Ike Turner Dead

TMZ has confirmed that music legend and the former Mr. Anna Mae Bullock has died. He was 76.

Turner apparently died in his home in San Marcos, Calif., just outside of San Diego.

Sources close to the family tell TMZ he may have died in his sleep.

TMZ caught up with the R&B star back in May after the legend spent a night in jail after his bogus arrest over a recalled 1989 warrant.

Ike was married four times, most famously to Tina Turner. The famous singing duo had seven top ten R&B songs and famously divorced in 1978 amidst his constant abuse towards her.

Ike has four known children: sons Ike Jr., Michael, Ronald and daughter Mia.

The Recording Academy issued the following the statement about Turner's passing: "There is no doubt that Ike Turner was one of rock and roll's great architects with his genre-defying sound as an instrumentalist and bandleader ... As a two-time GRAMMY® Award winner and recipient of The Recording Academy's 2004 Heroes Award, Ike's legacy as a groundbreaking pioneer in the music industry will never be forgotten."

tmz.com

Which Country Celebrate New Year First ?

New Zealand & Russia

The International Date Line runs through the Pacific, so those countries on the east side of Asia are the first to greet the New Year.


When year 2008 starts around the world ?

50th Annual Grammy Awards Nominations

The 50th Annual Grammy Awards Nominations List :

Best Male Pop Vocal Performance
(For a solo vocal performance. Singles or Tracks only.)

Everything
Michael Bublé
Track from: Call Me Irresponsible
[143 Records/Reprise]


Belief
John Mayer
Track from: The Village Sessions
[Columbia/Aware]


Dance Tonight
Paul McCartney
Track from: Memory Almost Full
[MPL/Hear Music]


Amazing
Seal
[Warner Bros.]


What Goes Around...Comes Around
Justin Timberlake
[Jive]


Best Female Pop Vocal Performance
(For a solo vocal performance. Singles or Tracks only.)

Candyman
Christina Aguilera
[RCA Records]


1234
Feist
Track from: The Reminder
[Cherry Tree / Interscope Records]


Big Girls Don't Cry
Fergie
Track from: The Dutchess
[A&M Records]


Say It Right
Nelly Furtado
Track from: Loose
[Geffen]


Rehab
Amy Winehouse
Track from: Back To Black
[Universal Republic Records]


Click here for a .txt version of the Nominations List

Click Here To Visit Official Grammy Site

Chocolate beer 3000 years old

People in Central America were drinking beverages made from cacao before 1000 BC, hundreds of years earlier than once thought, a new study shows.

These early cacao beverages were probably alcoholic brews, or beers, made from the fermented pulp of the cacao fruit.

These beverages were around 500 years earlier than the frothy chocolate-flavored drink made from the seed of the cacao tree that was such an important feature of later Mesoamerican culture.

But in brewing this primitive beer, or chicha, the ancient Mesoamericans may have stumbled on the secret to making chocolate-flavoured drinks, the paper says.

"In the course of beer brewing, you discover that if you ferment the seeds of the plant you get this chocolate taste," says John Henderson, a professor of anthropology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and lead author of the paper.

"It may be that the roots of the modern chocolate industry can be traced back to this primitive fermented drink."

The cacao bean played an important role in Mesoamerican civilisation, the native civilisation in parts of Mexico and Central America prior to the Spanish exploration and conquest of the 16th century.

The bean was a form of currency in Aztec society, and the frothed chocolate drink made from fermented beans or seeds was central to social and ritual life throughout Mesoamerica.

In the 16th century, invading Europeans acquired a taste for the beverage and brought it back to Europe, which led to the rise of the modern chocolate industry.

An elite drink

The archaeological evidence recovered by Henderson and colleagues from a site in Puerto Escondido in modern-day Honduras suggests that the beer that probably preceded the chocolate beverage was popular among wealthy people at least as early as 1100 BC.

Chemical analysis of residues found on fragments of pottery vessels recovered from the site tested positive for theobromine, a compound found in cacao trees that were limited to Central America.

The vessels were found in the "fancier, bigger houses" in the village of Puerto Escondido in the Ulua Valley in northern Honduras, says Henderson.

He suggests the elite members of society would have drunk the beverage to mark special occasions such as births and marriages.

AFP

One Laptop Per Child: the dream starts to deliver

Low-cost computers meant to usher poor children worldwide into the digital age are being mass produced in China as US nonprofit One Laptop Per Child strives to deliver on its promise.

The first of the XO laptops being built at a Quanta Computer facility in Changshu are destined for Uruguay, marking a milestone for the charity group founded by Nicholas Negroponte in Massachusetts two years ago.


"Against all the naysayers ... we have developed and now manufactured the world's most advanced and greenest laptop and one designed specifically to instill a passion for learning in children," Negroponte said.

A challenge for the organization has been that governments have not backed effusive words of support with willing flows of cash to buy laptops for children inside their borders.

It is hoped that a "Give One Get One" (G1G1) campaign starting Monday will boost orders by providing an incentive to people in more prosperous countries

For every laptop donated for a child, the donor gets a laptop. The original price was to be 100 dollars (US) per laptop but nearly doubled as costs climbed after Negroponte launched the initiative in 2005.

Telecom firm T-Mobile USA is offering people a year of free access to its nearly 8,500 wireless Internet hotspots in the United States if they become G1G1 donors.
The world's largest video game maker, Electronic Arts in Northern California, said this week they are giving the original "SimCity" to OLPC to put on laptops for free.

The "SimCity" franchise debuted in 1989. Players build communities from scratch, laying out roads, housing, factories, shops, tax codes, power plants and more in order to create places where citizens can work and live happily.

Acting as virtual "mayors," players must be ready to deal with disasters such as earthquakes, fires and floods.

"Players learn to use limited resources to build and customize their cities," said EA vice president Steve Seabolt.

"There are choices and consequences, but in the end, it's a creativity tool. The game should prove to be an incredibly effective way of making the laptop relevant, engaging, and fun."

SimCity has been used in US schools.

The list of companies backing OLPC with cash, technology or other resources includes Google, Intel, eBay, Advance Micro Devices, and News Corporation.

XO laptop operating systems are based on free open-source software. The machines are designed to use less than a tenth the power than standard laptops and come with solar or hand-crank charging options.

XO laptops are billed as a "kids machine" designed for rugged environments. The computers have built in video and still cameras as well as wireless Internet connectivity.

OLPC will begin distributing XO laptops in Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Haiti, Cambodia and India by the end of the year, according to EA.

Negroponte is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is the younger brother of the US deputy secretary of state.

OLPC's stated mission is "to design, manufacture and distribute laptop computers that are sufficiently affordable to provide every child in the world access to new channels of learning, sharing and self-expression."

The group envisions selling laptops to governments in developing nations, which give them to school-aged children and have stakes in supporting their use.

"Imagine the impact of every child owning a laptop computer that he/she can use in school and take home," OLPC said in a written release.

"By empowering children to educate themselves, a new generation will ultimately be better prepared to tackle the other serious problems (poverty, malnutrition, disease) facing their societies."

© 2007 AFP

if you dream, it will come !

We’ve all heard about the power of positive thinking, but what does that really mean?There are people who overcome great odds because they literally believed that they could. Athletes who envisioned themselves breaking a world record. Entrepreneurs or visionaries with grand ideas and the ability to see them through. People with terminal illnesses who magically recovered.

What is it that enables these people to do such great things?

1) It starts with a little seed. The seed is the dream. Maybe the seed is a new home, x number of dollars in the bank, a beautiful relationship, a healthy whole body. You choose. Be specific.

2) The seed doesn’t go poof and become reality. You need to water it and give it sunlight. Draw pictures of it. Create a vision board with your future on it. Paste it up where you’ll look at it every day. See it clearly in your mind. Taste it, smell it. Literally feel it…Allow yourself to get excited about this dream. Focus on the positive even if you have to fake it– laugh like crazy until the laughter becomes real. Thank the universe/creator/God (whatever you want to call it) for making it so (even before it actually happens!). Take a good look at your surroundings, your home, your office and make it conducive to helping you achieve this dream. Remove obstacles and any negative thinking that could become obstructions to your goal. Don’t give up. Often we let go of our dream right as it’s about to appear on our doorstep.

3) When your dream comes, Accept it. How many times is an opportunity right in front of us, but we don’t jump on it. Oh, this came too easily, or maybe I don’t deserve that dream home. Shhhhh, zip that doubt and replace it with YES. I’ve got it. Now dive right in. The water’s just right.

Girls primed to prefer pink

Boys like blue, girls like pink and there isn't much anybody can do about it, researchers say.

Their study, published in the journal Current Biology, is one of the first to show scientifically that there are gender-based colour preferences.

Researchers say these differences may have a basis in evolution in which females developed a preference for reddish colours associated with riper fruit and healthier faces.

Recent studies have suggested there is a universal preference for blue.

But there has not been much previous evidence to support the idea of sex differences when picking colours, says lead author Professor Anya Hurlbert, a neuroscientist at the UK's University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

"We speculate that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specialisation in the evolutionary division of labour," the researchers write. "There are biological reasons for liking reddish things."

Hurlbert also acknowledges that culture may also play a role in colour preferences.

"Culture may exploit and compound this natural female preferences," she says.

In the study, the researchers asked a group of men and women to look at about 1000 pairs of coloured rectangles on a computer screen in a dark room and pick the ones they liked best, as quickly as possible.

Afterwards, Hurlbert and colleague Dr Yazhu Ling plotted the results along the colour spectrum and found that while men prefer blue, women gravitate towards the pinker end of the blue spectrum.

"Women have a very clear pattern. It's low in the yellow and green regions and rises to a peak in the purplish to reddish region," she says.

Hurlbert believes women's preference for pink may have evolved on top of a natural, universal preference for blue.

"When you add it together you get the colours they intrinsically like, you get bluish red, which is sort of lilac or pink," she says.

For men, thinking about colours was less important because as hunters they just needed to spot something dark and shoot it, Hurlbert says.

But how about the universal appeal of blue? Could evolution explain that too?

"Going back to our savanna days, we would have a natural preference for a clear blue sky, because it signalled good weather," says Hurlbert. "Clear blue also signals a good water source."

source : Reuters