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Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Mainstream rock singer Brian Melo has been crowned winner of Canadian Idol 2007 (Season five). The 25-year old Hamilton, Ontario native sang in front of an audience at the Air Canada Place in Toronto, Ontario. The show was two-hours.

Seventeen year old Johnny Cash and Elvis-inspired country singer Jaydee Bixby of Drumheller, Alberta finished in second.

The Canadian Idol Top 10 started off the show last night singing Jon Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name”.

The top 10, and a duet with the top two, did several performances throughout the show.

Canadian-International pop-rock singer Avril Lavigne performed “Hot” and “When You’re Gone” from her third new album the “Best Damn Thing”.

Season four winner of Canadian Idol, Eva Avila performed her song “Fallin’ For You”. Melo and Bixby presented her with gold and platinum disk awards for her debut single “Meant To Fly” and her debut album “Somewhere Else”.

Country-rock singer Jon Bon Jovi, who mentored the singers for Monday’s performances, sang their new song “Lost Highway” and 2000 song “It’s My Life”.

Canadian Idol allowed auditioners, their top 22, and top 10 to perform with instruments this year. No other Idol shows have allowed this. Top ten competitors Greg Neufeld sang and performed with his guitar and Dwight d’Eon sang and performed with his electrical guitar, with the top 10 last night.

Canadian Idol’s official top 3 competitors, including top three’s eliminated Carly Rae Jepson from Mission, British Columbia, are set to have an “Idol Winner’s” tour across 15 Canadian cities this fall. The tour will start November 18, 2007 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. They are expected to tour cities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. It finishes with a final show in Edmonton, Alberta on December 12, 2007.

It’s the first tour the show has ever done.

Melo, the winner, was a construction worker in Hamilton. He auditioned at the nearby Toronto auditions.

At the beginning of the season Bixby and Melo appeared as stiff performers but changed drastically throughout the weeks. Melo was in the bottom three, three times.

“Just remember that you are so privileged and enjoy every minute but you never know how long it’s going to last,” Avila said before the winner was announced by host Ben Mulroney.

An estimated five million votes were cast following Monday’s performances.

Local Hamiltonians gathered last night at Hamilton Place Theatre. Approximately 2,000 fans were there. Most people and fans from, or around, the town of Drumheller gathered in a local hockey rink to show their support for Bixby.

Melo’s new single “All I Ever Wanted” will be released on radio’s and online music stores through Sony BMG Music Canada at 12:00am on September 13, 2007. His debut album will be out this winter.

“I want to grow and get better with each album. I want to be an international star, I’m thinking of big things. I want to hit the American market, I want to hit the European market as much as I can,” Melo said.

Melo says he will go the full way and write songs for his album. He also said he has planned dates to meet with songwriters for some input on what he’ll write.

“But being in this process, there’s been so many songwriters, so many great musicians that haven’t gotten the credit . . . that they deserve. So hopefully I’ll be able to change that,” Melo said.

“‘Keep positive, keep on the positive side of things’,” Bixby said. “And you know, there’s nothing negative about coming in second in a national audition, so I’m very happy. I’m glad I made my parents proud.”

“I didn’t think a year ago that I would be standing here. If it wasn’t for the fans, my friends, my family and everyone in the Hammer… (Hamilton) It’s been amazing,” said Melo.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

English actress Rachel Weisz thinks that Botox injections should be banned for all actors.

The 39-year-old actress, best known for her roles in the Mummy movie franchise and for her Academy Award-winning portrayal in The Constant Gardener, feels facial Botox injections leave actors less able to convey emotion and that it harms the acting industry as much as steroids harm athletes.

In an interview with UK’s Harper’s Bazaar, coming out next month, Weisz says, “It should be banned for actors, as steroids are for sportsmen,” she claims. “Acting is all about expression; why would you want to iron out a frown?”

Currently living in New York, she also mentions that English women are much less worried about their physical appearance than in the United States. “I love the way girls in London dress,” she claimed. “It’s so different to the American ‘blow-dry and immaculate grooming’ thing.”

Friday, January 12, 2007

The iPhone only made its appearance as a prototype and there have been controversies aroused.

The dispute has come up between the manufacturer of the iPhone (which was presented on Wednesday for the first time) — Apple Inc. — and a leader in network and communication systems, based in San Jose — Cisco. The company claims to possess the trademark for iPhone, and moreover, that it sells devices under the same brand through one of its divisions.

This became the reason for Cisco to file a lawsuit against Apple Inc. so that the latter would stop selling the device.

Cisco states that it has received the trademark in 2000, when the company overtook Infogear Technology Corp., which took place in 1996.

The Vice President and general counsel of the company, Mark Chandler, explained that there was no doubt about the excitement of the new device from Apple, but they should not use a trademark, which belongs to Cisco.

The iPhone developed by Cisco is a device which allows users to make phone calls over the voice over Internet protocol (VoIP).

Saturday, June 25, 2022

Media reported Wednesday that biologists from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida reported having captured a Burmese python (Python bivittatus) measuring nearly 18 feet (5 m) in length and 215 pounds (97 kg) in weight in the state’s Everglades wetlands.

It may be the largest member of its species ever found outside its natural range in Southeast Asia. Another Burmese python measuring 18 feet and 9 inches (5.7 m) was found in 2020, but it only weighed 104 pounds (47.2 kilograms).

In a search documented by National Geographic, the team captured the current snake in December 2021 by tagging a male “scout snake” named Dionysius with a GPS tracking device and releasing it into the western Everglades.

“How do you find the needle in the haystack? You could use a magnet, and in a similar way our male scout snakes are attracted to the biggest females around,” said wildlife expert Ian Bartoszek, the team’s project manager.

Pythons are an invasive species in Florida. Removing female snakes from the environment before they lay their eggs is the Conservancy’s preferred strategy for limiting python breeding. When the team saw that Dionysius was spending several weeks in one area, they concluded he’d found a sexually mature female and set off to retrieve him.

It took twenty minutes of wrestling and three adult humans to carry the snake to a vehicle, in which it was taken to a laboratory in Naples, Florida and euthanized. Upon necropsy, it was found to contain over 122 healthy but unfertilized egg follicles.

Pythons were introduced to Florida in the 1970s, probably by being sold as pets. While there is a history of individual pet owners illegally releasing exotic animals into the wild after they grow larger than expected, the destruction caused by Hurricane Andrew in 1992 also allowed animals from a serpent center to escape to the Everglades and other habitats, where they reproduced in great numbers.

Since then, they have disrupted the food chain by eating local animals, including endangered animals: the stomach of this snake contained the remains of a white-tailed deer.

The state of Florida considers Burmese pythons a threat to native wildlife and sponsors an annual python hunt with USD2,500 as first prize.

Thursday, October 13, 2005Clashes between gunmen and police have broken out in the capital of the southern Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria where Chechen rebels claimed responsibility for the insurgency.

The fighting in Nalchik started after a coordinated set of attacks were carried out against city security forces and police stations. The airport and government buildings were also targeted. The strike is believed to have come from anywhere between 60 to 500 insurgents. The insurgents used heavy arms fire, coupled with explosions at the outset, that lasted five hours. A police station has been captured and hostages taken.

According to reports from Russian press sources, 61 of the gunmen have been killed and 17 have been captured, and there may be dozens of civilian casualties. Seven policemen were also killed. Several government buildings throughout the city are on fire and some schools have been involved and evacuated accordingly.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered the army to seal off the city and shoot any insurgent who tries to escape. Officials in the city are saying the situation is slowly returning to normal.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

NASA’s Cassini–Huygens spacecraft has discovered evidence for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft’s direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon. The study has been published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

Data from Cassini’s cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and usually low in salt far away from the moon. Closer to the moon’s surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an “ocean-like” composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt-water. When water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving pure water ice behind.

Cassini’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph also recently obtained complementary results that support the presence of a subsurface ocean. A team of Cassini researchers led by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, measured gas shooting out of distinct jets originating in the moon’s south polar region at five to eight times the speed of sound, several times faster than previously measured. These observations of distinct jets, from a 2010 flyby, are consistent with results showing a difference in composition of ice grains close to the moon’s surface and those that made it out to the E ring, the outermost ring that gets its material primarily from Enceladean jets. If the plumes emanated from ice, they should have very little salt in them.

“There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus’s icy surface,” said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

The data suggests a layer of water between the moon’s rocky core and its icy mantle, possibly as deep as about 50 miles (80 kilometers) beneath the surface. As this water washes against the rocks, it dissolves salt compounds and rises through fractures in the overlying ice to form reserves nearer the surface. If the outermost layer cracks open, the decrease in pressure from these reserves to space causes a plume to shoot out. Roughly 400 pounds (200 kilograms) of water vapor is lost every second in the plumes, with smaller amounts being lost as ice grains. The team calculates the water reserves must have large evaporating surfaces, or they would freeze easily and stop the plumes.

“We imagine that between the ice and the ice core there is an ocean of depth and this is somehow connected to the surface reservoir,” added Postberg.

The Cassini mission discovered Enceladus’ water-vapor and ice jets in 2005. In 2009, scientists working with the cosmic dust analyzer examined some sodium salts found in ice grains of Saturn’s E ring but the link to subsurface salt water was not definitive. The new paper analyzes three Enceladus flybys in 2008 and 2009 with the same instrument, focusing on the composition of freshly ejected plume grains. In 2008, Cassini discovered a high “density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected” in geysers erupting from the moon. The icy particles hit the detector target at speeds between 15,000 and 39,000 MPH (23,000 and 63,000 KPH), vaporizing instantly. Electrical fields inside the cosmic dust analyzer separated the various constituents of the impact cloud.

“Enceladus has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life,” said Dennis Matson in 2008, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“This finding is a crucial new piece of evidence showing that environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life can be sustained on icy bodies orbiting gas giant planets,” said Nicolas Altobelli, the European Space Agency’s project scientist for Cassini.

“If there is water in such an unexpected place, it leaves possibility for the rest of the universe,” said Postberg.

A compilation of brief news reports for Monday, May 7, 2007.

A 30 meter section of a gas pipeline in Luka (near Kiev) in Ukraine has been destroyed by an explosion. Although supplies to Europe via this pipeline have stopped, Ukrainian Energy Minister Georgi E. Boyko said that supplies to Europe would not be affected.

“There are no changes in volumes of gas being transported,” Yuri Korolchuk said. “Volumes due to pass through the damaged section are being redirected through the Soyuz pipeline.”

Normal flows are reported in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania.

Sources

• “Blast damages pipeline in Ukraine” — Russia Today, May 8, 2007
• Natalya Zinets, Reuters. “Blast hits Ukraine gas pipeline” — The Scotsman, May 7, 2007

Copper prices are rising. Between record copper imports from China, and a mining strike in Peru, the prices have climbed to over $8100 (United States dollars) a tonne, for a gain of $575 dollars over the last week. However the upward trend is not new, it has been climbing for quite some time. In April 2003, the price of copper was under $2000 a tonne.

The metal market has been tending up due to growth in the Chinese industrial production. This trickles down to the local level, where the buying price at scrap yards is ever climbing, making scrap metal collection a more profitable endeavour for individual people using pick up trucks or other such vehicles to collect and cash in the scrap metal at metal buying yards. It can be collected via agreements with businesses, from the garbage, or, sometimes, by theft.

Copper prices fell today on the NYMEX commodity exchange from US$3.7545 per pound to US$3.7125 based on the July futures contract.

Sources

• “Copper up but crude oil down” — Financial Express, May 6, 2007
• Millie Munshi. “Metals Bubble Poised to Burst on Increasing Supplies” — Bloomberg L.P., May 7, 2007
• “Commodity Futures” — Bloomberg L.P., accessed May 7, 2007

One man was killed and another injured by an exploding backpack in the parking lot of the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The explosion happened at 4 a.m. PDT when the victim tried to remove a the object left on top of his car.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are on the scene. Aerial images did not show any apparent damage.

“We believe the victim was the intended target of this,” Bill Cassell said, spokesperson for the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. “This is being treated as a homicide in which the weapon used to cause death is a non-traditional weapon.”

Both of the victims worked at the Luxor.

Sources

• Associated Press. “1 dead, 1 hurt in Las Vegas parking lot blast” — MSNBC, May 7, 2007
• “Explosion kills man in Vegas outside Luxor hotel” — Reuters, May 7, 2007