Walk in Space for $15 Million

Space Adventures Ltd., a company based in Vienna, Va., that has sent three very wealthy men to orbit the earth on the International Space Station, is planning to announce today that future customers will be able to take an hour-and-a-half trip outside the station as well.

The price? Just $15 million, on top of the $20 million for the flight itself. For people who can afford $20 million for a 10-day vacation, the extra $15 million might seem like little more than overtipping.

Warming to the idea of another shot at that view, he said, “I think if I had 15 million, I’d go for it.”
last minute deal
The spacewalks have been approved by the Federal Space Agency of the Russian Federation, which provides training and transportation to the station on Soyuz rockets, said Eric Anderson, the chief executive of Space Adventures.

Sage 1.3.10 extension for Mozilla Firefox

Sage is a lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox. It's got a lot of what you need and not much of what you don't.
* Reads RSS (2.0, 1.0, 0.9x) and Atom feeds
* Feed Discovery
* Integrates with Firefox's bookmark storage and Live Bookmarks
* Imports and exports OPML feed lists
* Newspaper feed rendering customizable via style sheets
* Technorati and RSS search engine integration
* Support for the following locales: Argentine Spanish, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish, and Swedish

I would give Sage a 10 rating with a slight refresh to make it compatible with Firefox 3. I've tried other RSS readers and really prefer Sage. A couple of the other reviewers ripped this reader pretty badly, but hey, the programs and readers that they use have been used by me and found lacking. Believe me, I've tried almost all of them looking for a replacement for Sage. A couple of months ago, I emailed three of the developers asking if they had plans to keep this project going. Not one of them emailed me back. So it seems that this fine piece of software is going to die on the vine. What a shame.

With so many RSS feeds out on the Web today, RSS is a really important technology in force. Unfortunately, Sage has not been able to keep up with the revolution - Web RSS readers such as Google Reader have surpassed it in features, ease of use, interface design, and convenience. For example, any RSS feeds viewed using Sage are left on that computer and viewable there only, unlike web-based readers, which allow you to view feeds anywhere. Furthermore, Sage has hardly been updated in the last two years.

Southeast Drought Improving

The record drought that has given the Southeast U.S. its driest conditions in at least a century, and possibly as long as 800 years in some places, is showing signs of relenting.

"At least 2 inches of rain fell from northern Louisiana into much of Georgia and northern Florida, bringing another round of reductions in the coverage and intensity of abnormal dryness and moderate to exceptional drought," the U.S. Drought Monitor reported Thursday, in its weekly assessment of drought conditions across the country.

"Rainfall was particularly heavy across southern Georgia and northern Florida, where a few locations received in excess of 10 inches. As a result, a gap widened between drought areas of Florida and the remainder of the Southeast," the report states. "In fact, improvements were fairly widespread across the Southeast, except along the northern fringe of the drought area."


base.google.com

U.S. drought conditions, as of February 26, 2008. U.S. Drought Monitor

Folk medicines contain lead

HOUSTON - Maria didn't mean to poison her children. Quite the opposite. Worried about her daughters' lack of appetite, the young Houston mother was merely following her grandmother's advice when she gave the two girls and a niece a dose of "greta" — a Mexican folk medicine used to treat children's stomach ailments.

The city Board of Health planned to vote Tuesday for a second time on the requirement for major fast-food chains, which make up about 10 percent of the city's restaurants. A federal judge struck it down in September, but indicated that the rule would be acceptable if it were expanded to include more restaurants.

If the measure is approved, any large fast-food chain would have to list calorie counts prominently on their menu boards. Several chains, like McDonald's and Burger King, have the information available, but don't list it on the menu boards that customers read before ordering.

City officials hope the rule would curb obesity by making people aware of the thousands of calories that can be packed into some of the meals. Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden said Monday he hoped the chains would also respond by offering healthier options.

"I don't think we're going to see the 2,700-calorie appetizers that we see now," Frieden said.

New York City — which banned trans-fat-laden cooking oils from all restaurants last year — is believed to be the first U.S. city to enact a regulation requiring calories on menus. Since then, California lawmakers and King County in Washington, which includes Seattle, have considered similar bills.

The new regulation would take effect March 31.

The Board of Health first passed a similar rule last year. It only applied to establishments that had already volunteered to post nutritional information about their products.

But a federal judge struck it down in September, indicating the rule would be acceptable if it were expanded to include the restaurants that had volunteered the calorie data as well as those that had not.

The new policy would apply to any chain that operates at least 15 separate establishments, including those that don't currently have any information on calories. Those chains would include International House of Pancakes and Hale & Hearty Soups, city officials said.

Messages left with the New York Restaurant Association, which sued last year over the law, weren't immediately returned Monday.

Fast-food companies have said the calorie counts would clutter menus and irritate customers who didn't necessarily want to be confronted with the information.

Why men find a leggy lady sexier and lovelier?

When it comes to snaring the perfect man, the solution could be as simple as slipping on a pair of high heels.
In a study that confirms what many of us have long suspected, scientists have shown that men find long legs attractive. Faced with the choice of two women of the same height, but with different leg length, they will tend to plump for the one with the longer legs.
It is thought that lengthy limbs are perceived as indicating good health, as well as social standing and the ability to be a good provider, New Scientist reports.

The finding could go some way to explaining the allure of models Jemma Kidd and Eva Herzigova, both of whom have provided the face - and legs - for campaigns by Pretty Polly tights. The researchers asked more than 200 volunteers to rate the attractiveness of a series of images of a silhouetted man or woman.
In each case, the legs had been lengthened or shortened slightly but the overall height remained the same.

Both sexes described the pictures in which the legs were slightly longer than average as being the most attractive.
Researcher Dr Boguslaw Pawlowski said: "Long legs are signalling health."
Studies have linked short legs to a variety of ailments, with stocky sorts at higher risk of heart disease and diabetes. Long legs could also indicate a prosperous background, as poor nutrition in teenage years is thought to stunt the growth of the limbs.

But while legs 5 per cent longer than average proved the most popular, very long legs - around 15 per cent above the norm - fared poorly.
The researchers from Wroclaw University in Poland said extremely long legs in a woman could indicate poor childbearing prospects.
"One can hypothesise that excessively long legs, and therefore excessively small torsos, might indicate insufficient space for development of a foetus."
Previous work by the same researchers suggests women regard taller men as good for a fling but see shorter men as better companions with whom to settle down.