Google Now officially gets widgets in latest Google Search update

Seems like it was only a couple days ago that we were tipped to home screen and Android 4.2 lock screen widgets for Google Now, and today that update has come, along with a few other trinkets.

First off is that widget. It works on a home screen or lock screen (the latter only if you've got Android 4.2). We not noticing any real customizable settings just yet -- sing out if you see any. But you can at least resize it on the home screen, and you might well need to if it tries to take up a full 4x4 spot by default.

Then there's support for movie passes from Fandango, as well as ratings from Rotten Tomatoes. If you're searching for a home, you'll get real-estate listings from Zillo. In the United States, you'll now see a music button when a song is playing in voice mode. And, as some of you have already noticed this week, there's now support for college sports. (Just in time for March Madness!)

Update: Google's got a blog post detailing the update here.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/androidcentral/~3/pWQ3CP6c0tE/story01.htm

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Woman's death linked to Coca-cola addiction

A New Zealand coroner has linked the death of a 31-year-old woman to her Coca-Cola addiction.

Natasha Harris died Feb. 25, 2010 from a cardiac arrhythmia, according to a 19-page coroner's report obtained by ABCNews.com. And while Harris, a mother of eight from Invercargill, New Zealand, was known to smoke heavily and skip multiple meals, coroner David Crerar concluded that the sugar and caffeine she got by drinking more than 2.6 gallons of Coca-Cola Classic per day was "a substantial factor" in her death.

"When all of the available evidence is considered, were it not for the consumption of very large quantities of Coke by Natasha Harris, it is unlikely that she would have died when she died and how she died," Crerar wrote in his report.

Harris's partner, Christopher Hodgkinson, said Harris would get headaches and act moody without her Coke fix, according to the coroner's report. Close friends said she would "get the shakes" and other withdrawal symptoms. Her heart would race, her liver was swollen, and her rotting teeth had to be removed. But, said the report, "the family did not consider that Coke was harmful due to the fact of it having no warning signs."

"Natasha Harris knew, or ought to have known and recognized, the health hazard of her chosen diet and lifestyle," Crerar wrote in his report, adding that fact that Harris had her teeth extracted several years before her death "should have been treated by her, and by her family, as a warning."

Dr. Christopher Holstege, chief of medical toxicology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said anything can be toxic in large enough quantities.

"In toxicology, everything comes down to dose. And it sounds as though she was certainly taking an excessive dose," he said, adding that drinking two gallons of soda per day with limited amounts of food can cause a dangerous imbalance in electrolytes. "You're also not getting essential nutrients when you're only drinking Coke. You're basically getting sugar, and you're going to be deficient in vitamins, minerals and other essential nutrients."

Harris's reported Coke habit would have delivered more than 2.2 pounds of sugar daily, according to the coroner's report. She would have also ingested nearly a gram of caffeine, according to Coca-Cola's website.

"To me, it sounds like she was not a healthy woman in any way, shape or form," said Holstege.

Can too much caffeine kill you?

A spokesman for Coca-Cola expressed sympathy for Harris's family and disappointment that the coroner chose "to focus on the combination of Ms. Harris' excessive consumption of Coca-Cola, together with other health and lifestyle factors, as the probable cause of her death."

"Excessive consumption of one food or beverage - even water - to the exclusion of all others will not provide the essential nutrients an adult needs and is not recommended under New Zealand Food and Nutrition Guidelines," he said. "The safety of our products is paramount, and our promise is to deliver safe, quality beverages. All of our products have a place in an active, healthy lifestyle that includes a sensible, balanced diet and regular physical activity."

While Crerar noted that the ingredients of Coke are "entirely legal" and "enjoyed by millions," he said the risks of high doses were not adequately communicated to consumers.

"The hazards to the health of the consumers of excessive quantities of sugar and caffeine contained in carbonated beverages could be more clearly emphasized," he wrote.

Also Read

Source: http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/moms-death-linked-coke-coroners-report-164723213--abc-news-health.html

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Facebook app lets you 'Bang With Friends'

If you're looking to get a "bang" out of your Facebook friends on Valentine's Day, there is an app for that.

Bang With Friends is a controversial app that, as the name implies, is supposed to be no-nonsense way to learn which of your friends is interested in having sex. The app's logo and introductory screen shot leave no doubt about its intent.

Since launching on Jan. 23, the app has "already hooked up over 100,000 couples," according to an e-mail from the three California college students who created the app.

"It began as a result of a drunken night of coding when we discussed the dishonesty and other issues with online dating, then took off on its own from there," said the students, who have not publicly revealed their names or college.

The app has also been called "The Evilest App Ever" by the student-oriented group InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA, which says finding Facebook friends with benefits can only hurt loved ones, lead to marital infidelity and add unnecessary emotional baggage.

BWF's creators said they "humbly disagree."

"This is very real - our 600,000 users in (less than) three weeks tell us that the unabashed, honest approach is something that resonates with our generation - Generation Y," the e-mail said.

The app lists Facebook friends, allowing a choice of males, females or both. Clicking a "Down to Bang" button below each profile picture sends a message. Both sides are notified only if the prospective banger responds, and then it's game on.

The app also keeps score of celebrities people say they want to bang. On Wednesday, Jon Stewart was just ahead of rival TV show host Stephen Colbert, 300,000 to 294,000.

This sterile tech approach to sex and romance comes at the same time as a new survey commissioned by the online dating service AnastasiaDate. The survey, conducted by Harris Interactive, found that 1 in 4 American men "are too lazy to go out and find the woman of their dreams and of those who do, one quarter are too nervous to speak to a woman whom they find attractive."

But 74 percent of men and women surveyed also said technology has made dating easier and 55 percent believe online dating let them know about the person before committing to an actual date.

Still, with technology like Bang With Friends, who needs romance?

Indeed, there has been a "steady escalation" of technology-related sexual problems during the last 10 years, said Robert Weiss, a sexual addiction expert from Los Angeles.

Apps like Bang with Friends aren't necessarily bad if all you're looking for is casual sex, which for some people is like going to the gym, said Weiss, co-author of the books "Cybersex Exposed: Simple Fantasy or Obsession?" and "Untangling the Web: Sex, Porn, and Fantasy Obsession in the Internet Age."

But overreliance on such technology could make it harder for some people to develop the dating and social skills they need to find more lasting, emotionally satisfying relationships, he said.

"If you're 22 years old and you don't have a date on Valentine's Day, but you're guaranteed to hook up ... why take the time to take someone to dinner?" he said. "There's a much lower skill set required to get laid than there used to be."

Source: http://feeds.sfgate.com/click.phdo?i=4851c5f667369afa30cce12b7db11590

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New material promises better solar cells

Feb. 12, 2013 ? Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology show that a recently discovered class of materials can be used to create a new kind of solar cell.

Single atomic layers are combined to create novel materials with completely new properties. Layered oxide heterostructures are a new class of materials, which has attracted a great deal of attention among materials scientists in the last few years. A research team at the Vienna University of Technology, together with colleagues from the USA and Germany, has now shown that these heterostructures can be used to create a new kind of extremely efficient ultra-thin solar cells.

Discovering New Material Properties in Computer Simulations

"Single atomic layers of different oxides are stacked, creating a material with electronic properties which are vastly different from the properties the individual oxides have on their own," says Professor Karsten Held from the Institute for Solid State Physics, Vienna University of Technology. In order to design new materials with exactly the right physical properties, the structures were studied in large-scale computer simulations. As a result of this research, the scientists at TU Vienna discovered that the oxide heterostructures hold great potential for building solar cells.

Turning Light into Electricity

The basic idea behind solar cells is the photoelectric effect. Its simplest version was already explained by Albert Einstein in 1905: when a photon is absorbed, it can cause an electron to leave its place and electric current starts to flow. When an electron is removed, a positively charged region stays behind -- a so called "hole." Both the negatively charged electrons as well as the holes contribute to the electrical current.

"If these electrons and holes in the solar cell recombine instead of being transported away, nothing happens and the energy cannot be used," says Elias Assmann, who carried out a major part of the computer simulations at TU Vienna. "The crucial advantage of the new material is that on a microscopic scale, there is an electric field inside the material, which separates electrons and holes." This increases the efficiency of the solar cell.

Two Isolators Make a Metal

The oxides used to create the material are actually isolators. However, if two appropriate types of isolators are stacked, an astonishing effect can be observed: the surfaces of the material become metallic and conduct electrical current. "For us, this is very important. This effect allows us to conveniently extract the charge carriers and create an electrical circuit," says Karsten Held. Conventional solar cells made of silicon require metal wires on their surface to collect the charge carriers -- but these wires block part of the light from entering the solar cell.

Not all photons are converted into electrical current with the same efficiency. For different colors of light, different materials work best. "The oxide heterostructures can be tuned by choosing exactly the right chemical elements," says Professor Blaha (TU Vienna). In the computer simulations, oxides containing Lanthanum and Vanadium were studied, because that way the materials operate especially well with the natural light of the sun. "It is even possible to combine different kinds of materials, so that different colors of light can be absorbed in different layers of the solar cell at maximum efficiency," says Elias Assmann.

Putting Theory into Practice

The team from TU Vienna was assisted by Satoshi Okamoto (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, USA) and Professor Giorgio Sangiovanni, a former employee of TU Vienna, who is now working at W?rzburg University, Germany. In W?rzburg, the new solar cells will now be build and tested. "The production of these solar cells made of oxide layers is more complicated than making standard silicon solar cells. But wherever extremely high efficiency or minimum thickness is required, the new structures should be able to replace silicon cells," Karsten Held believes.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Vienna University of Technology, TU Vienna.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. elias Assmann, Peter Blaha, Robert Laskowski, Karsten Held, Satoshi Okamoto, and Giorgio Sangiovanni. Oxide Heterostructures for Efficient Solar Cells. Phys. Rev. Lett., 110, 078701 (2013) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.078701

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/S96gT2utXbg/130212075216.htm

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A Baby Shower With An Aviation Theme ? Timmester Photography

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Emily and Erick are just a few weeks away from having their first child, a baby boy!? To celebrate, Emily?s sister, the creative and thoughtful Christie of Events in the City,? threw a fabulous baby shower at Mon Ami Gabi in Reston.? The theme was aviation and the space was decked out in model airplanes, ?in flight meal? menus, destination table names, stacked luggage, and aviator sunglasses for attendees.? The scene was absolutely adorable, everyone laughed a lot and ate yummy food, Emily walked away with tons of cute baby loot, and the guests departed with hip aviator glasses.? Congrats, Emily & Erick!

Mom-to-be Emily surrounded by her mother and party host, Christie.

The ladies of Events in the City. :)

The family feud-style game was a big hit. :)

? Named a Top Wedding Photographer by Virginia Living Magazine

Source: http://www.timmesterphoto.com/blog/a-baby-shower-with-an-aviation-theme/

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State of the Union address: Why no mention of coal?

President Obama made no mention of coal during the State of the Union address last night, Miller writes, which in turn has caused one collective bipartisan question: Why not?

By Lisa Camooso Miller,?Americas' Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) / February 13, 2013

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President Barack Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, gives his State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday. Miller offers a look at what some members of Congress are saying about the president?s omission of coal-based electricity from Tuesday night?s speech.

Charles Dharapak/AP/Pool

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Yesterday we?wondered if President Obama?would take the advice of then candidate Obama regarding 21^st Century coal-based electricity.? President Obama made no mention of coal during the State of the Union address last night, which in turn has caused one collective bipartisan question.? Why not?

Skip to next paragraph Lisa Camooso Miller

Vice President for Media Relations, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE)

Lisa Camooso Miller is ACCCE's vice president for media relations. She oversees ACCCE's earned media implementation and strategic planning and appears regularly in print, radio and on national television. For more than 15 years, Lisa has been a notable communications leader in public affairs, holding key positions in local, state and federal government, political campaigns and committees, as well as advocacy organizations.

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Here?s a look at what some members of Congress are saying about the President?s omission of coal-based electricity from last night?s speech:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV):??I was, however, disappointed that he refused to mention coal when he discussed controlling our energy future. I?ve consistently pushed for an all-of-the-above energy policy and this President must do the same. Any discussion of our nation?s energy future must include coal.?

Rep Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV):??He expressly said that he would pick winners and losers in the energy economy, and we all know coal will be in the losing column. The Administration?s rules and regulations have already contributed to 2,000 layoffs throughout Appalachia, and one recent report found that West Virginia lost 1,200 mining jobs in the last quarter of 2012 alone. ? I am disappointed that the President is choosing to pursue his broken economic and energy agendas with even more fervor.?

Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH):??Finally, the President renewed his call for a so called ?all of the above? energy policy while simultaneously attacking America?s cheapest and most reliable source of energy ? coal. His anti-energy policies continue to ignore America?s vast natural resources like natural gas and coal, and the millions of jobs that go with harvesting them. His war on coal, and his rejection of a job-creating energy project like the Keystone XL Pipeline are perfect examples of his failed policies.?

Rep. Nick J. Rahall (D-WV):??But, on the energy front, he is absolutely wrong in his misguided efforts to circumvent the Congress with unilateral regulatory actions that will result in job loss, especially when it comes to the EPA?s unfair and inequitable treatment of coal mining in Appalachia, which the Congress and the courts are rightly resisting. I intend to keep on doing all that I can to promote coal and keep our miners on the job producing affordable energy for the Nation.?

Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA):??President Obama pledged in 2011 to review all federal regulations and remove burdensome ones that inhibit job creation and economic growth. Instead, our nation?s job creators have been handed a ?regulation wave? from federal agencies, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency. In Georgia alone, the EPA?s war on coal has already forced plant closures around the state, resulting in the loss of 500 jobs.?

The Monitor allows its sponsoring partners to connect directly with Monitor readers by including content on CSMonitor.com. Sponsored content is always clearly labeled?and is written, edited, and produced by the sponsor. Questions? E-mail us.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/2kOWK5Hhgek/State-of-the-Union-address-Why-no-mention-of-coal

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Obama presses for jobs without raising deficit

President Barack Obama, flanked by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, gives his State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday Feb. 12, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, Pool)

AP

Published: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 10:16 a.m.

Last Modified: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 10:16 a.m.

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Uncompromising and politically emboldened, President Barack Obama urged a deeply divided Congress Tuesday night to embrace his plans to use government money to create jobs and strengthen the nation's middle class. He declared Republican ideas for reducing the deficit "even worse" than the unpalatable deals Washington had to stomach during his first term.

In his first State of the Union address since winning re-election, Obama conceded economic revival is an "unfinished task," but he claimed clear progress and said he was seeking to build on it as he embarks on four more years in office.

"We have cleared away the rubble of crisis, and we can say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is strong," Obama said, speaking before a joint session of Congress and a television audience of millions.

Obama also announced new steps to reduce the U.S. military footprint abroad, with 34,000 American troops withdrawing from Afghanistan within a year. And he had a sharp rebuke for North Korea, which launched a nuclear test just hours before his remarks, saying, "Provocations of the sort we saw last night will only isolate them further."

Despite the pressing foreign policy concerns, jobs and growth dominated Obama's prime-time address, underscoring the degree to which the economy remains a vulnerability for the president and could disrupt his plans for pursuing a broader agenda, including immigration overhaul, stricter gun laws and climate change legislation.

Standing in Obama's way is a Congress that remains nearly as divided as it was during the final years of his first term, when Washington lurched from one crisis to another. The president implored lawmakers to break through partisan logjams, asserting that while Americans don't expect Washington to solve every problem, "they do expect us to forge reasonable compromise where we can."

Source: http://www.blueridgenow.com/article/20130212/wire/130219960

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