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I like this site. Good news and, finally, my own page here.

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Wednesday, 10 Jun, 2009

Hot Discussions

Do you think Angelina Jolie really is the most powerful celebrity?

Angelina Jolie ranked first in the most popular and powerful celebrity list"With a rich collection of blockbuster movies and the media buzzing around, Angelina Jolie tops Forbes' 2009 list of the most powerful celebrities in the world, surpassing last year's most powerful celebrity Oprah Winfrey."

Why do you think the Forbes Magazine named specifically Angelina Jolie the most powerful celebrity? Did she deservingly get this top rank? We need your opinion!

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Monday, 04 May, 2009

Environment

Inspiring Eco Ad Campaign: 1 Coach Bus for 50 Cars

Having the goal of motivating car drivers to take a coach bus, Acne, a Sweden-based advertising company, came up with a quite inspiring advertising campaign for an airport coach bus service called Flygbussarna.

The company built a bus from 50 wrecked vehicles. The bus resembles the original Flygbussarna coach bus and was placed near the main road that leads to the Stockholm airport.

With their installation, the Swedish company attempts to focus on the fact that 50 people can ride in a coach bus, while, in average, 1.2 people ride in a car. It is worth mentioning that a coach bus emits carbon less than 4 vehicles.

On the company's website visitors can watch live the installation and vehicles that drive by. In addition, you can see the amount of carbon that could have been saved if the drivers that passed the installation had taken a bus.

Here's the video that helps you get a better idea of Acne's advertising campaign:

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Saturday, 19 Jul, 2008

Current Events

Cheap Chargers - How Expensive Can That Be?

Unsafe Charger DE262347066
Courtesy of BBC.CO.UK
The UK Trading Standards officers are concerned of the fact that hundreds of thousands of chargers for mobile phones, games consoles, MP3 players and other mobile devices did not pass a proper safety test before being sold. Officers are studying thousands of cases of unsafe charges, probably originating from China, being sold in shops and on the Internet. Tests have shown that some chargers can overheat or cause electrocution.

Among the chargers concerned, one had the code marking DE62347066, which the users should be aware of. Other chargers have no code and are called Travel Charger.

Chris Holden, a senior trading standards officer, said that the UK appeared to be flooded with such chargers. At this point one could add that this was not an exclusively UK problem, but a global one.

The Trading Standards has already issued a warning about specific chargers, namely for the Nintendo DS and DS Lite. Chargers for such game consoles could be also fitted to use with the Gameboy game console. Officers from the TS are currently trying to recall all the chargers.

Chris Holden, however acknowledged that there could be a much bigger problem about the unsafe chargers. Some of them could carry a fake CE safety marking, which could mislead the buyers about the safety of such devices.

Mr. Holden revealed that chargers of such poor quality are being sold for 5 pounds on the Internet and for 6 pounds in shops. Safe chargers, on the other hand, which have been properly tested and approved of, are being sold for about 15 pounds.

The main concern about the danger of such devices comes from the fact that their wires become detached after some time of usage, thus leading to a risk of being electrocuted. The pins of some chargers do not fit properly into the UK sockets, which can cause overheating.

The problem of counterfeit chargers for mobile devices was raised after the death of a British seven-year-old boy, Connor Dean O'Keeffe. Connor was found dead by his mother on the floor of the apartment in Thailand, where the family was on a vacation. The boy was trying to use his games console charger.

Chris Holden mentioned that hundreds of suppliers were bringing such chargers into the UK.

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Friday, 23 May, 2008

Health & Fitness

Number of Alcohol Related Illnesses Doubled in the UK

Number of Alcohol Illnesses Doubled in the UKHealthcare Organization claims that in the UK the number of people, who have been treated from illnesses caused by alcohol consumption, has doubled during the last 10 years. In average a British drink is an equivalent of 9.6 liters of pure alcohol per year, whereas even in Russia, the country which is supposed to be the most 'drinking' country in the world, the average number is 8.7 liters.

Last year healthcare institutions registered 280,000 people treating from alcohol related illnesses. This statistics included not only liver and kidney diseases, which are most common among alcohol consuming people, but also injuries received due to excessive alcohol consumption.

The statistics also included an alarming figure of 30% of children aged between 11 and 15 years, who think that drinking a lot of alcohol at least once a week is absolutely normal. Healthcare organizations claim that a drinking young generation is not only a problem of Great Britain, but it is a global one.

A doctor at one of the London's hospitals said that today's average patient, suffering from alcohol abuse, is a 20-30 years' old person, whereas previously there were only 50 year olds addressing a medic with such problems.

The current report revealed the seriousness of the problem called 'alcohol abuse in the UK'. Many British doctors claimed last December that nearly one third of domestic violence and a half of the other violence related crimes registered in the UK where caused by alcohol consumption, as reported by BBC.

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Thursday, 11 Oct, 2007

Science

Computer Simulation Unveils Unexpected Process on the Surface of the Sun

Solar granulationsSolar granulations (the relatively light patterns) and sunspots (dark spots). Picture taken by the sun telescope of the Swedish Royal Science Academy. Courtesy of V. Zakharov / MPI Solar System Research

There is no other star that is observed and studies as much as the Sun - the center of solar system. However, no one could say that we know very much about it: its surface still hides many secrets, which are still to be discovered one day. A mathematician from the University of Vienna along with his colleagues astronomers has simulated the solar granulations and has made some surprising discoveries.

According to Herbert Muthsam, professor at the Mathematic Institute at the University of Vienna, the solar granulation is a process similar to the waves of boiling water in a kettle. It is a process during which torrents of water and helium are pushed out from under the surface of the sun to cool and then to sink back under the surface.

Professor Muthsam has been working on the modeling process for three years in order to provide the astronomers with a better, high-resolution picture of the granulation, since neither existing telescopes nor previous calculations were able to do this. Professor Muthsam said that even though the sun is being always under observation, there are certain limits to the possibilities of the astronomers.

Today's studies, which benefit from the best solar telescopes, can observe only the upper layers of the Sun and waves coming from under its surface, whereas many processes, such as those taking place deep under the star's crust or even in its atmosphere, remain a secret.

Thus, in order to analyze processes, events and their consequences on the surface of the Sun and to draw certain conclusions about them, which would boost up subsequent studies, scientists need a high-quality computer simulation of those processes. Professor Muthsam and his colleagues have developed special programs for torrents' simulation using various mathematical methods. The project benefited from three super computers, including the Schrödinger cluster from the University of Vienna, which were kept busy for a year running calculations on the possible models of the processes under the surface of the star.

In general, the modeling has showed something unexpected: the animation of the process depicted a sort of a wall, which moved relatively fast through the boiling surface of the sun. The professor explained that the moving walls were acoustic pulses, gigantic walls made of noise, which move across the surface of the star. He added that yet no one has ever had an opportunity of observing those pulses.

After the computer modeling showed that granulations are much more turbulent than they were initially thought to be, the researchers began to study the effects that granulations have on the heating of the chromosphere and the solar corona.

"This project made us come one step closer to answering the questions we are still to answer... and in addition, our schedules for the next few years include now much more work", the professor said.

Source: www.astronews.com

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Tuesday, 02 Oct, 2007

Technology

Pingdom Published Results of Google's Sites' Stability

Despite Google's enormous financial possibilities, the sites and services, provided by the company are not always available to its visitors.

According to a survey conducted between September the 1st, 2006 and September the 1st, 2007 in 32 countries, where Google is the leading provider of Internet search, Google's main page was unavailable from 3 to 48 minutes.

Google's search in Brazil was found as most stable, since during the researched period of time (1 year), it was unavailable for only 3 minutes, whereas the US page was unavailable for about 30 minutes.

A satisfactory stability of Google's regional representatives was found in Netherlands (11 minutes unavailable), India and Thailand (13 minutes), and Japan (15 minutes).

The most unstable of Google's regional sites were found in Israel (34 minutes), Turkey (40 minutes), Singapore and Taiwan (46 minutes), and Sweden (48 minutes).

Results of this survey surprised Google's chiefs, yet all of the tested sites have passed the milestone of 99,9%, which is the time when all of Google's sites and services were fully functional and available.

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