Rihanna?s 2AM emergency bikini wax in Belfast

The ‘Rude Boy’ hitmaker – who has been in Northern Ireland shooting the video for her single ‘We Found Love’ – had her team call four local beauticians in the early hours of Monday morning, before finally persuading one to get out of bed to perform the intimate treatment. A source told The Sun newspaper: [...]

Source: http://www.celebritymound.com/rihannas-2am-emergency-bikini-wax-in-belfast/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rihannas-2am-emergency-bikini-wax-in-belfast

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Facebook Music?s Biggest Loser: Last.fm [Facebook]

About ten years ago, third-year computer science student Richard Jones wrote the code that would eventually earn him $38 million. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/OXemipsN5Go/facebook-musics-biggest-loser-lastfm

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The Mystery Rust of Kivalina, Alaska

A scanning electron micrograph of an unidentified rust spore from Alaska. Note the gorgeous projections that look like they've been turned on a lathe.

Author?s note: This is the last of a series of four posts in Fungi Month here at TAA. Enjoy!

Last month a mysterious orange film (?goo? in the media vernacular) washed up on the shores of a northwest Alaskan village called Kivalina. Experts suspected crustacean eggs; locals were unnerved. In retrospect, reports that the substance ?dried into a powder? should have been suspicious, as should reports that the orange stuff also appeared on the water in rain buckets. Either the crustaceans really got around, or all was not as it seemed.

An orange powder seems an odd product for the drying of crustacean eggs, but could make perfect sense for fungi ? specifically, the rust fungi. And indeed, that is what experts believe them now to be. And yet, for all the gumshoe work, they really still have no idea what they actually were ? or what produced such an explosion in a place that had not seen such an event in the memory of anyone living.

Rusts are all plant parasites, but unlike the smuts ? their close relatives, who I wrote about here earlier this month ? they don?t specialize in hijacking plant parts for their nefarious purposes; instead they embed their reproductive structures in plant tissue in a system that can only be described as a byzantine dance of propagules. Some rusts have make up to five different sorts of spores produced in five different structures on two different hosts. It?s a bit dizzying keeping up with it all.

Before I fry your neurons with a rust life-cycle chart, let?s take a slightly larger view. There are thousands of species of rust, and all are plant parasites, many of which specialize in giving farmers ? and biologists ? headaches: coffee, asparagus, beans, snapdragons, carnations, roses, and wheat all have rusts that have achieved or are working on infamy. One rust ? cedar-apple ? makes distinctively alien orange goo starbursts on eastern red cedar (really a juniper) in the United States; its alternate host is apple.

A cedar-apple rust (Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae) gall on eastern red cedar after rain. When they're not wet, instead of looking like something your kids would enjoy eating or dropping down your shirt, they look like wooden balls with little satanic horns.

The reason they are called rusts is obvious: they make plants look rusty by discharging orange, powdery spores on leaves and stems during at least one of their many life stages. Here?s a photo I took of a rust dropping powdery orange spores in a rather undignified manner from a wild rose when I was on my boreal toad-hunting trip in July:

In completing their reproductive gymnastics, rusts produce some pretty interesting microscopic structures, or fruiting bodies, as mycologists sometimes call them.

Inside one of them, called a spermagonium or pycnium, sterile, stiff, tapering filaments called periphyses converge and push up on the plant epidermis. They rupture it, forming a little hole called an ostiole, and sometimes protrude through it like tentacles. Tailless male gametes called spermatia (or pycniospores) are formed inside and exuded in droplets of sweet, sticky nectar.

Nearby, ?receptive hyphae? (high-fee ? fungal filaments that make up their bodies) also protrude through the hole. Nectar-seeking insects land, get a sugar fix, and then take off with some hitchhiking spermatia stuck ? in some embarrassing configuration, no doubt ? to their feet or bodies. When they land on another spermagonium/pycnium, the spermatia/pycnia can then fuse with and fertilize the receptive hyphae. You know what this should remind you of, of course: a flower. A fungal flower, in fact, convergently evolved to suit the same purpose. And like some flowers, rusts have a rudimentary male/female system (mycologists boringly call the mating types A1 and A2) that ensures spermatia from a given spermagonium can?t fertilize their own receptive hyphae

OK. That is ONE of the FIVE possible life stages of a rust fungus. I?ve tried to shield you from this as long as possible. But I can?t hold back any more. Behold: the full horror of the life cycle of a heteroecious (two-host), macrocyclic (way too many spore-types) rust:

For the bionerds, delight in digesting this. For the rest of you, all that?s necessary is to notice what a headache it must have been getting this all figured out. For the record, not all rust fungi have life cycles this complex. Some have only one host, and some have only a few of the structures described above. But you get the idea.

This particular life cycle belongs to a rust fungus that is on my own personal ****-list. It is white pine blister rust ? Cronartium ribicola ? introduced to North America around 1900 and just now reaching Colorado after killing untold numbers of five-needle pines across the west. It has come south from Montana. And it is set to start killing our venerable limber and bristlecone pines, which I wrote about in June here. But I digress.

Each of those little cross sections in the drawing is a vertical section through a tiny cup-like structure on a stem or leaf. The potato-like objects inside are the spores. N is haploid(one copy of the chromosomes) and 2N is diploid, but N+N is a special fungal thing. It means the cells are dikaryotic ? they have two nuclei from mating but they haven?t yet fused. Fungi have a tendency to have some part of their life cycle involve this odd-couple state. In humans, as you?ll recall, the nuclei of sperm and egg waste no time in fusing once the sperm makes its intentions known.

There is also a beautiful variety in the structure, color, and texture of rust teliospores ? the resting stage for many rusts ? which were traditionally used to classify them. They are often spiky or pegged dark brown visual confections of one to several cells, in chains, layers, or on stalks. At least one teliospore I looked at was a multicellular bundle with a striking resemblance to pattypan squash.

It is the urediospores (produced in the uredia) which are usually rusty orange (aeciospores can be orangey too), and these are the spores that scientists believe exploded into view in Alaska.

But the scientists at the NOAA lab in Charleston, South Carolina, that did the identification could not give the rust a species name. It didn?t match anything they had worked with before, they said, and they noted that there are many unidentified rust species lurking in Arctic tundra; as you can imagine, mycologists, a scarce resource in any climate, are not particularly abundant in northwest Alaska.

When I contacted the lab this week to find out if they had any further information on the rust?s identity, they said they did not. And unless some inquiring mycologist with time on their hands (ha!) has time to take a look, that is all we will probably ever know. And yet it gets a girl wondering: where *did* all those spores come from? What tundra plant could have possibly been so parasitized without anyone noticing? It?s not like rusts hide the fact they?re hanging out on plants ? quite the opposite. And for an explosion of spores so profuse that they coated the ocean and washed ashore, there must have been something brewing on a biblical scale on the unfortunate hosts east of town. And what was it about this year that made them go crazy? If you?ve been paying to any news of the Arctic in the last five years, you can probably make an educated guess.

Before I close this post, though, I have a question about rusts I?d like to pose: if a rust has two hosts, they?re usually only distantly related. For instance, wheat stem rust?s hosts are common barberry and various grasses, straddling the gap between monocot and dicot flowering plants. White pine blister rust feeds on five-needle pines and various currants and gooseberries, shifting between the conifers and flowering plants. Uredinopsis osmundae shuttles between balsam fir and cinnamon ferns, crossing a huge taxonomic gap between seed-making and spore-making plants. Why?

And this leads to a larger question, which some of the wiser minds among you may understand, which is why so many parasites both of animals and plants seem to enjoy doing the host shuffle at all, much less across giant taxonomic gaps (there are many animal parasites, for instance, that shuttle between vertebrates and invertebrates like snails or annelid worms)? What benefit could having two sets of biologies and immune systems to navigate possibly offer when you could confine yourself to the comfy and familiar environs of just one host? I?m interested in your thoughts, so please feel free to share below. I should probably know the answer to this since I read Parasite Rex once upon a time, but I do not. Forgive me, St. Carl.

Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=d108a1267156f747c1a3a29ff4ed27f9

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Guidelines For Keeping Moving Worry At Bay | SF Real Estate Today

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Moving is definitely amongst probably the most annoying endeavors that individuals face in their lifetimes, even with help from state to state moving companies. Numerous individuals, couples, and households relocate to new ...

Source: http://sfrealestatetoday.com/2011/09/guidelines-for-keeping-moving-worry-at-bay/

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My Love/Hate Relationship with SAHM | Motherhood Unadorned

So I think I?ve determined that I have a love/hate relationship with being a stay at home mom. OK, not ?hate? exactly, more like love/not-love.

Granted I?ve got an almost 4-year-old and an almost 20-month-0ld, so its a pretty labor-intensive time in the grand scheme of motherhood. Neither child is in school. BOTH are still in diapers. (Yes my 4 year old is not potty trained. If you don?t already know the story, feel free to read the post.)

Right now, tonight, I have a few moments while they are both sleeping to write a blog post, and it struck me just how much I LOVE/NOT LOVE my SAHM life. So here?s a few reasons why.

I?d love to hear if you can relate to any of them. And if you can?t relate, how do you feel about your own role as SAHM or WAHM or WOOHM (that?s ?Work Out of Home Mom? in case that wasn?t clear. Did I just make that up? WOOHM sounds like a pretty cool abbreviation to me.)

Why I LOVE being a SAHM:

1. I get to see my kids grow and change minute to minute. I don?t ever feel like I might miss milestones or moments.

2.?I get to snuggle A LOT on a daily basis for naps, quiet times, game times, movie times. (My kids are very cozy snuggle bugs.)

3. I?ve built a very strong attachment with my kids. They want mama around them, with them and I love that.

4. I get to watch the beautiful relationship forming between Ronin and Ellie on a daily basis. It is such an amazing thing to see. They can be so sweet and loving with each other, love playing together, and be absolute terrors to each other. But I get to see it all.

5. Because I?m with her so much I understand Ellie?s?toddler speak?probably 95% of the time, which makes communication at this stage pretty easy. SO nice!

6. We luckily don?t have to pay for costly childcare. (Its EXpensive in the Pacific Northwest.)

7. I can still easily nurse Ellie at almost 20 months and not have to worry about pumping, etc (Have I mentioned how much I hate pumping?)

Why I NOT-LOVE Being a SAHM:

1. The constant unending cleaning, picking up, wiping butts, making food/cleaning food/washing dishes, dressing/undressing/laundry, etc. The tedious cleaning of everything is just amplified. I used to have a pretty clean nice looking house before kids. Now I feel like things just pile up and pile up and pile up all of the time. I?m the queen of piles and I hate them.

2. I NEVER get to pee by myself. Unless little ones are asleep of course.

3. Its difficult to focus on anything other than them when they are awake and with me. Me time/blog time/necklace-making time is impossible unless I pay for it, the kids are asleep (and let?s face it, I?d like to be asleep too!) or my husband watches the kids. And I want him to have him-time too.

4. I never feel fully present for adult conversations when I?m at play dates with our friends. I always have half to three-quarters of my brain on my kids. Moments of true adult time are very few and far between.

5. I take less care of myself, i.e. doctors appointments, dentist, any appointment really, because of the hassle of scheduling care.

6. Finding ways to keep the kids entertained and happy all day long can be tiresome and draining.

7. Part of me misses being a creative, active, engaging professional interacting with other professionals on a daily basis.

Why LOVE Overcomes the NOT-LOVE:

1. Right now, being a SAHM is my choice, my husband?s choice, our family?s choice. And its the right one for us, right now. Being with them on my worst day is better (for me), than not being with my kids at this stage of their lives.

2. It may not be the right choice tomorrow (but tomorrow is not today.) I can definitely see me doing something out of the home once they both hit school age, whether non-profit or corporate, I don?t know. I really am loving my mental health advocacy. So we?ll see.

3. On days that my own mental health is not at its best, I can be in the comfort of my home. I can use my own strategies to take care of self and take care of my kids. In other words, I can be lazy if I need to be. PJ Movie days are just fine and can happen on a regular basis. (Like today.)

Every role of motherhood has its own joys and challenges. And I know every stage and age of kids, brings its own joys and challenges too. So I?m just going to keep moving forward. Making the best choices (for us) and for my mental health.

Today I am SAHM, tomorrow the FUTURE (whatever that may be) awaits!

Source: http://www.ellieadorn.com/?p=3562

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Bank lobby rejects reopening of Greek rescue deal

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The international bank lobbying group that has been leading negotiations on giving debt-ridden Greece easier terms for its bonds on Sunday rejected calls to impose larger losses on private investors.

Forcing private creditors to write down their Greek bond holdings by more than the 21 percent tentatively agreed to in a July deal would quickly cause a "domino effect" that would see the crisis spread to other parts of Europe, warned Josef Ackermann, the outgoing chairman of the Institute of International Finance.

Such a move would ultimately cost taxpayers much more than just bailing out Greece and erode confidence in the euro, said Ackermann, who is also the CEO of Germany's Deutsche Bank, a major lender to Greece.

Germany and other rich eurozone nations have been pushing for a re-negotiation of the July deal, arguing that the economic situation in Greece has significantly deteriorated since then and may require a steeper cut in the country's debt load.

However, Ackermann quickly rejected that push, saying that the agreement was fair and already placed a heavy burden on banks at a time of major market turmoil.

"If we now start reopening this Pandora's box we will lose a lot of time and I'm not sure people would be willing to participate," Ackermann told a news conference on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund.

Under the July deal, Greece is asking banks and other large private investors to swap their existing Greek bonds for ones with longer repayment deadlines, a lower face value or lower interest rates. The IIF says the deal would save Greece some euro54 billion by 2014 and euro135 billion by 2020.

However, most analysts say that those savings are far too small to make Greece's massive debts ? which amount to some 160 percent of economic output ? sustainable again. At the same time, there have been growing doubts that investors will agree to swap 90 percent of their bond holdings, a minimum threshold that Athens set to make the deal worthwhile.

Getting private creditors to agree to the deal comes at a heavy cost for Greece. Apart from temporarily being rated in "selective default" ? a first for a eurozone nation ? the country has to spend some euro42 billion on setting up a collateral fund that would secure the remaining value of the bonds.

If at some point Athens decides that a steeper cut in its debt was necessary, that money would go to the bondholders.

"If the July deal goes ahead, Greece would be locked into this perpetually," said Sony Kapoor, managing director of Re-Define, a Brussels-based economic think tank.

Greece has been relying on euro110 billion in rescue loans from other eurozone countries and the International Monetary Fund since May 2010. In July, when it became clear that Athens needed more help, eurozone leaders agreed on a second, euro109 billion bailout, although several aspects of that deal still need to be finalized.

To make the second aid package acceptable for their taxpayers, several rich countries led by Germany pushed for banks and big insurance companies to share some of the pain of bailing out Greece ? despite opposition from the European Union and the European Central Bank, the central bank for the 17 nations that use the euro as a common currency.

But since July, the eurozone's debt crisis has significantly worsened, partly because investors now fear that they may also face losses on bonds from already bailed-out Portugal and Ireland as well as struggling Italy and Spain. The Greek economy is now set to shrink 5.3 percent this year, up from a June estimate of a 3.8 percent decline, followed by a further contraction in 2012.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2011-09-25-US-Global-Finance-Europe/id-66a68cdd65094eee8271da6fa45a59c0

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7 Steps To Reverse Diabetes, Health & Fitness

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Source: http://best.onyourweb.info/health/51910-7-steps-to-reverse-diabetes-health-fitness.html

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