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Tips for the Male Daily Diet

Just because most men don’t have to watch their girlish figures doesn’t mean that it should be a free-for-all when it comes to what you eat on a daily basis. As you get older, it gets harder and harder to undo bad eating habits so the sooner you take note of the following tips and put them into practice, your daily diet will keep you in the best shape ever.

Note that eating foods with a lot of protein will fill you up more than eating a bunch of carbohydrates. Plus, protein contains less calories, too, so start throwing in lean beef, pork, fish, eggs, nuts, beans and white-meat poultry into your daily meals. When it comes to meals in general, create and stick to a regular daily eating schedule. This will help your body adjust to burning calories and you’ll be more focused throughout the day, not to mention you’ll be less likely to gorge on snacks or suffer from hunger pangs. Eating when you can and/or skipping meals can throw your body off whack, as well as distract you mentally. Do right by your body by treating it to the right foods at the right times.

When you don’t want to deal with starving until your next major meal, you can find comfort in breaking down your eating routine to include several small meals. While it may seem like eating more would cause you to gain weight, in reality, eating smaller portions during breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as snacking on healthy items in between these meals helps you control your appetite and prevents you from overeating in one sitting. This type of eating pattern also boosts your metabolism, which means you’ll be constantly burning calories and will have a lot more energy to spare.

If you’re worried about calories, modify your meals to include more spices and less fattening condiments such as butter, sour cream and mayonnaise. This doesn’t mean you should never use these items but the key is to use them in moderation and in small amounts. No more slathering your foods in layers of butter or mayonnaise. Also try to eat a wider variety of foods to avoid getting bored with your regular meal plans. Try looking up new recipes and test your culinary expertise on the barbeque grill or on the stove. While eating, make sure to stop when you are full - don’t keep consuming food until you’re so full it hurts.

When it comes to your beverages, it’s best to make water the major drink in your life, regardless of where you are or what you’re doing. Cut out the drinks that contain a lot of calories, artificial flavors and caffeine.

As hard as it can be at times avoid the bad habit of being near starvation and then totally binging during your next meal. This can cause your body’s metabolism to slow down, resulting in your body using more of its fat storage. Skipping meals can also lead to unstable insulin and blood sugar levels.

Is China's Great Wall Visible from Space?

Though it stretches for some 4,500 miles, the ancient Chinese fortification is not as visible from orbit as modern desert roads


Choose a legend: The Great Wall of China is the one of the few man-made structures visible from orbit. Or, more remarkably, it's the only human artifact on Earth visible from the moon. Both are false, say astronauts and remote-sensing specialists. Although the Great Wall spans some 4,500 miles (7,200 kilometers), it's constructed from materials that make it difficult to discern from space.

The unglamorous truth is that the wall is only visible from low orbit under a specific set of weather and lighting conditions. And many other structures that are less spectacular from an earthly vantage point—desert roads, for example—appear more prominent from an orbital perspective.

Misinformation about the barrier's visibility dates back decades. A 1932 Ripley's Believe It or Not! cartoon claimed that the wall is "the mightiest work of man, the only one that would be visible to the human eye from the moon." The belief persisted into the Space Age. Since Neil Armstrong returned from the moon in 1969, he has been repeatedly asked whether he could see it.

His answer was relayed in a recent NASA Johnson Space Center oral history: He saw continents, lakes and splotches of white on blue. But he could not make out any man-made structures from the lunar surface, which averages a distance of 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) from Earth.

So just how visible is the Great Wall from low Earth orbit, at an altitude that begins around 100 miles (160 kilometers) up? Not very. Although sections near Beijing, China's capital, have been restored for tourists, in many areas the structure is crumbling. Where it still stands, the wall's mixture of stone and clay blends into the surrounding land.

"I have spent a lot of time looking at the Earth from space, including numerous flights over China, and I never saw the wall," asserts former NASA astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman, who flew on five space shuttle missions from 1985 to 1996. "The problem is that the human eye is most sensitive to contrast, and the color of the wall is not that different from the ground on either side of it."

Hoffman, now an aerospace engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, failed to make out the Egyptian pyramids for the same reason. But he could identify roads, airport runways and irrigation ditches simply because they stood out in their environments.

Some U.S. astronauts, notably Eugene Cernan and Ed Lu, have said they've seen the wall from low orbit. But it tends to show up only in certain lighting conditions. When the sun is low on the horizon, for example, the wall casts extended shadows that make it possible to discern its silhouette.

In 2004 American astronaut Leroy Chiao snapped a photo from the International Space Station of a swath of Inner Mongolia, around 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of Beijing, while the sun's angle was favorable. NASA experts later confirmed that the photo appears to show the wall. But Chiao admitted that he wasn't sure what he was seeing from space.

Machines can do a better job. Low-orbit satellites have sensors that can penetrate through haze and clouds, making it easier for them to produce clear images. But, as with the naked eye, identifying the wall is hardly a guarantee.

Moderate-resolution satellites, like the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) two operating Landsat land observation satellites that orbit 438 miles (705 kilometers) above Earth's surface, can typically only pick up the structure under specific weather conditions, says Ronald Beck, program information specialist with the USGS's Land Remote Sensing Program. "We have satellite images where snow covers the fields near the wall and snow has been cleared on the wall, and that allows us to see the wall," Beck says. "The key is contrast."

Often, identifying the rampart in satellite images requires a degree of sleuth work. In populated areas, Beck says, USGS scientists pinpoint sections of the wall by looking for parking lots and pathways. In more remote areas, they may scan for breaks in the vegetation surrounding the structure. But those techniques are hardly foolproof; at many points, the vegetation grows up and over the wall.

For the Chinese, the wall's visibility from space has long been a point of pride. When "taikonaut" Yang Liwei, China's first man in space, returned from the 14-orbit Shenzhou 5 mission in 2003 and admitted to reporters that he had not seen the Great Wall, online forums exploded with disappointment. The Ministry of Education even moved to revise its elementary school textbooks, which had long claimed the ancient barricade was visible.

Since then, a debate has raged in China, with scholars grasping at evidence that might settle the question of how great the wall really is. Chinese Academy of the Sciences Institute of Remote Sensing Application professor Wei Chengjie, who appeared on a national television special devoted to the issue in 2006, says more research is needed. "We need to carry out more tests and improve astronaut training. Some astronauts have said that they didn't see it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. A shuttle passes by so quickly."

In the meantime, however, China's search for clarity is coming up against a modern complication. As the country industrializes and its factories belch out noxious gases, the wall further fades from view. "The biggest problem nowadays is the pall of pollution which exists over much of China," Hoffman says. "It effectively makes it impossible to see almost anything."

First spam felony conviction upheld: no free speech to spam

Virginia's Supreme Court on Friday upheld the first US felony conviction for spamming. The spammer will serve nine years in prison for sending what authorities believe to be millions of messages over a two-month period in 2003.

Jeremy Jaynes is the man who will make history. A Raleigh, North Carolina, resident who made Spamhaus' top 10 list of spammers, Jaynes was arrested in 2003 even before the CAN SPAM act was passed by Congress. Jaynes was convicted in 2005, but his lawyers appealed the conviction. This past Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld that conviction, but the vote was a narrow 4-3.

The prosecution presented evidence of over 53,000 illegal e-mails that Jaynes sent over just three days during July, 2003, but it is believed that he sent 10 million messages per day between July and August of that year. Though he is a North Carolina resident, Jaynes was charged in Virginia because the AOL servers he used for sending spam were located in Loudoun County, Virginia.

While defending Jaynes, his lawyers attempted to argue that a provision of the Virginia Computer Crimes Act violates constitutional First Amendment rights to "anonymous speech," as well as the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution. The court rejected these claims due to Jaynes' use of fake e-mail addresses, which breaks the US CAN SPAM law's condition of giving recipients a means of contacting the sender. The court also stated that his peddling of scam products and services excludes him from First Amendment rights. In effect, the court said that you can't scam people and then cry "free speech!" when hooked by the law.

While one might think that Jaynes' case should have been open and shut, Justice Elizabeth Lacy highlighted some of the reasons behind the close 4-3 verdict, along with the potential dangers of vague anti-spam legislation. In her written dissent, Lacy argued that the "unsolicited bulk electronic mail" provision of Virginia's Computer Crimes Act is "unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mail including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."

Still, the court upheld Jaynes' original 2005 sentence of three years in prison for each of the three Virginia Computer Crimes Act code violations for which he was found guilty. For those playing along at home, that's nine years in the pokey.

The lesson? Spam doesn't pay, unless you live outside the US. But that's a story for another day.

Hitachi Introduces 320 GB Mobile SATA HDDs

Hitachi has announced volume shipment of new 5,400 RPM notebook hard drives with a maximum available capacity of 320GB. These drives are designed to support the multi-tasking needs of consumers and commercial users balancing mobile computing and movies, music and other digital media.

The new drives feature optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for users requiring increased data security. Apart from these drives’ Serial ATA (SATA) interface provides a fast 3 GB/s data transfer rate, allowing the drive to be used in a wide variety of applications including mainstream computing, portable external storage devices and other computing uses. Seeking to be power-efficient, the drives only consume 1.8W of power when reading and writing and their .55W low power idle means longer battery life for more "unplugged" notebook time and a longer drive life expectancy.

"The Travelstar 5K320 addresses a growing demand for high capacity hard drives, which are at the heart of today’s notebook PCs, external storage devices, gaming consoles and other mobile computing applications," said Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "And when coupled with our optional Bulk Data Encryption technology, the Travelstar 5K320 offers even greater value to notebook users by helping to guard against data theft."

The Travelstar 5K320 is now shipping worldwide. The enhanced-availability version of the drive is expected to ship in the second quarter of 2008. Pricing for these products is unknown as of now.

Hitachi Introduces 320 GB Mobile SATA HDDs

Hitachi has announced volume shipment of new 5,400 RPM notebook hard drives with a maximum available capacity of 320GB. These drives are designed to support the multi-tasking needs of consumers and commercial users balancing mobile computing and movies, music and other digital media.

The new drives feature optional Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) for users requiring increased data security. Apart from these drives’ Serial ATA (SATA) interface provides a fast 3 GB/s data transfer rate, allowing the drive to be used in a wide variety of applications including mainstream computing, portable external storage devices and other computing uses. Seeking to be power-efficient, the drives only consume 1.8W of power when reading and writing and their .55W low power idle means longer battery life for more "unplugged" notebook time and a longer drive life expectancy.

"The Travelstar 5K320 addresses a growing demand for high capacity hard drives, which are at the heart of today’s notebook PCs, external storage devices, gaming consoles and other mobile computing applications," said Larry Swezey, director, Consumer and Commercial HDD, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "And when coupled with our optional Bulk Data Encryption technology, the Travelstar 5K320 offers even greater value to notebook users by helping to guard against data theft."

The Travelstar 5K320 is now shipping worldwide. The enhanced-availability version of the drive is expected to ship in the second quarter of 2008. Pricing for these products is unknown as of now.

Report: Nissan, Renault to build $1 billion auto plant in India

Nissan Motor Co. and its affiliate Renault SA will build a $1.1 billion plant in India, Bloomberg News reported today.

The companies have reached an agreement with the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu on the project, they said today in a joint release in Chennai, the state's capital. The plant will have a capacity of 400,000 cars a year.

The factory will also help the companies, which will have equal stakes in the project, to ship cars to overseas markets. "We see India as another export base," Nissan's Executive Vice President Carlos Tavares said in the release.

The automakers are looking for sales growth in emerging markets to make up for stagnating demand in their home countries, and the dollar's decline against the yen, which undermines the value of Nissan's North American earnings.

The India car plant will make its first car by 2010 and will manufacture four models, Nissan spokeswoman Pauline Kee said in an interview in Chennai today.

Humans married to pups, to ward off evil

KULUPDANGA: Three boys and two girls were married to puppies in the superstition that it would ward off evil at this remote tribal-dominated village in Jharkhand's Saraikela-Kharswan district on Monday.

Salu Banra, the mother of one of the girls, 15-year-old Puspa, a student of class seven in a government school said, “this is a custom. We set the puppy free after the marriage.”

The upper tooth appearing in either a girl or a boy is considered inauspicious by the Ho tribe which lives in this village. “Marriage to puppies of the opposite gender gets rid of the evil,” said some of the other villagers.

They said that six marriages between puppies and boys and girls had taken place on Sunday.

The pup-human marriage takes place on only two days in a year - the second and third of the month of Maghe. Today was the third of Maghe.

Full grown dogs are not used in the marriages but puppies which are called 'pida panda' (one who drives away evil).

All rituals and customs of a tribal marriage takes place with a priest officiating and guests invited, entertained by songs and dances, the villagers told a PTI correspondent.

Dowry in cash is sought and given. The bride is also given new clothes to wear. Only in case of smearing of sindur (vermillion), it is applied not to the puppies or humans but to a tree known locally as 'renge banam'.

When contacted, SDO Dinesh Prasad said, “this is a tradition. As long as they don't disturb others, we don't interfere.”

An elderly woman belonging to the Ho community, Laxmi Kalundia, said such marriages also demonstrated the fondness for pets and nature.

“Only pet dogs are preferable in such marriages,” she said. The marriage to pups also did not hinder the real marriage in future, she said as husbands and wives accepted this as a part of tribal custom.

The 15-year-old bride said she was happy and hoped to lead a peaceful life free from evil.

Sharks facing extinction risk: study

Washington, February 18: Sharks might soon be seen in the official list of animals at global risk of extinction, for a new esearch has shown that they are disappearing from the world's ceans.

The study has shown that many large shark species have declined by more than 50 percent due to increased demand for shark fins and meat, recreational shark fisheries, as well as tuna and wordfish fisheries, where millions of sharks are taken as catch each year.

The World Conservation Union (IUCN) assessed the global status of the sharks.

"As a result of high and mostly unrestricted fishing pressure, any sharks are now considered to be at risk of extinction," said Julia Baum, an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a member of the IUCN's shark specialist group.

"Of particular concern is the scalloped hammerhead shark, an iconic coastal species, which will be listed on the 2008 IUCN Red list as globally 'endangered' due to overfishing and high demand or its valuable fins in the shark fin trade," Baum added.

She further said that fishing for sharks in international waters is unrestricted, and she supports a recently adopted UN esolution calling for immediate shark catch limits as well as a meaningful ban on shark finning.The research conducted by Baum and the late Ransom Myers over the past five years, demonstrated the magnitude of shark declines in the northwest Atlantic Ocean.

All species the researchers looked at had declined by over 50 per cent since the early 1970s.

For many large coastal shark species, the declines were much greater: tiger, scalloped hammerhead, bull and dusky shark opulations have all plummeted by more than 95 per cent.

Baum will speak at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Conference in Boston, which runs from Feb 14 to 18.

She will highlight management measures required to conserve harks at an afternoon press conference on February 17.

Now, charge your mobiles just by walking

Washington, February 8: University of Michigan scientists have found that a new energy-capturing knee brace has the potential to generate enough electricity from walking to operate a portable GPS locator or to charge a cell phone.

Arthur Kuo, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the university, has revealed that the wearable mechanism works much like regenerative braking charges a battery in some hybrid vehicles.

While regenerative brakes collect the kinetic energy that would otherwise be dissipated as heat when a car slows down, the knee brace harvests the energy lost when a human brakes the knee after swinging the leg forward to take a step.

"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. 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," said Kuo, who called the device "a cocktail-napkin idea".

"The body is clever. In a lot of places where it could be dissipating energy, it may actually be storing it and getting it back elastically. Your tendons act like springs. In many places, we're not sure whether the energy is really being dissipated or you're just storing it temporarily. 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," Kuo added.

During a study, reported in the journal Science, the scientists tested the knee brace on six men walking leisurely on a treadmill at 2.2 miles per hour. They measured the subjects' respiration to determine how hard they were working.

A control group wore the brace with the generator disengaged to measure how the weight of the 3.5-pound brace affected the wearer.

The study report reveals that in the mode in which the brace is only activated while the knee is braking, the subjects required less than one watt of extra metabolic power for each watt of electricity they generated.

By contrast, says the report, a typical hand-crank generator takes an average of 6.4 watts of metabolic power to generate one watt of electricity because of inefficiencies of muscles and generators.

"We've demonstrated proof of concept. The prototype device is bulky and heavy, and it does affect the wearer just to carry. But the energy generation part itself has very little effect on the wearer, whether it is turned on or not. We hope to improve the device so that it is easier to carry, and to retain the energy-harvesting capabilities," Kuo said.

The authors believe that a lighter version of the knee brace would be helpful to hikers or soldiers who do not have easy access to electricity. They also envision its application in implantable devices such as pacemakers or neurotransmitters, which today require a battery and periodic surgery to replace that battery.

"A future energy harvester might be implanted along with such a device and generate its own power from walking," Kuo said.

Rat nibbles on face of 10-day-old baby

Dr Suresh Shah, a pediatrician, attends to the baby. He said in such cases there are chances of infection reaching the brain. So he had to take great care of the baby to ensure the infection does not spread



The rodent badly mutilates the infant’s face; eats away nose and parts of the cheek; now, doctors plan to reconstruct the nose

Twenty-three year old Sunita Chavan (name changed) was in for a shock when she saw a rat nibbling at the face of her 10-day-old child on Thursday.

By the time Chavan, who was asleep next to her daughter woke up hearing her scream, the rat had eaten away the nose and parts of her daughter’s cheeks. “I got up and saw a big rat on the face of my child. I raised an alarm. By the time my mother came, the baby was bleeding profusely.” said Chavan.

The child is the first for Chavan, after her marriage a year back. Chavan had come to her parent’s home in a chawl in Matunga, for the delivery. She delivered on January 22 at a private nursing home nearby. As the baby weighed 1.6 kilogrammes at the time of birth, she was kept in the nursing home for three days. According to Chavan, she had finished her afternoon chores when she fell asleep along with the baby. She was in deep sleep when the baby woke up screaming. Chavan and her mother shooed the rat away, and rushed the baby to a hospital in King’s Circle. But doctors there refused to treat the child as the baby’s face was completely covered with blood. “We could not figure out which parts of the face the rat had eaten as the entire face was covered in blood. We kept running from one hospital to another, until she was finally taken care of at Shah Nursing home and Child health centre.” said Sunita’s mother, who did not want to disclose her name.
Doctor Suresh Shah, the pediatrician attending to the baby said, “The child was admitted to the hospital on January 31 at 5.30 pm. I was present in the hospital when she was brought in bleeding profusely. In such cases there are chances of infection reaching the brain, so we had to take great care to ensure the infection does not spread.”

A team of three doctors attended to the baby. Pediatric surgeon Bhalchandra Jaykar and Plastic surgeon Shankar Shriniwas were called in from other hospitals. Dr Shah and they are constantly monitoring the child’s progress. The doctor’s plan to reconstruct the baby’s nose through plastic surgery.

“The child is out of danger, but we had to pay particular attention to the nutrition aspect, as the upper lip is swollen. We also took care of the respiration, since the nose was eaten up.” said Dr Shah.

Man survives billion-volt lightning strike!

A British man trounced death after surviving a billion-volt lightning strike on his head.

Darren Milne was hit by a 14,000mph bolt that tossed him to the ground, shredded his shirt and destroyed his trainers.

Darren's wife Vicky rushed to him, and feared that he was dead after seeing blood oozing from an open wound on his head.

But, as she embraced Darren, shouting his name repeatedly, he opened his eyes and cried: "I can hear you."

And the 41-year-old left doctors shocked after making a full recovery in just a week.

"He is very lucky - he could have been boiled alive," The Sun quoted a doctor, as saying.

The lightning struck Darren when he and Vicky were exploring the weird 100ft Hoodoo rock formations at Bryce Canyon, Utah.

"Suddenly a storm blew in and it started to hailstone so I made a snowball out of the stuff. Then I heard this loud crack. I woke up on the ground in a complete daze," he said.

Vicky added: "I thought Darren was dead. There was a smell of burnt flesh and all his hair was singed. When he said 'I can hear you', I cried with relief."

Unsuccessful Robber Shoots Self in Foot

CHERRYVILLE, N.C. (AP) - Authorities said an unsuccessful robber shot himself in the foot ... by shooting himself in the foot. Police said Kelvin Ethelbert Roberts, 28, botched his plans to rob a Cherryville convenience store by accidentally shooting his right foot.

According to an arrest warrant, Roberts dropped a .45-caliber handgun in front of Gasland USA on Sunday. The gun hit the ground and went off, a bullet striking Roberts in the foot.

Roberts faces several charges that include attempted robbery with a dangerous weapon and possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Police said the handgun had been altered to fire .410 shotgun shells.

Authorities said Roberts was in illegal possession of the gun because of his felony cocaine possession conviction in 2002 in Chautauqua County, New York.

Cherryville is about 40 miles northwest of Charlotte.

China wants 'red' mobile messages, not blue jokes

Beijing, January 24: Communist Party officials in central China have urged mobile phone-wielding citizens to send rousing "red" text messages instead of blue jokes, but the response has been more derision than revolution.

Nanyang city, in rural Henan province, recently told residents to "mobilise to compose and send healthy, positive, uplifting red text messages," the China Youth Daily reported on Thursday.

"Red sentences occupy the text message culture front!," Party officials urged in a local newspaper, the Youth Daily said.

China's 500 million mobile phone users rank as the world's most avid text message senders and passing ribald jokes and satirical jibes about leaders is a national pastime frowned on by unamused Party officials.

"The broad masses of residents should mobilise ... and fight the vulgar with the healthy," said the announcement.

But many citizens have responded to the campaign with only more catcalls, the China Youth Daily reported.

"Too funny, this itself is a joke," said one message pasted on an Internet site. "You go your noble way and let us go our tasteless way," said another.

Other residents wondered whether officials should be doing more useful things.

"All of you wallow in wine and women and want us to be pure-minded and puritanical," one Nanyang resident told the paper. "It's going a bit far."

Earthquakes provide vital nutrients for microbes

A new research by scientists at the Stanford University in California has suggested that earthquakes help to keep the microbes present deep in the crust of the Earth alive by providing them vital nutrients.

According to a report in New Scientist, Earth's crust is known to host hardy bacteria even several kilometres below the surface.

These cells have no sun or organic material to sustain them, so they feed off the chemical energy in reactive molecules like hydrogen dissolved in the water seeping out of the rock.

This means that their growth and survival is limited by the flow of nutrients from deeper sources.

Now, a new research by Norman Sleep and Mark Zoback of Stanford University, show that earthquakes could provide these nutrients.

According to the researchers, earthquakes would open up cracks in the crust, releasing pockets of deeper nutrient-rich water and exposing fresh rock that would further drive the chemical reactions that release molecules like hydrogen.

The researchers' calculations show that seismic events would happen regularly enough to ensure a dependable supply of food right across a tectonic plate, sustaining microbial life for billions of years.

This mechanism might also keep microbes supplied with nutrients deep in the single-plate crust of Mars, the report added.

Brain Surgery Lets Woman Enjoy Music

Now that surgeons have operated on Stacey Gayle's brain, her favorite musician no longer makes her ill. Four years after being diagnosed with epilepsy, Gayle recently underwent brain surgery at Long Island Jewish Medical Center to cure a rare condition known as musicogenic epilepsy.



Gayle, a 25-year-old customer service employee at a bank in Alberta, Canada, was suffering as many as 10 grand mal seizures a day, despite being treated with medications designed to control them. The condition became so bad she eventually had to quit her job and leave the church choir where she sang.

Eighteen months ago, she began to suspect that music by reggae and hip-hop artist Sean Paul was triggering some of her seizures. She recalled being at a barbecue and collapsing when the Jamaican rapper's music started playing, and then remembered having a previous seizure when she heard his music.

Her suspicions were confirmed on a visit to the Long Island medical center last February, when she played Paul's hit "Temperature" on her iPod for doctors. Soon after, she suffered three seizures.

"Being that the seizures could be triggered by the music, this was a very interesting opportunity to study Stacey's brain," said Dr. Ashesh Mehta, the hospital's director of epilepsy surgery.

During the first surgery, doctors implanted more than 100 electrodes in the right side of her brain to pinpoint the abnormal area of her brain.

The surgeons followed that procedure with a second surgery to remove the electrodes, along with parts of her brain suspected of causing the seizures.

"We used the latest techniques, including image guidance, to pinpoint the areas of abnormality, and the operating microscope to perform the procedure during a four-hour operation," Mehta said.

Within three days, the woman was released from the hospital and has not experienced a seizure since.

"I always live each day like it's my last," she said. "I want to show others that life does not end at epilepsy. I know I have what it takes to succeed."

Epidemic Feared - Gays May Spread Deadly Staph Infection to General Population

Reuters has reported that, "A drug-resistant strain of potentially deadly bacteria has moved beyond the borders of U.S. hospitals and is being transmitted among gay men during sex, researchers said on Monday.

"They said methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is beginning to appear outside hospitals in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles."

"'Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable,' said Binh Diep, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who led the study."

According to the study, at this point, homosexual men are 13 times more likely to contract the potentially deadly, drug-resistant strain of staph infection, but the fear is that, because the infection is spread via skin-to-skin contact, homosexual men may soon spread it to the general population.

Matt Barber, Policy Director for Cultural issues with Concerned Women for America (CWA), said, "The medical community has known for years that homosexual conduct, especially among males, creates a breeding ground for often deadly disease. In recent years we have seen a profound resurgence in cases of HIV/AIDS, syphilis, rectal gonorrhea and many other STDs among those who call themselves 'gay.'

"The human body is quite callous in how it handles mistreatment and the perversion of its natural functions. When two men mimic the act of heterosexual intercourse with one another, they create an environment, a biological counterfeit, wherein disease can thrive. Unnatural behaviors beget natural consequences.

"In recent years our culture has adopted a laissez faire attitude toward sexual deviancy. Television shows like Will and Grace glorify the homosexual lifestyle while our children are taught in schools that homosexuality is a perfectly healthy, alternative sexual 'orientation.' 'Stay out of our bedrooms!' we're often commanded by militant 'gay' activists.

"Well, now the dangerous and possibly deadly consequence of what occurs in those bedrooms is spilling over into the general population. It's not only frightening, it's infuriating.

"Citizens, especially parents, need to stand up and say, 'No More! We will no longer sit idly by while politically correct cultural elites endanger our children and larger communities through propagandist promotion of this demonstrably deadly lifestyle.'

"Why does it take a potentially deadly staph epidemic for people to acknowledge reality? Will that even do it? Enough is enough!" concluded Barber.

2,500-year-old 'First Sword under Heaven' discovered in China

A sword, said to be around 2,500 years old, has been discovered by Chinese archaeologists from an ancient tomb in the eastern province of Jiangxi.

The chief of the excavation team, Xu Changqing, has named the sword the "First Sword under Heaven."

"It is reckoned as the oldest ever excavated in the country," China Daily quoted Changqing, as saying.

The well-preserved 50 centimetre-long sword is black, gold and bright red.

"A dragon pattern was carved on both ends of the scabbard, and the middle part of the scabbard was decorated with two rows of a W-shaped design," Changqing said.

Two other heritage pieces dug out along with the sword from the same tomb have been named "First Mat under Heaven" and "First Fan under Heaven."

At least 1,000 relics have been found in the ancient tomb built in the late Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC) since the excavation work was launched in January last year.

Fossil of rodent that weighed as much as a one-tonne truck discovered

US researchers have discovered a fossil of a rodent in South America, which might be the largest rodent known to have existed.

In a boulder on the southern coast of Uruguay, the 53 centimetre-long skull of the new species, Josephoartigasia monesi, was discovered.

The researchers, based on the age of the rock, estimated that the skull is between two and four million years old.

"This is a remarkable finding because of the size of the animal and the fortunate completeness of the skull," Nature quoted evolutionary biologist Ines Horovitz of the University of California, Los Angeles, as saying. The scientists couldn't access other skeletal measures, such as the length of the limb bones that are traditionally used to estimate the size of an animal, because they found only the skull of the rodent.

However, the research team developed an equation relating skull length to body mass using information from 13 of J. monesi 's closest living relatives.

The calculation gave an estimate of 1,008 kilograms. Adding information from 6 other measures of skull size gave an estimate of 1,211 kilograms, with a likely range of 468 to 2,586 kilograms.

The relatively small grinding teeth in the skull suggested that J. monesi was a member of the Dinomyidae family, which contains just one living example, the pakarana. This rodent lives in South America and weighs roughly 15 kilograms.

The resemblance in molars and premolars suggest the bull-sized J. monesi had a relatively weak jaw and lived on roughly the same diet as its modern-day cousin: soft vegetation and fruit.