How to work less and do better

Think pulling all-nighters in your office, bringing work home with you, and never releasing that clutch of death on your Blackberry is the only way to succeed in your job? Wrong. According to a recently published Harvard Business Review study, that ‘always on’ work ethic is probably doing you more harm than good. Working more efficiently and taking designated time off each week can actually improve your attitude in the office, your dialogue among team members, and it can also help spark new innovative processes.
Learn how to work less and do better at Open Forum.
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Glowing green sperm really get around


Fluorescent sperm are revealing new details about exactly what happens during insemination and fertilization. Researchers genetically altered fruit flies so their sperm heads were fluorescent red or green allowing scientists to observe in striking detail what happens to live sperm inside the female.
“Despite nearly a century of intensive and innovative work on the reproductive biology of the fruit fly, much of what we know about the female reproductive tract is a mystery,” says Scott Pitnick, a professor of biology at Syracuse University. “Our jaws hit the floor the first time we looked through a microscope and saw these glowing sperm. It turns out that they are constantly on the move within the female’s specialized sperm-storage organs and exhibit surprisingly complex behavior.”
Full story at Futurity.
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Top 5 infections you can pick up at the nail salon


How can a desire for well-groomed nails lead you straight to the doctor's office? It's not uncommon for hands and feet to get nicked and cut with all of the buffing and clipping that goes on. And wherever you have open wounds and a lot of skin-to-skin and skin-to-surface contact, you have a very good chance of picking up some gross bacteria or viruses.
While the majority of nail salon visits won't send you on your way with anything other than an excellent manicure and pedicure, customers -- and salon workers -- are at risk of spreading disease. We've got five culprits to watch out for.
  • Athlete's Foot: Unfortunately, the pedicure baths of a salon provide a breeding ground.
  • Swine Flu: H1N1 is a highly contagious strain of the flu virus. The virus can survive outside the body for up to eight hours, meaning that an infected customer at a salon can unknowingly booby-trap the establishment with the virus.
Full list at HowStuffWorks.com.
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Elton John's lover committed suicide after struggling to come to terms with sexuality

Sir Elton John has disclosed that a former lover threw himself to his death under a passing lorry because he could not reconcile his homosexuality with his Christian beliefs.
 
Elton John : Elton John's lover committed suicide after struggling to come to terms with sexuality
Elton John said he was deeply traumatised by the suicide of the man Photo: REX
The singer, 62, said he was deeply traumatised by the suicide of the man, with whom he had been involved in a relationship before he "married" David Furnish, a film-maker 15 years his junior, in 2005.
"Years back I had a relationship, and I had absolutely no idea in the world he was going to do this... he threw himself under a truck," Sir Elton said. "There was so much grief."
Mr Furnish told The Sunday Telegraph that the lover, whom he declined to name, had taken his life because he was traumatised by the clash between his Christianity and his sexual inclinations.
"He was so tortured by the conflicting views between his sexuality and his strong religious beliefs that he chose to take his own life," said Furnish, whom Sir Elton "married" in a ceremony at Windsor Guildhall on the first day that civil partnerships could be performed in England. "It is very sad indeed."
Mr Furnish, a former advertising executive, added that "out of respect" for the dead man's family he would not name him.
Sir Elton, who has a fortune estimated at £175 million, said his grief had inspired him to provide financial support for a stage play that opened in New York last week.
The couple are producers of the play, Next Fall, which documents the relationship between two homosexual men: one a young Christian from the southern states of America; the other, a non-believer. One of the men suffers an accident.
"It's the right timing for this," said Mr Furnish. "The religious divide between Right and Left has gotten wider, and so the rights of gay people never got back to where it was heading."
Sir Elton added: "Look, we all need love. We all have the same fears and insecurities. We should all be allowed to be free."
The disclosure by the flamboyant musician is likely to provoke much speculation about the identity of his late lover.
Sir Elton was known for his sexual promiscuity during the 1970s and 1980s when he struggled with addiction to alcohol and illegal drugs, and suffered from bulimia.
On Valentine's Day 1984, the musician, who has claimed that everyone is bisexual to a degree, caused widespread surprise by marrying Renate Blauel, German recording engineer, When they divorced four years later.
Sir Elton said he was "comfortable" being homosexual.
Mr Furnish said of Sir Elton, whose first sexual experience had been with a woman, the secretary Linda Woodrow: "For many, many years, he had a lot of demons stored away; a lot of skeletons in his closet. And he's learnt that a happy and burden-free life comes out of being honest."
Among Sir Elton's ex-lovers was John Reid, his former manager, with whom he was involved in an unsuccessful £8 million High Court battle in 2000.
During the case, in which the singer claimed that Reid mishandled his business affairs, he admitted spending £30 million in less than two years, including almost £15,000 a month on flowers.
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5 famous pairs of lips


They're the most sensual part of the body that's out there for all the world to see. They're vulnerable and expressive. Good lips are crucial to sexual attractiveness.
While some celebrity lips are admired for a while, others become icons. These 5 famous lips are among the most recognizable celebrity lips you're sure to know. See five famous pairs of lips at HowStuffWorks.
  • Angelina Jolie: One sign of the fame of Angelina's lips: There are Web sites on which people devote a good deal of time and energy discussing whether they're real.
  • Mick Jagger: As if anyone would ever forget them, Mick Jagger's lips are now enshrined in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. At an auction in September 2008, the museum paid $92,500 for the Rolling Stones' lips and tongue logo original artwork.
Full list at HowStuffWorks.com.
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'Snowball' Earth may have given birth to first animals

Snowball Earth: New Evidence Hints at Global Glaciation 716.5 Million Years Ago

ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2010) — Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a "snowball Earth" event long suspected to have taken place around that time.
Led by scientists at Harvard University, the team reports on its work in the journal Science. The new findings -- based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada -- bolster the theory that our planet has, at times in the past, been ice-covered at all latitudes.
"This is the first time that the Sturtian glaciation has been shown to have occurred at tropical latitudes, providing direct evidence that this particular glaciation was a 'snowball Earth' event," says lead author Francis A. Macdonald, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard. "Our data also suggests that the Sturtian glaciation lasted a minimum of 5 million years."
The survival of eukaryotic life throughout this period indicates sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on the surface of Earth. The earliest animals arose at roughly the same time, following a major proliferation of eukaryotes.
Even in a snowball Earth, Macdonald says, there would be temperature gradients on Earth and it is likely that ice would be dynamic: flowing, thinning, and forming local patches of open water, providing refuge for life.
"The fossil record suggests that all of the major eukaryotic groups, with the possible exception of animals, existed before the Sturtian glaciation," Macdonald says. "The questions that arise from this are: If a snowball Earth existed, how did these eukaryotes survive? Moreover, did the Sturtian snowball Earth stimulate evolution and the origin of animals?"
"From an evolutionary perspective," he adds, "it's not always a bad thing for life on Earth to face severe stress."
The rocks Macdonald and his colleagues analyzed in Canada's Yukon Territory showed glacial deposits and other signs of glaciation, such as striated clasts, ice rafted debris, and deformation of soft sediments. The scientists were able to determine, based on the magnetism and composition of these rocks, that 716.5 million years ago they were located at sea level in the tropics, at about 10 degrees latitude.
"Because of the high albedo of ice, climate modeling has long predicted that if sea ice were ever to develop within 30 degrees latitude of the equator, the whole ocean would rapidly freeze over," Macdonald says. "So our result implies quite strongly that ice would have been found at all latitudes during the Sturtian glaciation."
Scientists don't know exactly what caused this glaciation or what ended it, but Macdonald says its age of 716.5 million years closely matches the age of a large igneous province stretching more than 1,500 kilometers (932 miles) from Alaska to Ellesmere Island in far northeastern Canada. This coincidence could mean the glaciation was either precipitated or terminated by volcanic activity.
Macdonald's co-authors on the Science paper are Phoebe A. Cohen, David T. Johnston, and Daniel P. Schrag at Harvard; Mark D. Schmitz and James L. Crowley of Boise State University; Charles F. Roots of the Geological Survey of Canada; David S. Jones of Washington University in St. Louis; Adam C. Maloof of Princeton University; and Justin V. Strauss.
This work was supported by the Polar Continental Shelf Project and the National Science Foundation's Geobiology and Environmental Geochemistry Program.
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One in SIX Americans has genital herpes

*Highest rates found among blacks, women
*
By JoAnne Allen
WASHINGTON, March 9 (Reuters) - About 16 percent of Americans between the ages of 14 and 49 are infected with genital herpes, making it one of the most common sexually transmitted diseases, U.S. health officials said on Tuesday.
Black women had the highest rate of infection at 48 percent and women were nearly twice likely as men to be infected, according to an analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About 21 percent of women were infected with genital herpes, compared to only 11.5 percent of men, while 39 percent of blacks were infected compared to about 12 percent for whites, the CDC said.
There is no cure for genital herpes, or herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2), which can cause recurrent and painful genital sores and also increases the likelihood of acquiring and transmitting the AIDS virus. It is related to herpes simplex virus 1, or oral herpes, which causes cold sores.
Several drugs are available to treat herpes symptoms and outbreaks, including acyclovir, which is available generically or under the Zovirax brand name, and valacyclovir, known generically as Valtrex -- both made by GlaxoSmithKline PLC (GSK.L). Ganciclovir, sold as Zirgan, is made by privately-held Sirion Therapeutics, Inc.
The CDC estimates that more than 80 percent of people with genital herpes do not know they are infected.
"The message is herpes is quite common. The symptoms can be often very innocuous," Dr. John Douglas of the CDC said in a teleconference.
"Because herpes is so prevalent it becomes ... a really important reason to use condoms on a consistent and correct basis with all of your partners," Douglas said.
Douglas said the increased rate of infection in blacks is not do to increased risk behavior but likely due to biological factors that make women more susceptible as well as the higher rate of infection within black communities.
The CDC estimates that there are 19 million new sexually transmitted disease infections every year in the United States, costing the health care system about $16 billion annually.
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Four in five believe internet access is a fundamental right

Four in five people around the word believe that web access is a fundamental human right, according to a new survey.
Web access: fundamental right
Seventy-eight per cent of the web users polled believe that the web offers them greater freedom.
The poll, which collated the answers from more than 27,000 people across 26 countries and was conducted on behalf of the BBC World Service, found that 87 per cent of intent users felt that web access should be a basic right. More than 70 per cent of non-users felt they should have access to the net.

In Japan, Mexico and Russia, nearly 75 per cent of respondents said they could not cope without their internet connection. Ninety per cent of those polled in Turkey believed web access was a fundamental human right, making it the strongest supporter of the widely held sentiment.
"The right to communicate cannot be ignored," Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), told BBC News.
"The internet is the most powerful potential source of enlightenment ever created."
He said that governments must "regard the internet as basic infrastructure - just like roads, waste and water".
Seventy-eight per cent pollsters believe that the web gave them greater levels of freedom. This belief was most popular with the US respondents, who were also the respondents that were the most confident to express their opinions openly online.
However, many web users expressed concerns about the dangers of hacking, fraud and privacy. A majority of internet users in Japan, Germany, France, China and South Korea were not confident about expressing their opinions online.
But government regulation was not viewed as the correct method to solve these issues, with over half of the 27,000 respondents agreeing that that internet “should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere”.
Participants in South Korea, Nigeria and Mexico heavily agreed with this statement – however the belief was less popularly expressed by respondents in Turkey, Pakistan and China. Only 16 per cent of the Chinese respondents agreed with the need to ensure that governments refrain from regulating the web. China’s government has faced increasing scrutiny after Google, the largest search engine, threaten to leave the world’s biggest web market earlier this year, because of the country’s strict censorship rules and suspicions of untoward hacking.
"Despite worries about privacy and fraud, people around the world see access to the internet as their fundamental right," said Doug Miller, the chairman of GlobeScan which conducted the survey. "They think the web is a force for good, and most don't want governments to regulate it."
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My boyfriend can't stop going on about the amazing sex with his ex

I have been going out with my partner for two years and we are planning to move in together, but one thing threatens to derail our happiness. He has a tendency to mention his ex, with whom he lived for five years.
She was an extremely difficult and demanding woman, but he's given me the impression she was always passionate in the bedroom, and I can't help feeling that he thinks they had better sex than we do.
I don't want to seem haunted and jealous, but I really wish he would drop the subject. What should I do?
Man and woman in bed
Some women have a maddening way of looming over their successors - even when they're dead, or miles away
This is a textbook case of Rebecca Syndrome, named in tribute to Daphne du Maurier's famous novel about a wealthy widower's second wife who finds her life haunted by her glamorous predecessor.
Some women have a maddening way of looming over their successors  -  even when they're dead, or miles away.
I'm afraid those women invariably are of a certain type: the femme fatale.
Just look at the way you describe your partner's ex: 'difficult', 'demanding' and 'passionate'.
I bet she's the sort of person who smashes plates, slams down phones and then uses sex to reel her victims back in.
Imagine how any woman who's ever dated a man after Angelina Jolie's had her teeth stuck into him must feel! A bit mousy and second-best is my guess.
And let's get one thing clear here: your resentment is not in the least bit irrational.
Nobody wants to be constantly reminded that they are the second Mrs de Winter. Particularly when the person doing the reminding is Mr de Winter.
Shame on your boyfriend for making you feel inadequate, when you're bending over backwards to be accommodating.
It seems to me that there's one of two things going on here and, without knowing him, I can't tell which it is.
He's either a) a complete dunderhead who has no grasp whatsoever of female psychology and is just being clumsy and needy, or b) he's manipulative and controlling and is deliberately trying to undermine you because he himself feels inadequate.
If the latter hypothesis chimes any bells then I would seriously reconsider your future with this man. A few nasty male specimens retain their girlfriends by constantly whittling away at their confidence and implying that they'll never match up to some mythical uber-vixen.
The majority of men are grateful that an attractive woman wants to have sex with them and wouldn't dream of adjudicating bedroom performance as if we were show ponies.
If your boyfriend's merely the clumsy kind (which seems more likely, since you love him), then the only way to proceed is to sit him down and tell him how insensitive he's being.
Ask him how he'd feel if you kept mentioning an ex-boyfriend and talking about the sex you'd had. He'd probably be hoofing it out of the door in a nanosecond.
I think it's possible that your chap has no idea how overshadowed you feel and that he doesn't actually think this ex was better in bed.
Most men find demanding, volatile women quite draining in the long run and prefer to make love than be forced to perform.
It's likely that he's working his way through a painful psychodrama by talking about the past relationship (using you as his therapist), but that the last thing in the world he wants is for you to imitate his ex.
I really do think that you need to look at the inner dynamics of your relationship, because the more confident you feel in your boyfriend's love, the less you'll worry about his ex.
Indeed, I have one female friend who was so confident of her husband's love that she was entirely happy to move into a flat that his first wife had decorated with hand-painted frescos, telling me with admirable sang froid she was pleased she didn't have to think about the decor.
More than that, she has the same Christian name as the first wife and they are both artists.
Is your own insecurity perhaps born of the fact that you sense a passion in your boyfriend's former relationship that is not coursing through your own?
It could, of course, be the case that you are dwelling so hard on his past that you are not concentrating enough on your present and future. Don't try and imitate his exlover when you could be creating sparks of your own.
Because you are in the process of taking a big step, by sharing a home, it might be sensible to consider some form of couples' therapy with a qualified relationship counsellor (try Relate or the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy's websites).
Give Rebecca's ghost a vigorous exorcism! Your new home's meant for two, not three.
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Finger Fail: Why Most Touchscreens Miss the Point

screen_wars
You’re not crazy, and neither are we: The touchscreen on the Apple iPhone really is more responsive than the screens on the BlackBerry Storm, the Motorola Droid, the Nexus One and many other phones, even though all of these devices use essentially the same touch-sensing hardware.

Though handset makers buy their touchscreens as components from the same select pool of suppliers, a good touchscreen experience requires more than just hardware. It requires a bit of design alchemy blending software, engineering and calibration for the perfect feel. Few smartphone makers have managed to get that balance right, say experts.
“If you think that no other touchscreen out there is as good as the iPhone, its not all in your head,” says Chris Verplaetse, vice president of the Moto Development Group, a product design and development firm. “It’s like asking what makes a Mercedes door close like a Mercedes door and a Hyundai door close like one though they use the same steel. There’s clearly a difference.”
Variables include engineering details such the calibration of the touch sensor so it can separate the signal from the noise, the quality of the firmware and the level of integration of the touch experience into the phone’s user interface. There are also more difficult-to-quantify things such as as the level of the company’s commitment to making the best touchscreen experience possible.
“Many layers account for the performance of a touchscreen,” says Verplaetse. “But it all comes down to how well the electronics and the mechanical hardware are integrated.”
As cellphones became more powerful, allowing users to surf the internet and check e-mail, handset makers started to add touch capability to their phones.  The earliest screens were resistive touchscreens, where two thin metallic layers are separated by a narrow gap. A finger pushing down on the top layer makes contact with the bottom surface and the point of contact is computed by the accompanying electronics.
But resistive touchscreens didn’t make most consumers happy because they weren’t responsive enough — you had to really push and hammer away at the display with your fingernail or a stylus to get it to respond.
The capacitive touchscreen in Apple’s iPhone changed the game, because it’s not pressure-sensitive. Instead, this kind of technology responds to the electrical properties of your skin, not the pressure of your finger, to figure out where you’re touching the screen. For the first time, just a light tap could open an application or a flicking gesture could get the screen scrolling. Best of all, it seemed effortless.
A projected capacitive touchscreen — the kind that’s usually used in phones — has a glass insulator coated with a transparent conductive layer. The layer is etched into a gridlike pattern. When a finger touches the surface of the screen, it distorts the electrostatic field. That can be measured as a change in capacitance.  The location of the touch is computed and it is passed on to a software application that relates the touch into actions for the device.
In theory, all capacitive touchscreens should offer consumers the same experience, but they rarely do, says Andrew Hsu, a technology strategist for Synaptics, one of the biggest touchscreen component makers.
“Capacitive touch-based handsets involve a lot of development work and quite a bit of engineering expertise in order to give them their ‘magical’ quality,” says Hsu.

It’s Not Just About Hardware

Smartphone users have no way to measure exactly how well the capacitive sensor system on their phone is actually working. Their perception is based on the feedback they see on the screen, says Hsu. That means a touchscreen could be quite fast and accurate, but if the visual display doesn’t keep up, it won’t feel smooth or responsive.
That’s where well-designed user interfaces and quality firmware come into play.
“Some systems are better at it than others,” says Hsu.
Synaptics ran tests comparing the iPhone touchscreen to the original BlackBerry Storm. They found that the Storm’s touchscreen sensor responded well, which pointed the finger at the underlying firmware.
It’s also a reason why BlackBerry maker Research In Motion was able to fix some of the lag and the bugginess of the screen that reviewers had initially complained about. Subsequent updates to the Storm’s software significantly improved its responsiveness to touch.
Another problem is separating signal from noise, which some phones are better at than others.
A perfectly designed and well-tuned capacitive sensing system would require no pressure to detect the presence of a user’s finger. But to get there, handset makers have to solve what Hsu calls the “needle in a haystack problem.”
The amount of signal that your finger contributes when it touches the sensor is very small compared to the noise already present in the system. To accurately sense it and compute its location requires some software magic.
“Even if you design the entire touchscreen right, once you put it into the device, there’s an impact from other sources that emit electromagnetic interference, such as the wireless unit,” says Hsu.
That’s where an ASIC, or application specific integrated circuit, is needed to measure and amplify the signals. Apple reportedly designed its own ASIC for the iPhone’s touchscreen, while most other companies buy an ASIC from one of the touchscreen chipmakers.
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10 ways to drive traffic with LinkedIn

In a guest post at Problogger, Lewis Howes explains ten ways to drive traffic to your blog using LinkedIn. Three of the ways are:
  • For crying out loud, complete your profile.
  • Customize your links.
  • Answer questions
Full story at Problogger.
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Turn your favorite tee into a laptop sleeve


Ahh, there’s nothing like your favorite old shirt—except this time it’s on your laptop. Literally. The folks at Hello Rewind take old shirts and transform them into new laptop sleeves, so you can enjoy your beloved tees all over again. What’s more, the company employs formerly sex trafficked women to help make the sleeves, allowing them to find a new source of income and handy, new skills. This way, you get a cool, new duds for your laptop and help other people at the same time.
Read the full story at the Hello Rewind site.
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