Southern Italy is dotted with hulking aqueducts that went out of service years ago. In an attempt to find a new use for the structures in lieu of tearing it down, the government held a competition. One of the winning designs will blow your mind.
This is what America's most famous pit—the Grand Canyon—looks like from the International Space Station. A winding craggy oasis in the middle of the desert. [NASA]
Who's a good boy? WHO'S A GOOD BOY?!? Ahem. Apologies. Here are our entries for last week's pet photography challenge
Last year Facebook debuted a nice redesign that featured big, beautiful pictures, seen above. But Facebook never rolled it out. Why? Because most people have crappy old computers.
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Amazon and Best Buy have the latest generation Apple TV for $85, which is pretty much as low as we've ever seen it go. Now featuring HBO GO. [Amazon]
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Making the rounds to promote her new self-help guide, Demi Lovato headed to Barnes & Noble in Los Angeles for a book signing on Saturday (November 23).
The "Heart Attack" singer rocked her blue hair with a black top, black blazer, and matching pants as she signed copies of "Staying Strong: 365 Days a Year."
In the book, the 21-year-old star shows how she deals with addiction, depression, and anxiety as well as life's daily struggles with her own insights and inspirational quotes from others.
Along with her new book, Demi is currently promoting new music. Her latest single "Neon Lights" is available now.
Source: http://celebrity-gossip.net/demi-lovato/demi-lovato-staying-strong-la-969415(As the UFC turns 20, we revisit each year from 2013 to 1993 with 20 articles in 20 days.)
One of the more colorful fighters in the UFC’s short history was Dan Severn, a 6-foot-2, 250-pound construct who was split down the middle between menace and levity. He began wrestling in 1969, and won his first national title in 1972. Yet he’d never been in a street fight ahead of his first appearance in the Octagon in 1994, and to this day he’s never ingested a mind-altering chemical. Severn’s resume is teeming with such dissimilar feats.
In his glorious heyday, though, which began at the age of 36 at UFC 4 and raged on for well over a decade, Severn had a mustache that couldn’t be emulated at Hollywood’s best disguise shops, and an eccentric way of going about business. Still, in the prehistoric days of No Hold’s Barred fighting, when anarchy sold pay-per-views and ended up as VHS tapes, Severn lived up to his nickname of "The Beast" when the cage door locked behind him.
Through it all he had a lightness of being, which was never anything other than unnerving.
"The very first time I ever walked into the Octagon cage at UFC 4, referee John McCarthy had a set format, where he used to talk to the fighter first," Severn says. "And when he got to the end he’d always say, ‘are there any questions?’ He’d turn to you, then turn to your corner person. So, the very first time, he goes, are there any questions? I couldn’t think of anything. But as he’s turning away, I made the comment, ‘yeah, where did all that money go that my parents paid for piano lessons?’ And he said he heard it, but when he looked back at he thought it couldn’t have come from me because I had my game face on."
The next fight, just before he blew up Marcus Bossett, McCarthy did the same routine, and this time Severn muttered to McCarthy, "if you would only give me the winning lotto ticket numbers, I wouldn’t be doing this." McCarthy knew what he heard this time, and later would marvel at this kind of humor just before a potentially gruesome encounter.
"McCarthy said you’re the scariest cat of them all, because you’re out there farting around and these guys are trying to take your head off," Severn says. "And in those days, even with the two rules -- no eye-gouging and no biting -- if you really read the contract, it just said your purse would be fined, not truly disqualified."
By 1995, having been upset by Royce Gracie in the finals of UFC 4 after dominating 15 minutes of the less than 16-minute fight, Severn was a popular figure to the underground sphere of NHB. At UFC 5, he ran roughshod through Joe Charles, Oleg Taktarov and Dave Beneteau to win the tournament.
"For UFC 5, I took out 32 days of my life," he says. This would prove as historic as Severn’s legacy for joining the 100-fight club in 2007 against Dave Legeno in Cage Rage. Severn, in 127 pro MMA fights, only had two full training camps. The rest of he time he just taught classes. Ahead of UFC 4, he trained in a pro wrestling ring with pro wrestlers, and made up crude submissions by which he would relent only upon hearing them "scream or squawk."
Though he lost the "clash of the titans" fight with Ken Shamrock in Casper, Wyoming at UFC 6 -- a card that signaled the end times for the UFC’s puritanical detractors, selling over 240,000 PPVs -- Severn was at the height of his popularity heading into the Ultimate Ultimate in December of that year. That was the only other fight card he put in a training camp for, isolating himself from family and friends in remote Michigan for 35 days.
"Only until the Ultimate Ultimate did you know who your first opponent was going to be ahead of time," he says. "That was the first time they brought in judges…but there was no criteria for the judges. It was thumbs up, thumbs down...I don’t know what they were doing. To go back in time and look at what was going on then, people are right to be baffled as to what these guys were doing. I was doing battle with the Shamrocks and the Gracies and everything else, and there were no rules or regulations. I call it kind of like the Wild Wild West. Anything goes at that point in time.
"But I will say, my cardio vascular was off the hook at that point at that point. Out of a two-hour PPV, in those three matches I was in the Octagon cage just over one hour."
It was perhaps Severn’s opus that cold night at the Mammoth Gardens in Denver, as the old stevedore went to work piling up bodies. First it was Paul Varelans, who was also known for his work in professional wrestling (much like Severn himself). Varelans went gently, succumbing to a triangle choke.
That brought up Tank Abbott, who back at UFC 5 had one of the most violent knockouts of the UFC’s checkered decade when he sent sumo John Matua into convulsions with a right hand. The pillager Abbott, ever goading and never short on words, was already dishing out lines of hysteria. He’d said that Severn looked "like Freddie Mercury on steroids," and that he "hit like a girl," none of which bothered Severn so much as the unnecessary shot following the coup de grâce that Abbott put on Matua a few months earlier.
"Tank was a character, and he was very brash to me," Severn says. "When he hit the 400-pound sumo again, as he was laying there stiffening up and basically his body going into convulsions, I was like, you bastard. If you would do that to a man who can’t defend himself, then when I face you, if I can hurt you, if I can injure you or end your career, I’m going to do it. I lost all respect for him."
Severn battered Abbott for 18 solid minutes.
"I basically embarrassed him out there with how many times I hit him, and how many different ways I hit him," he says. "I told my corner, keep me aware of time. When I heard them yell out three minutes, that’s when I allowed Abbott to get up to his feet. I had been on the ground the entire time punishing him, and I threw a lot of knees into his sciatic area because I wanted his knees to be wobbly as he stood.
"When my guys yelled out one minute, I tried to pry him off the cage wall because I was going to belly-to-back suplex him onto his head. It might not have ended the fight. He probably would have bounced once or twice and came up swinging or something like that, but I was going to entertain the crowd after going almost a 20-minute match. If done correctly, the belly-to-back suplex is actually quite devastating. And I tell you, if I could have pulled that off, the roof would have exploded off the place."
That set up a rematch with Taktarov, the Russian who had won the tournament at UFC 6 by taking out Tank Abbott as well.
"I already knew what the Russian mentality was, I’d been to Russia a few times," Severn says. "I knew I was going to have to half kill my opponent. And basically, I just about did that twice. I think I delivered well over 300 headbutts in that match against him. And 20 or 30 minutes after that match was done they rushed him off to the hospital because his skull was swelling. I popped two Ibuprofen and I was good to go."
Severn won the Ultimate Ultimate ’95, and avenged his loss to Ken Shamrock at UFC 9 the next spring. That was his eleventh pro fight, when he was 38 years old. He would go on to fight 116 more times, facing all of the 100-fight club members (which included Jeremy Horn, a marvel of existence himself). Only in January of 2013, at the refined age of 54, he did call it quits from MMA competition. He remains one of the fight game’s greatest characters.
And that mustache, just like Bert Sugar's hat and cigar, will follow him to Valhalla.
Rounding out the weekend with a fun-filled evening, Nicole Scherzinger showed up at the Arts Club in London, England last night (November 10).
The “Boomerang” songstress donned an all-black ensemble that showed off her curves as she exited the venue and hopped into a chauffeured SUV.
Meanwhile, it sounds like there may be some drama going on behind the scenes over at the “X Factor,” as producers have asked Gary Barlow, Louis Walsh, and Sharon Osbourne to be more like Nicole.
An insider snitched, “Nicole's attitude is brilliant - but she's showing up the other judges and they don't like it at all. They feel Nicole is making them look bad and is being teacher's pet. She's increasingly isolated by them. The other judges feel like Nicole the golden girl can do no wrong at the moment. It's causing bad feeling and resentment.”
Source: http://celebrity-gossip.net/nicole-scherzinger/nicole-scherzinger-gets-down-arts-club-959206FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2012, file photo, Alexes Garcia makes cinnamon rolls for student's lunch in the kitchen at Kepner Middle School in Denver. The rolls are made using apple sauce instead of trans fats. Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade as nutritionists have criticized them and local governments have banned them. The Food and Drug Administration is now finishing the job as they announce Nov. 7, 2013, that it will require the food industry to gradually phase out trans fats, saying they are a threat to the health of Americans.(AP Photo/Ed Andrieski, File)
FILE - In this Jan. 18, 2012, file photo, Alexes Garcia makes cinnamon rolls for student's lunch in the kitchen at Kepner Middle School in Denver. The rolls are made using apple sauce instead of trans fats. Heart-clogging trans fats have been slowly disappearing from grocery aisles and restaurant menus in the last decade as nutritionists have criticized them and local governments have banned them. The Food and Drug Administration is now finishing the job as they announce Nov. 7, 2013, that it will require the food industry to gradually phase out trans fats, saying they are a threat to the health of Americans.(AP Photo/Ed Andrieski, File)
FILE - In this Feb. 12, 2008 file photo, a rack of donuts is displayed at a Dunkin' Donuts franchise in Boston. Consumers wondering what food without trans fat will taste like, probably already know as food manufacturers began eliminating it years ago. (AP Photo/Lisa Poole, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Heart-clogging trans fats were once a staple of the American diet, plentiful in baked goods, microwave popcorn and fried foods. Now, mindful of the health risks, the Food and Drug Administration is getting rid of what's left of them for good.
Condemning artificial trans fats as a threat to public health, the FDA announced Thursday it will require the food industry to phase them out.
Manufacturers already have eliminated many trans fats, responding to criticism from the medical community and to local laws, Even so, the FDA said getting rid of the rest — the average American still eats around a gram of trans fat a day — could prevent 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths each year.
It won't happen right away. The agency will collect comments for two months before determining a phase-out timetable. Different foods may have different schedules, depending how easy it is to find substitutes.
"We want to do it in a way that doesn't unduly disrupt markets," said Michael Taylor, FDA's deputy commissioner for foods. Still, he says, the food "industry has demonstrated that it is, by and large, feasible to do."
Indeed, so much already has changed that most people won't notice much difference, if any, in food they get at groceries or restaurants.
Scientists say there are no health benefits to trans fats. And they can raise levels of "bad" cholesterol and lower "good" cholesterol, increasing the risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States. Trans fats are widely considered the worst kind for your heart, even worse than saturated fats, which also can contribute to heart disease.
Trans fats are used both in processed food and in restaurants, often to improve the texture, shelf life or flavor of foods. Though they have been removed from many items, the fats are still found in some baked goods such as pie crusts and biscuits and in ready-to-eat frostings that use the more-solid fats to keep consistency.
They also are sometimes used by restaurants for frying. Many larger chains have phased them out, but smaller restaurants may still get food containing trans fats from suppliers.
How can the government get rid of them? The FDA said it has made a preliminary determination that trans fats no longer fall in the agency's "generally recognized as safe" category, which covers thousands of additives that manufacturers can add to foods without FDA review. Once trans fats are off the list, anyone who wants to use them would have to petition the agency for a regulation allowing it, and that would likely not be approved.
The fats are created when hydrogen is added to vegetable oil to make it more solid, which is why they are often called partially hydrogenated oils. The FDA is not targeting small amounts of trans fats that occur naturally in some meat and dairy products, because they would be too difficult to remove and aren't considered a major public health threat on their own.
Many companies have already phased out trans fats, prompted by new nutrition labels introduced by FDA in 2006 that list trans fats and by an increasing number of local laws, like one in New York City, that have banned them. In 2011, Wal-Mart pledged to remove all artificial trans fats from the foods the company sells by 2016. Recent school lunch guidelines prevent them from being served in cafeterias.
In a statement, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said it was his city's 2008 ban that led to much of the change. "Our prohibition on trans fats was one of many bold public health measures that faced fierce initial criticism, only to gain widespread acceptance and support," he said.
But support is far from universal. A nationwide poll conducted by the Pew Research Center between Oct. 30 and Nov. 6 said that of the 996 adults surveyed, 44 percent were in favor of prohibiting restaurants from using trans fats while 52 percent opposed the idea.
Still, Americans are eating much less of the fat. According to the FDA, trans fat intake among Americans declined from 4.6 grams per day in 2003 to around one gram in 2012.
A handful of other countries have banned them, including Switzerland and Denmark. Other countries have enacted strict labeling laws.
Dr. Leon Bruner, chief scientist at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, said in a statement that his group estimates that food manufacturers have voluntarily lowered the amount of trans fats in food products by 73 percent.
The group, which represents the country's largest food companies, did not speculate on a reasonable timeline or speak to how difficult a ban might be for some manufacturers. Bruner said in a statement that "consumers can be confident that their food is safe, and we look forward to working with the FDA to better understand their concerns and how our industry can better serve consumers."
Said FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg: "While consumption of potentially harmful artificial trans fat has declined over the last two decades in the United States, current intake remains a significant public health concern."
Agency officials say they have been working on trans fat issues for around 15 years and have been collecting data to justify a possible phase-out since just after President Barack Obama came into office in 2009.
The advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest first petitioned FDA to ban trans fats nine years ago. The group's director, Michael Jacobson, says the prohibition is "one of the most important lifesaving actions the FDA could take."
"Six months or a year should be more than enough time, especially considering that companies have had a decade to figure out what to do," Jacobson said.
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Follow Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mcjalonick
Associated PressSource: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2013-11-08-FDA-Trans%20Fats/id-078611003d4942f1bc8a65c5f958faba
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