Animal Insting

Faster XP : Increasing Graphics Performance

By default, WindowsXP turns on a lot of shadows, fades, slides etc to menu items.
Most simply slow down their display.

To turn these off selectively:

Right click on the My Computer icon
Select Properties
Click on the Advanced tab
Under Performance, click on the Settings button
To turn them all of, select Adjust for best performance
My preference is to leave them all off except for Show shadows under mouse pointer and Show window contents while dragging

Afghan Baby Girl Sings and Dances

The latest and upcoming mobile phone from the LG Electronics is called LG Ally, the handset has touch-screen measuring 3.2 inches, the color support is 262,000 hues. The screen resolution compiles 800 x 480 pixels. So images are vibrant and colors are bright.

In order to get to the keypad you need to slide the display to the right. If you do this, you will reveal a four-row QWERTY keyboard. There is an accelerometer sensor feature in the mobile phone that helps rotate the screen modes from a landscape mode to a portrait one. The LG Ally runs Android 2.1 OS. The high-end features of the phone are: Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth, A-GPS and Android browser.

As for entertainment there is a video and music player. The video player is supportive to MPEG4, WMV, 3GP, and 3G2 formats. The music player can play in MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA file formats. The LG Ally has a 3.2-megapixel camera with five resolutions and three quality settings. The camera featuresare the following: a self-timer, different shot modes including Panorama Shot and Smile Shot, zoom, LED flash, and macro mode.

The LG Ally features a video recorder that takes video clips in three resolutions of 176 x 144 pixels, 320×240 pixels, and 640×480 pixels. The internal memory of the LG Ally offers 512 MB. If it is not enough there is an option to increase the memory up to 16 GB with the help of a microSD memory card. The battery life of the LG Ally compiles up to 7.5 hours of talk time and 20.8 days of stand-by mode. The LG Ally is available for preorder now.

In the early 20th century, Fort Bragg residents threw their household trash over these cliffs.

They discarded glass, appliances, and even cars. The land was owned at that time by the Union Lumber Company, and locals referred to it as "The Dumps." Sometimes fires would be lit to reduce the size of the trash pile.

In 1967, the North Coast Water Quality Board and city leaders closed the area and various cleanup programs were undertaken through the years to correct the damage.

Over the next several decades the pounding waves cleansed the beach, wearing down the discarded glass into the small, smooth, colored trinkets that cover the beach today.

Overeating can effect your brain

Overeating makes the brain go haywire, prompting a cascade of damage that may cause diabetes, heart disease and other ills, U.S. researchers recently reported. Eating too much appears to activate a usually dormant immune system pathway in the brain, sending out immune cells to attack and destroy invaders that are not there, research found.

The finding, reported in the journal cell, could help explain why obesity causes so many different diseases.


It might also offer a way to prevent obesity itself. Obesity is a growing global problem, with 1.8 billion people estimated to be overweight or obese in 2007. Drugs marketed so far to fight obesity have only limited success and, often, severe side-effects. Obesity causes chronic inflammation throughout the body. This inflammation is found in a range of diseases related to obesity, including heart disease and diabetes.

Immune cells such as macrophages and leukocytes use it but research team found it in the hypothalamus, a part of the brain linked with metabolism in mice and humans alike.

"The hypothalamus is the 'headquarters' for regulating energy," they wrote. They found high levels of the compound there but it was normally inactive.

When they fed mice a high-fat diet, it became extremely active. And when it was active, the body ignored signals from leptin, a hormone that normally helps regulate appetite, and insulin, which helps convert food into energy.

The team has discovered a master switch for the diseases caused by overeating.

Team does not know why this compound would be in the brain and in the immune system but suspects it evolved long ago in primitive animals that do not have the same sophisticated immune system as modern animals, including mice and humans.



"Presumably it played some role to guide the immune defense," they said. "In today's society, this pathway is mobilised by different environmental challenge over-nutrition."

'Knocking out' the gene using genetic engineering kept mice eating normally and prevented obesity. This cannot be done in people but team believes a drug, or even gene therapy might work.With gene therapy, a virus or other so-called vector is used to carry corrective DNA into the body, but the approach is still highly experimental.

World's Largest Santa Sculpture

These guys are really BIG fans of Santa...