Yahoo.com- Soda, pop, cola, soft drink — whatever you call it, it is one of the worst beverages that you could be drinking for your health. As the debate for whether to put a tax on the sale of soft drinks continues, you should know how they affect your body so that you can make an informed choice on your own.

Soft drinks are hard on your health
Soft drinks contain little to no vitamins or other essential nutrients. However, it is what they do contain that is the problem: caffeine, carbonation, simple sugars — or worse, sugar substitutes — and often food additives such as artificial coloring, flavoring, and preservatives.

A lot of research has found that consumption of soft drinks in high quantity, especially by children, is responsible for many health problems that include tooth decay, nutritional depletion, obesity, type-2 diabetes, and heart disease.

Why the sugar in soft drinks isn’t so sweet
Most soft drinks contain a high amount of simple sugars. The USDA recommendation of sugar consumption for a 2,000-calorie diet is a daily allotment of 10 teaspoons of added sugars. Many soft drinks contain more than this amount!

Just why is too much sugar so unhealthy? Well, to start, let’s talk about what happens to you as sugar enters your body. When you drink sodas that are packed with simple sugars, the pancreas is called upon to produce and release insulin, a hormone that empties the sugar in your blood stream into all the tissues and cells for usage. The result of overindulging in simple sugar is raised insulin levels. Raised blood insulin levels beyond the norm can lead to depression of the immune system, which in turn weakens your ability to fight disease.

Something else to consider is that most of the excess sugar ends up being stored as fat in your body, which results in weight gain and elevates risk for heart disease and cancer. One study found that when subjects were given refined sugar, their white blood cell count decreased significantly for several hours afterwards. Another study discovered that rats fed a high-sugar diet had a substantially elevated rate of breast cancer when compared to rats on a regular diet.

The health effects of diet soda
You may come to the conclusion that diet or sugar-free soda is a better choice. However, one study discovered that drinking one or more soft drinks a day — and it didn’t matter whether it was diet or regular — led to a 30% greater chance of weight gain around the belly.

Diet soda is filled with artificial sweeteners such as aspartame, sucralose, or saccharin. These artificial sweeteners pose a threat to your health. Saccharin, for instance, has been found to be carcinogenic, and studies have found that it produced bladder cancer in rats.

Aspartame, commonly known as nutrasweet, is a chemical that stimulates the brain to think the food is sweet. It breaks down into acpartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol at a temperature of 86 degrees. (Remember, your stomach is somewhere around 98 degrees.) An article put out by the University of Texas found that aspartame has been linked to obesity. The process of stimulating the brain causes more cravings for sweets and leads to carbohydrate loading.

Carbonation depletes calcium
Beverages with bubbles contain phosphoric acid, which can severely deplete the blood calcium levels; calcium is a key component of the bone matrix. With less concentration of calcium over a long time, it can lower deposition rates so that bone mass and density suffer. This means that drinking sodas and carbonated water increases your risk of osteoporosis.

Add in the caffeine usually present in soft drinks, and you are in for even more trouble. Caffeine can deplete the body’s calcium, in addition to stimulating your central nervous system and contributing to stress, a racing mind, and insomnia.

Read more of this article at Yahoo.com.

Cnn-A California judge awarded Facebook $711 million in damages against spammer Sanford Wallace for bombarding the Web site with junk messages.

“We won another battle in the fight against spam,” said Facebook, which announced the Oct. 29 ruling on its Web site on Friday.

Wallace, who has also been called the “Spam King,” accessed Facebook members’ accounts without their permission and sent out “phony” Wall posts and messages, the company said.

In addition to the damages, Judge Jeremy Fogel of U.S. District Court in Northern California’s San Jose division banned Wallace, and anyone affiliated with him, from accessing Facebook.

Facebook acknowledged that it doesn’t expect to get much money out of the bankrupt Wallace, but it said that he could end up behind bars.

“Most notably, the judge referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney’s Office with a request that Wallace be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means that in addition to the judgment, he now faces possible jail time,” read the Facebook statement. “We will continue to pursue damages against other spammers.”

Read more about this article at Cnn.com.

Cnn-The ice and snow that cap majestic Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania are vanishing before our eyes.

If current conditions persist, climate change experts say, Kilimanjaro’s world-renowned glaciers, which have covered Africa’s highest peak for centuries, will be gone within the next two decades.

“In a very real sense, these glaciers are being decapitated from the surface down,” said Lonnie Thompson, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. Thompson is co-author of a study on Kilimanjaro published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study’s authors blame the disappearing ice on increases in global temperatures and diminished snowfall at Kilimanjaro’s summit.

Previous studies of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers have relied on aerial photographs to measure the rate of the retreating ice. For this new survey, scientists climbed the mountain and drilled deep into the glaciers to measure the volume of the ice fields atop the 19,331-foot (5,892-meter) peak.

The ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 2007 was 85 percent smaller than the one that covered its plateau in 1912, paleoclimatologists explained in the study.

The mountain’s ice cover shrank about 1 percent a year from 1912 to 1953, a rate that has accelerated in recent years. From 1989 to 2007, that rate jumped to 2.5 percent a year. Since 2000, the plateau’s three remaining ice fields have shrunk by 26 percent, scientists found.

Source: Cnn.com

Link (Legend of Zelda): Orlando Bloom

Nathan Drake (Uncharted): Nathan Fillion

Princess Peach: Reese Witherspoon

Sean Devlin (Saboteur): Brandon Ellison

Kratos (God of War): Goldberg

Duke Nukem: Arnold Schwarzenegger

Bayonetta: Tina Fey

Solid Snake (Metal Gear Solid): Kurt Russell

Little Sister (Bioshock): Dakota Fanning

Source:  Yahoo.com

Employment and economic muscle

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke might think the country is out of the recession, but unemployment is rising from Connecticut to California and banks are taking possession of a growing share of American homes. But some metros across the nation have managed to stay out of the recession’s path and could now be poised for recovery. Using data and analysis from the Brookings Institution’s new MetroMonitor study, BusinessWeek.com ranked the nation’s top 40 economies based on job growth, employment, economic growth and home prices. And Texas seems to be the clear winner, with San Antonio at the top of the list and five metros in the top 10. To see which metros made the list, read on.

1. San Antonio

2. Austin-Round Rock, Texas

3. Oklahoma City

4. Little Rock-North Little Rock-Conway, Ark.

5. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Texas

6. Baton Rouge, La.

7. Tulsa, Okla.

8. Omaha-Council Bluffs, Neb.-Iowa

9. Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, Texas

10. El Paso, Texas

11. Jackson, Miss.

12. McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas

13. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, D.C.-Va.-Md.-W.Va

14. Columbia, S.C.

15. Pittsburgh

To see the reason why each city is considered in this list go to MSN.com.

Every Day with Rachael Ray magazine  bought ate many different brands of pizzas from the grocery store, the listed categories  below are the ones that came out on top.

BEST OVERALL: American Flatbread Cheese and Herb
“It’s pizza in its purest form,” one taster said, “simple and earthy.” (americanflatbread.com for stores)

BEST CHEESE: Wolfgang Puck All-Natural Margherita
This pie won raves over the “big, pretty” tomato slices and strong flavors of olive oil and herbs: “It tastes like fresh pesto.”

BEST PEPPERONI: Tombstone Pepperoni
Tasters called it “one generously topped” pie. The supermarket standby also scored big for its “thick and salty” slices.

BEST VEGETABLE: DiGiorno Rising Crust Spinach, Mushroom & Garlic
“It’s doughy on the inside and crisp on the outside,” said one taster. And this well-decorated pie is smothered with “loads of spinach” and “fresh-tasting mushrooms.”

BEST SAUSAGE: Home Run Inn Deep Dish Sausage
Tasters said the inside-out deep-dish pie is worth the fuss, praising its “crunchy crust,” “big tomato chunks” and “juicy sausage.” (homeruninn.com for stores)

BEST CRUST: Amy’s Kitchen 3-Cheese Pizza with Cornmeal Crust
Freezers aren’t always kind to pizza crust—making them doughy, dense or limp. But judges noted the “great cornmeal texture” on this unique recipe.

BEST ODDBALL
California Pizza Kitchen BBQ Chicken
The frozen supermarket version of the restaurant’s pie beat plenty of wacky pizzas. Judges loved the “tangy” sauce and “mountain of toppings.”

Source: RachelRayMag.com

I give you the Kohjinsha netbook prototype.

One screen slides behind the other, which allows you to use the computer in dual screen or single screen mode. The laptop is a little thicker than your average netbook in order to accommodate two separate 10.1 inch displays. But the size difference is minimal.

The Kohjinsha netbook uses an AMD Neo MV-40 processor and ATI graphics to power the dual display system, allowing you to use an extended desktop mode that lets you either have a single application span across both windows or run separate apps in each window. For instance, you can watch a video in one screen while typing a document in another.

There’s no word on what kind of battery life this laptop is going to get. I’m guessing the combination of the AMD processor and two displays means you’re not exactly going to get all-day battery life out of this netbook.

DigInfo reports that the netbook could be available before the end of 2009 for under 100,000 yen which equals 742,10 euro or $1097,20 USD.

The source of the article is from lilputing.com and you can check out a video of it after the break

In an Oct. 26 blog post, Max Kelly, Facebook’s head of security, announced the company’s policy of “memorializing” profiles of users who have died, taking them out of the public search results, sealing them from any future log-in attempts and leaving the wall open for family and friends to pay their respects. Though most media reports claimed this was a new Facebook feature, a spokeswoman for the company told TIME that it’s an option the site has had since its early days.

Read more of the article at CNN.com.