It’s 45 years since David Bourland suggested doing away with the verb “to be”. A silly suggestion, one might think, but look a little closer and it makes a weird kind of sense

Two little words that cause all sorts of trouble - and not just for Hamlet (Christopher Eccleston). Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Forty-five years ago, the author David Bourland published an essay proposing a radical overhaul of English based on eliminating all forms of the verb “to be”. In a world where we all spoke E-Prime, as Bourland called this new language, you couldn’t say “Sandra Bullock’s latest film is shockingly mediocre”; you’d have to say it “seems mediocre to me”. Shakespeare productions would need retooling (“To live or not to live, I ask this question”), as would the Bible (“The Lord functions as my shepherd”). The world, in short, would feel very different – though in E-Prime you couldn’t actually say it “was” very different. Unsurprisingly, it proved even less popular than Esperanto, and in fairness Bourland never meant it as a serious replace­ment for English. But in this anniversary year, his eccentric vision deserves celebrating. Because in theory at least, E-Prime aimed at nothing less than using language to make our insane lives a little more sane.

Bourland studied under Alfred Korzybski, a Polish aristocrat émigré who founded the philosophy of General Semantics, made famous by his slogan, “The map is not the territory.” To think about and function in the world, Korzybski said, we rely on systems of abstract concepts, most obviously language. But those concepts don’t reflect the world in a straightforward way; instead, they contain hidden traps that distort reality, causing confusion and angst. And the verb “to be”, he argued, contains the most traps of all.

Take the phrase, “My brother is lazy.” It seems clear, but Korzybski and Bourland would say it deceives: it implies certainty and objectivity, when in reality it expresses an opinion. Even, “The sky is blue” papers over the details: I really mean, “The sky appears blue to me.” “Our judgments can only be proba­bi­listic,” wrote Allen Walker Read, a Korzybski follower. “Therefore we would do well to avoid finalistic, absolutistic terms. Can we ever find ‘perfection’ or ‘certainty’ or ‘truth’? No! Then let us stop using such words in our formulations.” E-Prime provided an easy way to do this: simply stop using “to be”.

All this might seem maniacally pointless pedantry. But as cognitive therapists note, thoughts trigger emotions, and “finalistic, absolutistic” thoughts trigger stressful emotions. “I am a failure” feels permanent, all-encompassing, hopeless. Restating it in E-Prime – “I feel like a failure” or “I have failed at this task” – makes it limited, temporary, addressable.

“I have found repeatedly,” wrote the novelist Robert Anton Wilson, an E-Prime advocate, “that when baffled by a problem in science, in philosophy, or in daily life, I gain immediate insight by writing down what I know about the enigma in strict E-Prime.” Political debates might benefit, too, since E-Prime renders unyielding dogmatism – “All immigrants are scroungers!”, “Taxation is theft!” etcetera – essentially impossible. As George Santayana put it, “The little word ‘is’ has its tragedies.”

E-Prime never really caught on; General Semantics fell out of fashion. (It can’t have helped that Korzybski’s fans included that high-priest of poppycock, L Ron Hubbard.) Even so, trying to express one’s thoughts without using “to be” can have a curiously salutary, bracing effect. In this column, with the obvious exception of the quoted examples, I have attempted to do this.

These easy-to-buy superfoods could help you to live a healthier, flat-bellied and longer life, says our nutritionist

Baked beans
Great for soluble fibre (the type that helps to lower blood sugar and cholesterol levels), baked beans also give you 6g of protein per average serving; about the same as in a medium-size egg. Have them on toast, with a baked potato or, if you absolutely must, straight from the can.

Green tea
Swap a couple of cups of your builder’s brew a day for green tea. Especially rich in polyphenols, green tea antioxidants have antibacterial and antithrombotic roles, and regulate the immune system. The lazy man’s solution to boosting antioxidants, which may also help to fight tooth decay.

Oily fish
Fling fresh sardines under the grill, or have them from a can; either way, like mackerel, salmon and anchovies, they are great for omega-3 oils, which seem to make platelets in the blood less likely to clump together and cause a clot.

Parsley
Chew on some after a meal and this herb, which is rich in chlorophyl, can help to keep your breath fresh and mop up pongy odours; vital if out on the town after eating. Also good for vitamin C, a vital antioxidant that helps to protect sperm from free-radical attack.

Apples
With an astonishing 150 supernutrients packed into each apple you eat, this easy-to-transport, easy-to-eat, no-waste fruit is especially good for quercetin, an antioxidant that appears from laboratory research to help to kill off viruses such as herpes, which causes cold sores. Quercetin sits just under the skin so never peel your apples before eating.

Grapefruit
It is said that eating a grapefruit before each meal helps you to cut calorie intake in the meal itself, possibly because it slightly lowers blood sugar and makes participants feel more satisfied. Grapefruits also give you glucaric acid, a supernutrient known to lower “bad”, artery-clogging cholesterol.

Tomatoes
This vegetable is packed with the red pigment lycopene, the main antioxidant in the prostate gland. Studies reveal that men eating tomatoes (or tomato products such as purée, juice and soup) ten or more times a week have a 35 per cent reduced risk of developing prostate cancer.

Pomegranates
You don’t need to fiddle around with fresh pomegranates. Israeli scientists found that men drinking only a couple of gulps (100ml) of this powerful juice each day for 12 months helped to reverse artery damage. This may be down to the fruit’s increasing production of paraoxonase, a cholesterol-breaking enzyme.

New potatoes
A baked potato gives you fast-release energy, making it a great post-workout, muscle-refuelling food. If you are not an exercise nut, new potatoes are a better option. They provide slow-release energy to keep blood sugar levels and appetite under control between normal meals.

Oats
Have them in muesli or porridge, Oatibix or oatmeal. Full of the soluble fibre called beta glucan, which lowers “bad” cholesterol, they also give us silica, a trace mineral believed to be vital for good- quality skin, metrosexual or otherwise.

Poached eggs
Eggs give us lecithin, which is turned into choline once eaten, a vital component of transmitters in our brains involved in memory. This brain-boosting food is also fabulously filling — eat two for breakfast (poached or boiled, not fried) and, according to research, you will eat 400 calories less during the rest of the day.

Frozen peas
The ultimate convenience food, frozen peas lock in the B vitamins needed for a healthy nervous system, plus soluble fibre to help to fill you up and keep cholesterol under control. A 140g portion gives you 16mg of immune-boosting vitamin C, about as much as you will get in a satsuma.

Prunes
Blend them with milk and yoghurt to make an antioxidant-rich, free-radical- zapping drink that also gives ferulic acid, a supernutrient associated with bowel health. The special sugars in prunes will also help to keep you regular and potentially help to resist bowel cancer.

Dark chocolate
The dark varieties (above 70 per cent cocoa solids) are rich in antioxidants. Studies have shown that flavanol-packed cocoa acts in an “aspirin-like” way to stop blood cells clumping together.

Frozen berries
An easy way to increase potential brain- boosting, anti-ageing antioxidants to help to keep you ahead of the game on the work front. Throw them into smoothies or defrost and mix with yoghurt for breakfast.

Olives
Put on home-made pizzas or eaten as a bar snack, olives are good for monounsaturated fats, phenolics and vitamin E, which are all important for artery health and long life.

Almonds
Ditch cholesterol-raising snacks such as biscuits and cakes and trade them in for a fistful of almonds. Research shows that this will help you to feel full and cut back on artery-clogging fats.

Chillies
These are sure to raise your metabolism: the hotter you can stand, the more their effect. Expect a 15 per cent increase in calories burnt for about two hours after eating a hot chilli sauce.

Wholewheat pasta
The ultimate filling — and so easy to cook. The wholewheat variety has a lower glycaemic index than plain and releases energy slowly. Good for sportsmen who need muscles packed with energy.

Turmeric
As used liberally in Gordon Ramsay’s recipes, this is a great source of curcumin, which is believed to have anti-inflammatory effects and may help to fight bowel cancer. For Indian takeaways, choose healthy dishes such as tandoori chicken and chicken tikka, which provide turmeric but don’t have loads of fat.

Time Machine Structur

One 13 year old boy , named Gentill Abdulla, has said that he has a time machine plan that is going to work. I have personally met him and he is an extremely bright boy. Gentill says that his ingenious plans can allow time travel to be possible. He told me “I have done a lot of research on the areas of black holes, time travel, wormholes, magnetism, light, and most importantly gravity. I have devised an experiment that if done correctly could allow time travel. Here is the theory. If you had magnets in front of each other and had one beam of blue light that had been traveling for thousands of years and put that in the middle of these two magnets then turned on lasers on each magnet , and the side they are pointing makes the magnets face each other, and when the magnets are heated have eight smaller magnets on each magnet and make those magnets so that they would repel the big magnet. Then move all these magnets toward the plastic magnet so it will compress it on all sides so it will become smaller than it’s Schwarzschild radius. After this is done the magnets both should become black holes. Since they are facing each other their gravities will act and join these black holes together. There will still be a singularity but it will be magnetic. Now you make a device, that I have also made, that will split the singularity into a ring.This device that will make a hole in the singularity. Since the string is no longer there the magnets will expand enough to make the singularity into ta ring. You will know if it works because you will be able to see the other side of the hole from the entrance. Since the beam of light is old and the light beam is what is creating the effect you will be able to go back to when that beam of light was first made. So through this it will make a traversable wormhole. The negative energy really won’t be negative energy because since the smaller magnets are repelling the singularity it will push it outward in the opposite way or just rotate the 2 magnets from the begining so you don’t have that problem…

Senegal’s president says he will offer free land and “repatriation” to people affected by the earthquake in Haiti.

Abdoulaye Wade said Haitians could "return to their origin"

President Abdoulaye Wade said Haitians were sons and daughters of Africa since Haiti was founded by slaves, including some thought to be from Senegal.

“The president is offering voluntary repatriation to any Haitian that wants to return to their origin,” said Mr Wade’s spokesman, Mamadou Bemba Ndiaye.

Tuesday’s earthquake killed tens of thousands and left many more homeless.

Buildings have been reduced to rubble, the distribution of aid is slow, and people have been flooding out of the devastated capital, Port-au-Prince.

“Senegal is ready to offer them parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come,” Mr Bemba Ndiaye said.

“If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region.”

The spokesman emphasised that if a region was given, it would be in a fertile part of the country rather than in its parched deserts, the Associated Press news agency reported.

A double circle of stones sits atop a hill on the Colorado Springs campus

AIR FORCE ACADEMY, Colo. – The Air Force Academy has set aside an outdoor worship area for Pagans, Wiccans, Druids and other Earth-centered believers, school officials said Monday.

A double circle of stones atop a hill on the campus near Colorado Springs has been designated for the group, which previously met indoors.

“Being with nature and connecting with it is kind of the whole point,” said Tech. Sgt. Brandon Longcrier, who sponsors the group and describes himself as a Pagan. “It will dramatically improve that atmosphere, the mindset and the actual connection.”

The stones were moved to the hilltop last year because erosion threatened to make them unstable in their previous location near the visitors center. Crews arranged them in two concentric circles because they thought it would be a pleasant place for cadets to relax, Longcrier said.

When Longcrier and academy chaplains were looking for an outdoor worship space, they discovered one already existed in the form of the circles.

Lt. Col. William Ziegler, one of the academy’s chaplains, said designating the space is part of the school’s effort to foster religious tolerance and to defend the constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.

‘A freedom thing’
“It’s about our commitment as airmen to protect freedom and defend freedom. To me this is a freedom thing,” he said.

The school also has worship facilities for Protestant and Catholic Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists.

The academy superintendent, Lt. Gen. Michael Gould, has made religious tolerance a priority. It became a concern in 2004 when a survey found many cadets had heard slurs or jokes about other religions and that some felt ostracized because they weren’t religious.

Longcrier and Ziegler said they’ve heard no criticism of the new worship space but both noted its presence was just made public.

“Not to say that it’s not coming, but so far we haven’t had any real issues,” Longcrier said.

He said 15 to 20 cadets have shown an interest in Earth-centered beliefs, and eight to 10 regularly attend Monday night meetings. Of those, six or seven are devout believers and the others are “searchers,” Longcrier said.

The academy has about 4,000 cadets. The school is one of five U.S. service academies, including West Point and Annapolis. Cadets graduate as second lieutenants.

Gods and goddesses
“Earth-centered” spirituality encompasses many beliefs, Longcrier said, many that recognize multiple gods and goddesses and observe holidays tied to the seasons.

Longcrier said he personally doesn’t consider gods and goddesses to be actual beings but personifications of natural events that human ancestors wanted to put a face on.

“The goddess is symbolic of the Earth,” Longcrier said. “Do I believe I’m worshipping this female entity living in the Earth or up in space somewhere? No. The symbolism is very important.”

The group’s meetings are usually devoted to mediation, lessons or ceremonies, he said.

The author of The New Feminism talks about challenging the resurgence of sexism in her new book, Living Dolls – and not being an angry feminist

Natasha Walter. Photograph: Sarah Lee

I’m trying to establish just how ­often the feminist writer Natasha Walter gets angry. Is she ever in a rage before breakfast? “Rarely,” she says. Does she ever rant at sexist comments on TV? “From time to time.” Would she ­describe ­herself as an angry person? ­”Sometimes I think I’m not the raging sort.”

I’m on a mission to discover what fires Walter up. She has been one of Britain’s foremost feminist voices for more than a decade, a period in which she has written rationally, ­often ­compellingly, on everything from ­prostitution to parental leave and ­pornography to equal pay. They are subjects that can provoke real fury, and yet Walter’s approach to them tends to be calm, sane, straightforward.

Which is great, of course, but her sensibility has always intrigued me. It’s a hoary old cliche that feminists are intrinsically angry – a cliche that has been used to undermine feminists, to paint us as marauding harpies, steam belching from our ears – but like all cliches it holds a grain of truth. Most strong political arguments do, necessarily, arise from a wellspring of anger. So what makes Walter furious? What drives her?

We have arranged to meet to talk about her new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It is organised in two distinct parts, and the first finds Walter ­taking a journey through the seedy underbelly of modern culture, an ­excursion that starts, in faintly ­surreal fashion, at a “Babes on the Bed” ­competition in a Southend nightclub, a contest to find a glamour model for Nuts magazine. It’s difficult to ­imagine anyone more ­incongruous here than the intellectual, refined Walter; ­especially when the DJ starts ­shouting, “This is Cara Brett! She’s on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank.” The ­uncomfortable scene grows uglier as a series of young women take to a bed and strip off their bras to “joggle” their breasts before a throng of men.

The journey continues through interviews with a former lap dancer called Ellie, who helps illustrate just how sexist the culture has ­become: “Now,” says ­Ellie, “women get told they are prudes if they say they don’t want their boyfriend to go to a club where he gets to stick his fingers in someone else’s vagina.” She interviews a woman she calls Angela, who, in ­describing her work as a prostitute, says that “basically you’ve consented to being raped sometimes for money”. And then there’s pornography addict Jim, who says that “porn is way more brutalising than it used to be. There is this unbelievable obsession with [extreme] anal sex . . . It’s far more demeaning to women than in the past.”

It’s all enraging material, and Walter marshals it well, but there still seems to be an edge of fury amiss. I ask what prompted her to write this first part of the book, and she says that it came about after a short ­newspaper column that she had dashed off. “It was just a little squib about lads’ ­magazines. I didn’t invest much in it, and it was one of those ­situations where you start ­getting more ­responses than you expected.”

One email in particular stuck out, a message from a 17-year-old girl called Carly Whiteley. She said that she was “starting to think it was time to give up and sit in silence while my friends put on a porno and grunted about ­whatever blonde, airbrushed piece of plastic was in Nuts this week. What you said gave me back the will not to give in . . . It’s nice to see someone else saying it, makes me feel like less of a prude-type oddball.”

The “prude” reference was key. In Living Dolls, Walter takes on the ­notion that, for example, stripping and pole dancing are ­empowering, ­liberating choices; instead, she ­suggests, it has become increasingly difficult for young women to opt out of this culture, to take any path other than that which leads inexorably to fake nails, fake tan and, finally, fake breasts. And, if they do, there are ­serious social penalties.

“I was surprised by the attitudes of the girls I interviewed,” she says, “who seemed to feel that they would be mocked if they protested within their peer groups. You know, when I was at university [in the 80s] it was OK to be annoyed about ­sexism, to take it quite seriously – if you argued about it, it didn’t make you the ­subject of ­mockery. Even if you didn’t ­particularly identify yourself as a feminist, you could choose where you wanted to be on a spectrum, and you could still say, ‘I really don’t want Page 3 in the ­common room,’ or, ‘I ­really hate the idea of porn’ . . . I was surprised when I was ­interviewing young women that they felt ­uncomfortable engaging in that way. Of course, a lot them would say, ‘It’s fine, we can choose whether to [interact with the sexist culture] or not,’ and then you dig a little deeper, and you realise that it is more ­problematic than that.”

The focus on popular culture, on the pervasive web of sexist imagery and behaviour, is a big shift away from Walter’s first book, The New Feminism, which came out in 1998. Then she ­argued that feminists should ­concentrate on specific political, ­social and financial aims; in Living Dolls she writes that she felt that, at that time, we could put aside the feminist ­arguments that “centred on private lives: how women made love, how they dressed, whom they desired . . . I believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of the old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away. I am ready to admit that I was entirely wrong.”

Was she more optimistic about the prospect of equality back then, with New Labour just elected, and women such as Mo Mowlam, Clare Short and Harriet Harman riding high in politics? “Totally,” she says. “I really felt that we were on an irresistible journey. There was still this big gap to close, but I felt that we wanted to close it, and it was possible to close it, and therefore we would. We were in a virtuous ­circle. And what I feel now is that policy changes are not enough, ­because the culture is still very resistant to change. The book’s subtitle is The Return of Sexism, and while I don’t really think sexism ever went away, it’s stronger than it was. It’s as though something crept in by the backdoor – and we turned around and it’s everywhere, and you just think, ‘OK, we’ve got to deal with this again.’”

Walter grew up steeped in politics. She was born in 1967 to Nicolas, an influential anarchist once imprisoned for heckling Harold Wilson, and Ruth, who was also politically active. Her parents had met in the peace ­movement, and Walter’s mother went on to become a social worker, and an avid reader of Spare Rib: “She was genuinely ­committed to feminism, in a very true way.” Was there a specific moment when Walter herself became a feminist? She shakes her head. “It was just always there.”

They lived in the suburbs, and ­Walter went to the exclusive girls’ school, North London Collegiate, then on to study English at Cambridge. There followed a stint at Vogue, and writing for various ­newspapers, before the publication of The New Feminism. The book came at an ­interesting, divisive ­period in the feminist movement, an era of ­personal spats between leading feminists, played out in public. In the mid-90s, Germaine Greer said that ­Suzanne Moore had “hair bird’s-nested all over the place, fuck-me shoes, and three fat inches of cleavage”; a few years ­before, Julie Burchill and Camille Paglia had conducted a lively argument via fax machine.

Along came The New ­Feminism, and many ­established feminists took the title as an insult. Why was a new ­feminism ­necessary? The book ­itself was variously ­described as a work of “post-political blandness”, “just not serious”, the product of ­”cyclical amnesia”, an ­uninvigorating read “with none of the impact, inspirational or irritating, of a seminal ­feminist work”, a book that “tends towards the banal. New ­Feminism desperately wants not to be a threat to men’s egos or women’s sex appeal.” Germaine Greer said that “lifestyle feminists” were one of the reasons that she had decided to write The Whole Woman, her follow up to The Female Eunuch; “I thought, this isn’t what it is about at all,” she said of Walter’s work.

Walter was described as “the ­embodiment of sweet reason and non-aggression”, much reference was made to her good looks (not meant as a compliment), and as the response unfolded, you couldn’t help feeling sympathetic towards her, caught, as she was, in the jaws of a generational shift. I ask how she felt at the time, and she says that she was “disappointed. What really pissed me off was that ­people kept referring to it as some argument for the right to wear lipstick. That just was not what the book was about. I wanted people to talk about, ‘Well, why are women poorer than men? Why don’t we earn as much?’ It really ­infuriated me that people weren’t ­prepared to engage with that debate.”

The experience seems to have shaken her confidence. “Certainly, after I published The New Feminism I took a back seat – if you had told me a year after that that I’d be writing ­another [feminist] book, I’d say, ‘You’re kidding, I’m not going to go there again.” People started saying personal things about me and the way I looked. I hated all that . . . There was a slightly bitter tone that crept in. ­Territorial, I suppose.”

I wonder if she ever lost faith in the women’s movement, and she says that “if I’m being really, really honest, I did . . . There was a patch after The New Feminism where I felt as though other feminists weren’t being very sisterly, I suppose.” Her faith was ­revived when she set up the campaign group Women for Refugee Women in 2006, a cause she is clearly ­passionate about, and which has inspired some of her best journalism. “That reconnected me to that basic human rights agenda of the women’s movement, which was ­fantastic. Over the last few years there’s been so much, well, sisterhood. That’s an overused word, but it’s real, and it’s hugely sustaining.”

Walter and her partner have two ­children, Clara, nine, and Arthur, one, and it was becoming a mother that partly inspired the second half of ­Living Dolls. In this section, Walter looks at the way that arguments for biological determinism have suddenly multiplied in recent years. She ­delivers a ­convincing critique of the studies that have been used to imply that children are biologically programmed to fit social stereotypes – that boys have a natural love of blue and cars and guns, and that girls have a natural love of pink and prams and dolls.

When Walter first had her daughter, she says, “I was hit by this deluge of pink. Then, at friends’ houses, you’d walk into a boy’s bedroom, and it would just be blue and navy, and full of cars and Action Men. I found that when I raised this – even with really liberal parents – they would say, ‘But boys and girls are just different. She just LOVES pink.’ Or, ‘It’s such a pity that he doesn’t play with dolls, but he just doesn’t get it.’ They would be ­saying this, sort of bemoaning it, but ­endlessly reinforcing [gender] ­stereotypes in an almost unconscious way . . . I’d hear things like, ‘Well, he wanted to do ballet, but he’d be the only boy in the class, so obviously he couldn’t do it,’ and you’d think, ‘Why obviously?’.”

The two halves of Living Dolls ­provide an anatomy of regression, of a culture that has responded to the ascent of women with a reassertion of sexist values: the objectification of young women, the suggestion that men and women are simply programmed to behave in certain ways, and that inequality is therefore inevitable. However successful the book is, it’s a welcome addition to the feminist bookshelf, and comes at the start of a year that will see two more British feminist books published – Kat Banyard’s The Equality Illusion, and Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune’s Reclaiming the F Word: The New ­Feminist Movement.

Walter says that she is excited by the amount of feminist writing and ­activism that has sprung up recently – at the end of her book she briefly ­profiles some of the key organisations and activists of the last 10 years. “When I wrote The New Feminism, I went and talked to various organisations about their work and, to be honest, I felt I was slightly spinning them [in the book], because I wanted them to be doing well. Now I think I can be much more wholehearted. Young women come up at the end of events and say, ‘What can I do, can I come and volunteer?’ And they’re so excited and idealistic. It’s wonderful.”

We return to the ­subject of anger. Walter admits that she’s not a font of fury, and that “sometimes what you need in this debate are the people who will be enraged, and who will ­really shout. And maybe in this generation we don’t quite have someone like that. Of course, a lot of feminist books come out of a personal anger, from that sense of, ‘I have suffered, and I’m going to tell you about that.’ I don’t write those books because I haven’t suffered in that way. I just haven’t. I don’t have the personal weight of rage that some inspirational feminists have. And I’m not going to pretend that I do. It’s maddening when you feel a comfortable, middle-class feminist trying to take the weight of the world’s sorrows on her shoulders.”

Instead, she says, what she does is “to put the argument in place and think about it”, to act as a conduit for the stories of women who have suffered, whether it’s a rape victim seeking refuge, or a young lap dancer in London. In some ways, her lack of intrinsic rage makes Walter’s writing even more admirable, ­particularly ­considering the opprobrium she’s faced. She does it out of social ­conscience, “out of solidarity”, she says. What ­better reason is there?

A new scientific study has found that the size of certain brain structures predict achievement, and gamers have been found to have bigger brains and more success.

According to a study published in the science journal Cerebral Cortex, scientists can predict how well a person will perform on a video game just by measuring the volume of specific brain structures.

Within the study, 39 adults (age 18-28, only 10 of whom were male) had their brains scanned before playing “Space Fortress,” a game developed by students at the University of Illinois in which the players were required to destroy a fortress without losing their own ship. (Sounds thrilling.)

The results were that gamers with a larger nucleus accumbens (”the brain’s reward center”) did better on the initial levels of the game, while those with larger caudate nucleus and putamen (center for learning “procedures” and “new skills”) did better at playing with more variables and distractions.

Maybe video games are good for kids after all? Well, don’t throw your kids in front of a TV and the gaming console of your choice just yet, since it’s not clear that if playing more really makes your brain any bigger. Now the task is how researchers will use these findings, possibly for special education – especially patients with learning disabilities or dementia.

What do you think about the findings? Think you’ll be sharpening your video game skills anytime soon?

An estimated one million have been made homeless by the earthquake, as experts warn another may strike the small Caribbean nation. Read more:

PORT-AU-PRINCE – Haiti should be preparing for another major earthquake that could be triggered by the catastrophic one last month which killed up to 200,000 people and left the capital Port-au-Prince in ruins, experts say.

Teams of geophysicists, who have been tracking movements in the fault line that slashes across Haiti and into the Dominican Republic, came to the nation last week to measure changes in the Earth’s crust after the 7.0-magnitude quake on January 12.

Increased pressure on the fault after the quake could unleash another of the same size or bigger, although scientists acknowledge they have no way of knowing exactly when or where it will hit.

“Faults are always waiting for the right moment but if another earthquake gives them a little kick they go before their time,” said Eric Calais, a professor of geophysics from Purdue University in Indiana, who is leading the seismology project in Haiti.

Preliminary calculations by his group show the January 12 quake could be the “little kick” that sets off another temblor along the 186 mile fault where two regional tectonic plates have been scraping together for millions of years.

More than 50 aftershocks, including one measuring 5.9 magnitude, have shaken Port-au-Prince after last month’s quake. The U.S. Geological Survey says the aftershock sequence will continue for months, “if not years”, and “damaging earthquakes will remain possible in the coming months”.

Calais was due to take his findings to a meeting on Monday with President Rene Preval and the head of the United Nations mission in Haiti, in which he would stress the urgent need to rebuild the city’s critical infrastructure safely and quickly.

Haiti’s government has announced plans to relocate up to half a million homeless quake victims — many now camped out in rubble-strewn streets — in temporary villages outside of Port-au-Prince. But some experts suggest the whole capital should be rebuilt away from the dangerous fault line.

QUAKE PREDICTION NOT AN EXACT SCIENCE

Calais was part of a group of experts who warned Haitian officials in 2008 that there could be a 7.2 magnitude quake on the horizon.

But Haitian officials said there was not enough time or funds to shore up the impoverished Caribbean’s country’s shoddy construction or take precautions, and in last month’s quake, many buildings pancaked, their bricks crumbling to dust.

“It’s not too late. Now is the time to really get serious about this,” Calais said.

Over 200 years ago, when Haiti saw its last major earthquake, there were actually several temblors in a row, two in 1751 and another in 1770, Calais said.

In one destroyed neighborhood in the Haitian capital, where people now live in tents made of bed sheets and sticks, curious children watched the scientists set up specialized global positioning systems. The devices, placed at different points along the fault, will gather data over three days and compare it to information gathered over the past five years.

But for all the precise measurements, there is no such thing as an exact science of earthquake prediction.

Haiti’s national geological survey offices collapsed in the quake, killing some 30 people inside, including the institute’s director. This complicates future research in a country that has no seismic network, except for Calais’ GPS monitors.

“Scientists are blind when it comes to this earthquake … We rely on data that is coming from stations that are far away,” he said.

“It’s like if you go to your doctor and the only thing we can do is look at you with binoculars — so the diagnostic would be pretty poor.”

Jamie Foxx

The previous nighttime’s year of 2010 Gram. awarding ceremonial occasion was quite astonishingly amusive as well as the executions by the singing
stars as well as their public performances was pretty rocking.

The far famed instrumentalist as well as the singer who turned himself over into an Actor, known to all as the J. Foxx executed the most brilliant musical hit number, blame it on the alcohol as well as he was among the numerous natural endowments to arrive at the theatrical stage up, at the awarding ceremony.

The J. Foxx as well as the T.Pain bumped off on to the theatrical stage within quite a diachronic, age old expressive style to perform the Jamie’s super hit song entitled the, blame it on the alcohol number. They without doubt made the nighttime as well as the entire crowd together were relishing it.

Not alone this, had they as well induced an age old school time rapper named the D. E. Fresh for a beat-box musical séance.

Jamie Foxx approached on to the theatrical stage & commenced his public perform. of the song known as the blame it on the alcohol, within a quite melodramatic expressive style & led off vocalizing the song, blame it on the alcohol. He was appareled up within a suit of clothes that appeared to be from the way back in the 1700’s or something quite close to that.

His song, blame it on the alcohol, was a United States of America Billboard No. One super hit song within the previous yr.

Green Day on Sunday night previewed their American Idiot Musical during the Grammy’s award show, with Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong singing
along with the cast of Broadway show.

Armstrong sung “21 Guns” off the “21st Century Breakdown” album which won the Best Rock Album Grammy that same night.

The American Idiot Musical is directed by Tony award winning director Michael Mayer, who won his Tony for “Spring Awakening.” The musical started it’s run at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in September 2009 and tells the story of “love, loss and war” according to MTV, while incorporating Green Days American Idiot and some of 21st Century Breakdown, plus a never before released track named “When It’s Time”.

The musical will begin a run at Manhattan’s St. James Theater March 24th, then officially open to Broadway visitors on April 20th 2010.

Here’s a quick preview from the Grammy’s:

Grammy Winners 2010 List

Grammy Winners 2010 List contains some of the most famous celebrities of music world. Grammy Winners 2010 List consists of Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Rihanna, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Lady Gaga, Stephen Colbert, Eminem and several other face names. Beyonce won six, while Lady Gaga stood second on the Grammy Winners 2010 list to receive three trophies among the most successful celebrities.

Here is a Complete Grammy Winners 2010 list for your viewing pleasure.

Grammy Award for the Categories

1. Album of the Year award was presented to Taylor Swift for “Fearless”

2. Song of the Year award was presented to Thaddis Harrell, Beyoncé Knowles, Terius Nash & Christopher Stewart for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on it)”

3. Best New Artist award was presented to Zac Brown Band

4. Best Female Pop Vocal Performance award was presented to Beyonce for “Halo”

5. Best Performance by a Group of Duo with Vocals award was presented to The Black Eyed Peas for “I Gotta Feeling”

6. Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals award was presented to Jason Mraz and Colbie Caillat for “Lucky”

7. Best Pop Instrumental Performance award was presented to Bela Fleck for “Throw Down Your Heart”

8. Best Pop Instrumental Album award was presented to

Booker T. Jones for “Potato Hole”

9. Best Pop Vocal Album award was presented to The Black Eyed Peas for “The END”

10. Best Dance Recording award was presented to Lady Gaga for “Poker Face”

11. Best Dance Album award was presented to Lady Gaga for “The Fame”

12. Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album award was presented to Michael Buble for “Michael Buble Meets Madison Square Garden”

13. Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance award was presented to Bruce Springsteen for “Working on a Dream”

Over all the show put up by all the celebrities was amazing. Beyonce has won 16 Grammy Awards including these six. While Lady Gaga, Black Eyed Pease and Jason Mraz were among those celebrities who stole the show and stood tall in Grammy Winners 2010 list.

The Grammy Awards took a brief detour to the middle of last century last night, when guitarist Jeff Beck led a cover of “How High the Moon” in honor of the late Les Paul. Lead vocals were handled by someone you might not have recognized, but who’s already a sizable star in her native Ireland and the U.K.: Rockabilly singer Imelda May.

The Dublin singer has released two albums, No Turning Back and Love Tattoo, the latter reaching No. 12 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart this past December. Check out a clip of May performing “Big Bad Handsome Man” on Ireland’s Late Late Show in 2009. Then let us know what you think: Does Imelda May have what it takes to break out in the U.S. like, say, Amy Winehouse did a couple years back? Were you familiar with her work before the Grammys?

Imelda May got just the 2nd live performing Irish actress after U2 to perform at the Grammy Awards held on last Sunday nighttime. She vaunted away the viewing audience as well as the approximated one hundred and twenty million catching with her rockabilly public presentation.

Played along by guitar fable Jeff Beck, the renowned singer from Dublin, Irish Capital, demonstrated that she is geared up for United States prime time with her incredible public presentation.

Imelda May had been in a twelve years of bad and tough times which she had scrambled through strongly before previous night’s crowning time. Within that time period the blues vocalist has been out of work and she was nearly lost, but she has always harks back. The Grammy night was an over-the-top exoneration.

May and her hubby, Darrell Higham, established their very own recording studio in capital of the United Kingdom to record her music album ‘Love Tattoo’ after all of her albums and songs had lowered her to a great extent.

Imelda May as an alternative passed out it at her personal selling shows in more small-scale locales. The record finally had got the attention of rockabilly adept Jools Holland who reserved her on his personally hosted BBC programme “Later with Jools Holland”.

Leon Russell performs at the 2010 Grammy Awards

Leon Russell, the wispy keyboardist who guested with the Zac Brown Band at the Grammy Awards on Sunday night (January 31), brought decades of experience and legendary performances to the stage.

Born Claude Russell Bridges in Oklahoma in 1942, the keyboardist began his career in the nightclubs of Tulsa in his early teens. After relocating to Los Angeles, he became a part of Phil Spector’s legendary team of session musicians, performing on many of Spector’s biggest hits, as well as songs by the Byrds, Herb Alpert and others.

His first hit as a songwriter was Joe Cocker’s take on “Delta Lady.” He then helmed Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour, at which many felt Russell stole the show. He also took the spotlight during George Harrison’s 1971 Concert for Bangladesh, singing a medley of the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and the ’50s hit “Young Blood” (he also played piano on the Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed).

Apart from his 1972 hit album Carney (featuring the hits “Tight Rope” and “This Masquerade”), Russell’s solo efforts have met with limited success, but he has written hit songs for others, including “Superstar,” co-written with Bonnie Bramlett, which was later rendered by the Carpenters, Luther Vandross and Sonic Youth; and especially “A Song for You,” which has been covered by Donny Hathaway, Christina Aguilera and many others. He also had a country hit in 1979, a cover of the Elvis Presley classic “Heartbreak Hotel” performed with Willie Nelson.

Throughout the ’80s, Russell continued to tour and pump out live and studio albums, including the country disc Hank Wilson Vol. II in 1984. The next decade, he teamed up with Bruce Hornsby for Anything Can Happen. In 2001, Russell won a Grammy for his collaboration with Earl Scruggs and friends on “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.”

At Willie Nelson’s 70th birthday celebration at the Beacon Theatre in New York in 2003, Russell performed “A Song for You” with Nelson and Ray Charles. In the new millennium, Russell has continued to record music on his own label and has toured, even hitting Japan at one point during a three-year-long stint on the road.

During Sunday’s Grammy performance, Zac Brown opened with a rendition of “America the Beautiful” before bringing out Russell, who hammered away at the piano as Brown and his band busted through their hit song “Chicken Fried.”

Kurt Warner Retires

While one all-time great quarterback chooses to spend the offseason playing the ‘will-he/won’t-he’ game again, Arizona Cardinals quarterback Kurt Warner announced his retirement from the NFL today.

And don’t worry Cardinals fans: he leaves the team in capable hands …

Warner’s likely Hall of Fame career was remarkable, even if the constant puff pieces done by awestruck sports media personalities got a tad nauseating at times.

Warner lucked into a chance as a starter with the St. Louis Rams when then-starter Trent Green was lost for the season after a preseason knee injury in 1999. Warner, a re-tread from the Arena League, promptly had a MVP season and led the Rams high-powered offense — arguably the most potent offense of this era — to a Super Bowl win over Tennessee.

He had two other teams — the 2002 Rams and 2009 Cardinals — leading in the fourth quarter of their respective Super Bowl appearances before late drives orchestrated by Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger stole wins away.

Perhaps most impressively — yes, more impressive than Warner going from bag boy to MVP — was his success in Arizona. Let go by the Rams after the Mike Martz quarterback-killing offense took a toll on his body, Warner looked washed up his final seasons with the Rams and in one season with the Giants.

The Cardinals turned to him when it was clear Matt Leinart was not the guy, and Warner again started putting up MVP-numbers, six years after his last Pro Bowl season in St. Louis.

Warner walks away from the game after a season in which he again led the Cardinals to the playoffs and can obviously still play at a high level. He also leaves behind a Cardinals offense that has the best group of wide receivers in the NFL in Larry Fitzgerald, Anquan Boldin and Steve Breaston.

Right only an Image from a Hand !

The Goatse is the best way to tell people that you're an extremely "open" person and that you're extremly "open" to trying new things. The Goatse is also a way of saying that you've opened up your heart as wide as possible and you'll let pretty much anyone try to "jam" their love inside it.

Im only making it with 2 Hands but with one hand its Impossible,

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