2007-12-30T08:50:00.000+04:00

At CES 2007, mega media storage with easy tools to share photos, videos, and messages throughout the home was a big computing theme. The HP/Microsoft media server and HP's bulky TouchSmart PC for the family kitchen come to mind, both on the market now. This year, look for computers that do all of that with an emphasis on design and simplicity.

Lighter, sleeker, more stylish laptops and smaller, efficient, better-looking desktops will be featured throughout the jam-packed CES halls.

Small and simple: Chris Null already has taken the Asus Eee PC for a spin, but many will get a first look at the pint-sized, well-loaded 4G Linux PC that provides just about everything a new PC user needs for $400. Along with the Intel Classmate and OLPC XO Laptop, both designed to bring easy-to-use Wi-Fi-enabled computers to more kids throughout the world, the Eee PC marks a new direction in personal computing.

Asus also is showcasing an even smaller ultra-mobile PC, the R50A Notebook, which has a 4.8-inch LCD, a built-in TV tuner, and GPS. Oh, and it handles most office apps and with its InfoPen software, so users can record and edit on the small notebook's 1024 x 600 screen like writing on a piece of paper.

The Samsung Q1 Ultra Premium combines a 7-inch LCD screen with a less-than-2-pound ultra-mobile PC, a joint project of Samsung, Intel, and Microsoft.

Design. Gateway's One has been making some good pre-CES impressions for its all-in-one, simplified design. Ben and Robin were both impressed by the lack of wires and its power brick that also houses Ethernet and USB ports.

Dell, which added color to its Inspiron lineup this year, has made design a key new element of it thinned-down XPS M1330. The Sony Vaio TZ series also offers high design as one of its best features. Toshiba will be showing off its Portege R500, a thin 12.1-inch-screen notebook that weighs less than 2 pounds.

Desktops have slimmed down, too, and PC makers will be showcasing less bulky hard drives and sleeker monitors. Not all are as svelte as the Gateway One, but Apple's successful emphasis on design will be evident throughout the CES halls, where Apple, as usual, will not be present.

HP has shrunken the conventional PC tower to a third of the size in the Pavilion Slimline s3220n PC. The Dell XPS 420 is not reduced in size, but its tower features buttons to quickly access stored media, incuding songs, photos, and videos, without using the keyboard, mouse, or monitor display.

That's a quick preview. We'll be on the lookout at CES to bring you the latest PC unveilings.

Fortune for a rare stamp

2007-12-28T02:56:00.000+04:00

One of the most famously flawed stamps in U.S. history sold for $825,000 to a New York man who bought it slightly cheaper than the record price another "Inverted Jenny" copy fetched at auction last month.

The rare 1918 24-cent stamp, depicting an upside-down Curtis JN-4 biplane known as "Jenny," was sold privately this week to a Wall Street executive who did not want to be identified.

Heritage Auction Galleries president Greg Rohan, who brokered the sale, said the buyer is the same collector who lost an auction last month in which another "Inverted Jenny" sold for $977,500. Rohan said his client, whom he described as not being a rare stamp collector, was glad to get another chance at the prized misprint.

"I suspect he's going to enjoy owning it and showing it to a few close friends," Rohan said.

The mint condition red, white and blue stamp is one of the finest known surviving stamps from the original sheet of 100 misprints. The original 100 were bought at a Washington, D.C., post office in 1918.

Randy Shoemaker, founder of Professional Stamp Experts, said there are probably fewer than 1,000 collectors in the world with the money and obsession to seriously pursue such a rare item.

"This is the Rolls-Royce," Shoemaker said. "It's the most expensive airmail stamp in the world."

Rohan said Heritage acquired its stamp from Sonny Hagendorf, a dealer from Scarsdale, N.Y. Rohan said the copy sold by Heritage is one of fewer than five to have never been hinged, meaning affixed with adhesive to be placed in a stamp album.

The monsters of 2007

2007-12-26T13:09:00.001+04:00

At a time when camera phones bear eyewitness to every spectacle and a hastily delivered text message can spread news in a heartbeat, could we still believe in giant mountain men with hypertrichosis?

In other words, Bigfoot and his friends still haunt our imagination and our searches. While celebrity antics and serious news preoccupied the bulk of Internet attention in 2007, a significant number of people hunted the paranormal and the legendary online. "Ghosts" led the list of imaginary creatures.

Queries into these wandering souls were on par with 2006, but a resurgence in those whose jobs it is to reach out to these restless apparitions enjoyed a 30% increase in searches: "ghost hunters," "taps ghost hunters," the size 2 "Ghost Whisperer," and the movies "Ghost Rider" and "Ghostbusters" all surged this year.

Perhaps coincidentally, 2007 seemed friendly to those who fight the forces of evil. While number three "vampires" saw a slight drop-off in queries, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" had a Search resurgence, likely spiked (so to speak) because of its life as a comic strip and the continued rumors of another cinematic treatment. Of course, Bram Stoker's literary icon "Dracula" vamped his way into the top 10, nearly (but not quite) matched by Mary Shelley's monstrously tragic creation.

Actual sightings might explain our continued faith in these fey beings: A flood of reports came in fall 2007 regarding goat suckers and multiple Nessies in China.cryptozoology never cease. Below is a round-up of these elusive creatures that lurked in Search this year. May the wonders of

Top 2007 Imaginary Creatures in Search

Move over, Rudolph

2007-12-24T10:26:00.000+04:00

Mars will be unusually bright this Christmas Eve and the moon will be shining full — a development that might make Santa Claus rethink his need for Rudolph's red nose.

That idea, from Miami Space Transit Planetarium director Jack Horkheimer, made us wonder if retooling a certain reindeer song is the best way to explain it to the kids:

Mars is a red-tinged planet

With a very shiny glow

And if you look to see it

You will find the moon in tow.

The red planet will shine brighter because it will be directly opposite the sun, reflecting the most light, and fairly close to Earth, only 55.5 million miles away. The full moon will appear nearby, rising about an hour later, said Horkheimer, host of the public television show "Star Gazer."

All of the other Yuletides

Santa would have at his side

The shiny nose of Rudolph

Acting as his big sleigh's guide

Mars will outshine the brightest star and won't be as noticeable in the sky for nine more years, Horkheimer said. The Hubble Space Telescope took a picture of Mars, which came closest to Earth on Dec. 18, but it will be brighter on Christmas Eve because of its position opposite the sun.

But this very Christmas Eve

Santa came to say:

"Rudolph, now with Mars so bright,

You can stay at home tonight."

"It will be a brilliant red light," Horkheimer said. "It is so bright it knocks your socks off." He added that this would allow Santa to give Rudolph a pink slip, albeit a temporary one.

Then all the reindeer teased him.

And they shouted out with glee:

"Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer

Outsourced to astronomy."

6-ingredient holiday recipes

2007-12-22T09:32:00.000+04:00

Striped Bass with Toasted-Shallot Vinaigrette and Spinach Recipe

Serve With: Brown Rice Pilaf with Almonds and Parsley Recipe and Dried Cherry "Popover" Recipe

Beef with Parmesan Potatoes Recipe

Serve With: Roasted Cumin Carrots Recipe and Pecan Wedges with Brown Sugar Whipped Cream Recipe

Roasted Tarragon Lamb with Butter Beans Recipe

Serve With: Sautéed Spinach with Basil Recipe and Boozy Clementines with Pound Cake Recipe

Smoky Braised Chicken and Gnocchi Recipe

Serve With: Butter Lettuce and Herb Salad Recipe and Apple Kuchen Recipe

Brown Rice Pilaf with Almonds and Parsley Recipe

Serve With: Roast Chicken with Olives, Garlic, and Thyme Recipe and Maple Baked Apples Recipe

Roasted Cumin Carrots Recipe

Serve With: Pan-Seared Lemon Sole Recipe and Bittersweet Chocolate Cake Recipe

Dried Cherry "Popover" Recipe

Serve With: Arugula and Pear Salad with Maple Vinaigrette Recipe and Beef and Shallot Stew Recipe

Pecan Wedges with Brown Sugar Whipped Cream Recipe

Serve With: Fettucine with Bolognese Sauce Recipe and Broccoli with Lemon Crumbs Recipe

Best gadgets of the year

2007-12-21T22:30:00.000+04:00

It's been a banner year for tech—so much so that I've had a hard time whittling down my list of favorite gadgets to a mere 10. From a touch-screen phone that you've probably heard of to the latest stab at an e-book reader, I present to you (in alphabetical order) the top 10 gadgets of the year.

Amazon Kindle: It's pricey at $399, and with its so-so screen and uninspiring design, the Kindle probably won't spell the end for your garden-variety paper book anytime soon. That said, fellow blogger Christopher Null called the light, easy-to-read, and 3G-equipped Kindle a potentially "game-changing device" that gives the sleepy e-book market a swift, much-needed kick in the pants.

Apple iPhone: In his initial review, Null dismissed the iPhone as a "nifty little gadget" that's "filled with flaws," and I agree with many of his criticisms. (No 3G! No games! Can't replace the battery!) That said, I'd be lying if I didn't call the iPhone—with its intuitive (nay, fun!) touch-screen interface, top-of-the-heap mobile Web browser, and unmatched integration of music and video in a handset—one of the most exciting gadgets I've ever seen.

Asus Eee: Try this on for size: a two-pound, paperback-sized laptop that runs Linux like a dream. The hard-to-please Null gave the Asus Eee (which comes loaded with a 900MHz Celeron CPU, Wi-Fi, and a 4GB solid-state hard drive) a test-drive last month and called it "downright exciting." Even more impressive? The $499 price tag.

Ibiza Rhapsody: There's been a lot of buzz about Wi-Fi MP3 players this year, what with the new iPod Touch and the updated Zunes, but here's a no-name player that beats both those heavyweights at the wireless game. The Ibiza Rhapsody syncs with your Rhapsody music account over Wi-F, finds and updates your podcasts, plays MPEG-4, WMV, and H.264 video files, and even surfs the web—no PC syncing required.

Intel Classmate PC: Love it or hate it, we live in a Windows world, and Intel's Classmate PC is the only "One Laptop Per Child" device to run XP. Writing for Wired, Christopher Null reports that the "ultra-small keyboard" won't do for grown-ups, but the laptop's rugged case, cute looks, and snappy performance will make the grade in classrooms. And at $300, the price is right.

Nokia N95: No, it doesn't have a touch screen, but the N95 is one of the most feature-packed phones I've ever tested, including Wi-Fi, 3G support (new for the United States), GPS, a 5-megapixel camera, quad-band GSM support for world calling, a top-notch web browser (second only to the iPhone's), an Office document reader, and a music player with support for subscription music services such as Rhapsody. Unfortunately, at $750, the N95 won't be making any "Top 10 bargains" lists this year.

Pioneer "Kuro" Plasma HDTVs: Grayish-looking black levels are the collective Achilles' heel of flat-panel HDTVs, but here's a set that isn't afraid of the dark. Available in 720p and 1080p versions (depending on the size and model), Pioneer's line of Kuro sets blew me away with its deep, dark black levels—now this is what "Blade Runner" is supposed to look like.

Shure SE530 earphones: First things first: At $450, the SE530s are among the priciest earbuds you'll ever find. But when I crammed these babies (which come complete with a trio of "microspeakers" for each 'bud) into my ears... how shall I put this? Aural nirvana. Now all you have to do is talk yourself out of 450 big ones.

TiVo HD: The best of the set-top DVRs made the leap to HD in late 2006, but the $800 price tag for the new Series3 box was a bitter pill. Luckily, the $300 TiVo HD arrived in August. In the meantime, TiVo's been busy adding support for Amazon Unbox video downloads, the Rhapsody music service, and Picasa photo libraries.

Vudu: It's not the perfect TV set-top box—it lacks a subscription model, it's too expensive at $400, and video quality is shy of DVD levels (although it just launched its first HD movies), But with its peer-to-peer method of delivering a library of 5,000 movies (and now TV shows) instantly, Vudu is the closest thing I've seen to Netflix-in-a-box.

Magna Carta's hefty price

2007-12-19T16:14:00.000+04:00

A 710-year-old copy of the declaration of human rights known as the Magna Carta — the version that became part of English law — was auctioned Tuesday for $21.3 million, a Sotheby's spokeswoman said.

The document, which had been expected to draw bids of $30 million or higher, was bought by David Rubenstein of The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, the spokeswoman said.

Sotheby's vice chairman David Redden called the old but durable parchment "the most important document in the world, the birth certificate of freedom."

The document was owned by the Perot Foundation, created by Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, since the early 1980s. It had been on exhibit at the auction house for the past 11 days.

Bearing the seal of King Edward I and dated 1297, it is one of 17 known copies of the historic tract that defined human rights as the foundation for liberty and democracy as it is known today. It is one of two that exist outside Britain; the other is in Australia.

The Perot Foundation bought its copy from a British family for $1.5 million. From 1988 until earlier this year it was on loan to the National Archives in Washington, sharing space with the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, two documents that drew on its principles.

"Over those years," Redden said, "it may have been seen by 40 to 50 million people, certainly the most viewed version of the Magna Carta anywhere."

The Magna Carta came into existence when a group of English barons demanded that King John affix his seal to a list of protections at Runnymede in 1215. Those edicts were not fulfilled, but subsequent versions of the document followed for the next 80 years, until 1297, when it was codified into law.

Tuesday's sale price included the auction house's commission.

Beat the sleep stealers

2007-12-17T12:11:00.001+04:00

It's bedtime, and Valerie Baadh Garrett, 55, can't sleep. This isn't unusual—or hasn't been since she hit menopause. "Even something as subtle as my husband shifting his position can wake me and keep me up for hours," she explains. "It's so frustrating."

Valerie is hardly alone. According to the National Sleep Foundation, 67 percent of women have sleep problems on a regular basis, and 46 percent say they have trouble getting shut-eye almost every night. Unfortunately, lack of sleep can do more than just make you cranky. Research has linked it to a host of health problems, such as obesity, diabetes and a weakened immune system. The latest news: Lack of sleep can double your risk of dying from heart disease.
The key to getting quality rest on a regular basis (and staying healthy) is figuring out what's causing your insomnia right now. Check out our list of surprising sleep stealers and expert advice on how to stop them.

1. A medical condition

If you can't fall or stay asleep most nights of the week, chances are insomnia isn't your only issue. According to a report from the University of Oklahoma, 75 to 80 percent of people with chronic sleep problems suffer from another health condition. After all, it's hard to sleep if your joints are aching from arthritis, you're drenched from night sweats or you're always sneezing from allergies. Common culprits for women include undiagnosed sleep apnea, a condition in which you stop breathing for as long as 30 seconds at a time during the night, and restless leg syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes an urge to move your legs while you're asleep. Various medications can also cause sleep disturbances.

2. Noise and light

These sound like no-brainers, but what you may not realize is that even the slightest sound or glimmer of light can be enough to interfere with the most restorative stages of sleep (rapid eye movement, or REM) and your body's production of melatonin, a hormone that helps lull you into dreamland, says Joyce A. Walsleben, Ph.D., diplomate of the American Board of Sleep Medicine and associate professor at the NYU School of Medicine. "Even the glow of a digital clock or television noise from down the hall can get in the way," says Richard Gelula, CEO of the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, DC.

Ideally, complete darkness is best (try blackout curtains/shades or an eye mask). When it comes to noise, a fan on a constant speed or white-noise machine can help block out traffic and a snoring bedmate. But skip the nature sounds or a soothing talk show host: Your brain registers changes in tone, even if they're slight, and this can wake you.

3. Caffeine

You know that caffeine keeps you up, but you may be surprised at just how long it can affect you. Caffeine can take seven to eight hours to work its way out of your system, says Dr. Walsleben. "If you have trouble sleeping, cut it off by noon."

4. Alcohol and cigarettes

A nightcap may make you sleepy initially, but it delays the start of your first REM cycle, so you may end up having fewer of them during the night and won't feel well-rested, says Dr. Walsleben. Drinking also can cause night sweats and wake you up to go to the bathroom. So don't overdo it, and make last call at least three hours before bedtime.

As for smoking, you can add insomnia to the long list of health problems it causes, since nicotine is a stimulant.

5. Bad sleep habits

You need a buffer between the activities of the day and sleeptime—and watching TV until you doze off doesn't count. Start winding down at least an hour before bed. The key is to make pre-bedtime quiet—so ban newspapers, television or anything stressful. Give pillow-hogging pets the boot, too.

As for the bedroom itself, keep it a comfortable temperature (around 69 degrees is ideal), use comfy linens and pillows, and clear the clutter. "Use the bed just for sleeping and for sex," says Michael H. Silber, M.D., past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.

To help figure out what you may be doing wrong, keep a sleep diary to track what you're doing before you hit the sack, and how ready you feel for bed both physically and mentally. Download one at shuteye.com (click on "Sleep Solutions" and then "Discover Patterns").

6. Your genes

Another thing to blame on Mom (or Dad): A predisposition to being a night owl or early morning person can be inherited, explains Dr. Walsleben. Certain sleep disorders (like narcolepsy, which causes an overwhelming urge to fall asleep sporadically during the day) have a genetic component.

Your anatomy is also largely dictated by your genes, so if obesity, a receding jaw or a deviated septum (which makes breathing difficult) run in your family, you may be more prone to problems such as sleep apnea.

'Potter' book buyer revealed

2007-12-16T09:54:00.000+04:00

Online retailer Amazon revealed Friday it was the mystery buyer of British author J.K. Rowling's first book since the phenomenally successful Harry Potter series.

"The Tales of Beedle the Bard" was sold at auction at Sotheby's

Thursday to art dealers on behalf of an unidentified client for 1.95 million pounds (2.72 million euros, 3.95 million dollars), 40 times its expected price.

All proceeds from the sale of the handwritten single volume will go to Rowling's charity, Children's Voice, which helps vulnerable children across Europe.

Amazon has published editorial reviews of the book's content and photographs on its website, although it did not reveal if it would also make extracts from the book available.

"Even before establishing her charity, J.K. Rowling had done the world a rare and immeasurably valuable service, enlarging forever our concept of the way books can touch people, and in particular children, in modern times," Amazon's founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said in a statement.

Amazon has sold 12 million of the Potter books.

"The Tales" play a key role in the seventh and last Potter tome, "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows", which came out in July, featuring as the volume of five wizarding fairy tales left to Potter's friend Hermione Granger by headmaster Albus Dumbledore.

One of the tales appears in "Deathly Hallows", but the remaining four are told in "The Tales" for the first time.

There are just seven of the books, bound in brown Moroccan leather covered with a silver skull motif and jewels. Rowling gave the other six to people involved with the Potter books.

The 42-year-old author has become a billionaire, with the tales of the boy wizard translated into 64 languages.

Those darn onion tears

2007-12-16T09:50:00.000+04:00

Onions cells contain traces of sulfur, that are broken and released into the air when cut. These sulfured compounds react with the moisture in your eyes forming sulfuric acid, which cause the burning sensation you feel. The defense mechanism of the eye is to create tears to dilute the acid. So your tears protect your eyes from damage.