Unseen World!

It’s a shocking deal no one saw coming in a million years. According to an official press release from the Walt Disney Company, Disney has bought Marvel Entertainment for the hefty price of $4 billion. Under the deal, Disney gains control of more than 5,000 Marvel characters, and Marvel gains their massive marketing infrastructure.

"This transaction combines Marvel’s strong global brand and world-renowned library of characters including Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men, Captain America, Fantastic Four and Thor with Disney’s creative skills, unparalleled global portfolio of entertainment properties, and a business structure that maximizes the value of creative properties across multiple platforms and territories," said Robert A. Iger, President of The Walt Disney Company. "Ike Perlmutter and his team have done an impressive job of nurturing these properties and have created significant value. We are pleased to bring this talent and these great assets to Disney."

So, there you have it. Marvel is now a Disney brand in all senses of the word. Obviously, this has just been announced, but the big question looms: What will this mean for all those upcoming Marvel movies? We’ve all marveled at the creative networking Marvel Entertainment has been doing, and the way Kevin Feige has been building little bridges of creative continuity throughout their cinematic universe. So far, they seemed to be doing everything right by fans, and creating movies that could draw in newcomers and hardcore geeks. What is it going to mean for the films when a behemoth like Disney takes control? Family friendly, mythology-be-damned, direct-to-DVD offerings? Or will it just mean a lot more Slurped cups and action figures? Time will tell, but something tells me the future of the Marvel cinematic universe might have become a little less bright

Do you want to know whether you’ll likely be dead next year? Well you can calculate your death risk over the next year online using the death calculator.

Death risk rankings, a new website from Carnegie Mellon, allows you to calculate your death risk rankings over the next year. The website tells you where you rank in terms of dying for up to 66 causes of death. Death risk rankings was developed to provide valuable health information that compares disease rates, risk of death based on ethnicity, and location.

Death risk rankings is also designed to help regulatory policy makers track human health trends. The site was developed through a coordinated effort between the Carnegie Mellon team and the Center for the Study and Improvement of Regulation.

Death risk ranking calculates risk of dying in MicroMorts. You can find predictions about the causes of dying in your locale, in any age group, ethnicity, and by cause. A MicroMort is a one in million chance of death.

Death risk rankings can also be converted to number of deaths, percentage, number of people in each category.

Predictions delivered by death risk rankings is a new and innovative technology, designed by Carnegie Mellon researchers to help regulatory agencies track leading causes of death across the globe. In addition to death risk rankings, Carnegie Mellon is working to multiple interactive tools “in areas traffic safety, mortality risk, vehicle technology, and hospital admissions.”

Below is some excerpt from their site:

The forecasts for beyond one year are calculated using a “survival” function. For example, the forecast for a 40-year old male in the US to live another five years is 14,554 MicroMorts (i.e, about a 1.5% chance of dying within the forecast period). The calculation uses MicroMorts for each of the successive five years,. The number of MicroMorts for a 40-year old is 2,497, meaning that for each 1,000,000 40-year olds, on average 1,000,000 – 2,497 = 999,997,503 survive. The number of MicroMorts for the second year is 2,706, so the number of people expected to survive for two years is 999,997, 503 x (1,000,000 – 2,706) / 1,000,000. Using the MicroMorts from the table, we can see that the five-year forecast is calculated as

(1,000,000 – 2,497)
x ((1,000,000 – 2,706)/1,000,000)
x ((1,000,000 – 2,920)/1,000,000)
x ((1,000,000 – 3,143)/1,000,000)
((1,000,000 – 3,371)/1,000,000) = 14,552

Age            MicroMorts

40              2,497

41              2,706

42              2,920

43              3,143

Calculate your Death – Here

A treasured piece at the Dutch national museum – a supposed moon rock from the first manned lunar landing – is nothing more than petrified wood, curators say.

It was given to former Prime Minister Willem Drees during a goodwill tour by the three Apollo-11 astronauts shortly after their moon mission in 1969.

When Mr Drees died, the rock went on display at the Amsterdam museum.

At one point it was insured for around $500,000 (£308,000), but tests have proved it was not the genuine article.

The Rijksmuseum, which is perhaps better known for paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, says it will keep the piece as a curiosity.

"It’s a good story, with some questions that are still unanswered," Xandra van Gelder, who oversaw the investigation that proved the piece was a fake, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.

"We can laugh about it."

The "rock" had originally been been vetted through a phone call to Nasa, she added.

The US agency gave moon rocks to more than 100 countries following lunar missions in the 1970s.

US officials said they had no explanation for the Dutch discovery.

Courtesy – BBC News

I had this thought on this topic while watching television series, who exactly they (Hijras) are and where/how have they been originated from. So I pulled out this article online which has answered many of my questions! Let me know your opinions!!

The history and cultural relations of the hijras are rooted both in ancient Hinduism, where eunuchs are mentioned in a variety of texts, including the epic Mahabharata, and in Islam, where eunuchs served in the harems of the Mogul rulers. The ritual participation of hijras in life-cycle ceremonies has a clearly Hindu origin, though they may perform for Muslims as well. Many aspects of hijra social organization are taken from Islam, and many of the most important hijra leaders have been and are Muslim. However, hijras differ from traditional Muslim eunuchs, who did not dress as women and were sexually inactive. Nor were Muslim court eunuchs endowed with the powers to bless and to curse that hijras derive from their ambiguous sexuality and connection with the mother goddess. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Hindu and Muslim hijras did not live together, but in contemporary India they often do. Another historical connection of the hijras appears to be with the Magna Mata cults in ancient Greece, whose devotees also dressed in women’s clothing and sometimes castrated themselves.

Cont Next – Hijra – Kinship and Social Organization

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The ancient Greeks called our galaxy the Milky Way because they thought it was made from drops of milk from the breasts of the Greek goddess Hera.
Yuri Gagarin survived the first manned spaceflight but was killed in a plane crash seven years later.
Astronauts become a little taller in space. There is less gravity, so their bones are less squashed together.
Astronauts’ footprints and Lunar Rover tyre tracks will stay on the moon for millions of years as there is no wind to blow them away.
About 1500 stars are visible at night with the naked eye in a clear, dark sky. There are 88 constellations altogether. The smallest star measures about 1700 km across. It is a white dwarf called LP 327-16.
The first object to orbit earth was Sputnik 1, launched by the USSR in October 1957.
The first animal in space was the Soviet dog, Laika, in November 1957. It died on the flight.
The first animals to survive in orbital spaceflight were the Soviet dogs, Strelka and Belka, launched in Sputnik 5 in August 1960.
The first person to orbit earth was Yuri Gagarin, from the USSR, in April 1961.
The first American to orbit earth was John Glenn in February 1962.
The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova, from the USSR, in June 1963.
The first person to walk on the moon was Neil Armstrong in July 1969. (HMM…..THIS HAS TO BE RESEARCHED)

Here comes the new conspiracy!!! Are you prepared then continue reading!!

Devoted fans of Michael Jackson have claimed the iconic singer is not dead after gaining access to an alleged video of the King of Pop jumping out of a coroner’s van after his death.

“I checked the license plate number and it looks like the King of Pop is jumping out of the same van, his dead body has been in,” the LiveLeak post reads.

The poster claims the video was received from a “trustworthy” source, although there is no timestamp or a clear shot of the man believed to be MJ.

The US ranks 28th in the world in average Internet connection speed according to the nationwide study of real-time Internet connection speeds released by Communications Workers of America

WASHINGTON, USA: No doubt, the United States is a much developed nation and the IT industry world over depends on that country a lot in business. But when it comes to the average Internet speed, big brother US lags behind many developed nations, said a recent report released by Communications Workers of America (CWA).

The average download speed in South Korea is 20.4 megabits per second (mbps) – four times faster than the US average of 5.1 mbps. The US ranks 28th in the world in average Internet connection speed according to the nationwide study of real-time Internet connection speeds.

At this rate, it will take the US 15 years to catch up with current Internet speeds in South Korea, the country with the fastest average Internet connections, said the report.

The CWA report added that the fastest download speeds in the US are in the northeastern parts of the country whereas the slowest are in states such as Alaska, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

Between 2007 and 2009, the average download Internet speed in the US has increased by only 1.6 megabits per second (mbps), from 3.5 mbps in 2007 to 5.1 mbps in 2009.

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Pulls down the advertisement from the Polish site following controversy

LOS ANGELES, USA: Software giant Microsoft Corp apologized on Tuesday for altering the image of a black man into that of a white man by morphing it in a promotional ad.
The advertisement in the US website featured three employees – one black man, one Asian and a white woman – sitting around a desk. However, when it was used in Poland, the Black man’s face was replaced by that of a white man, which caused a controversy about racism.
Interestingly, the color of the hands of this morphed white man remained unchanged, which was soon detected by the bloggers, who circulated the image online, forcing Microsoft to apologize.

"We are looking into the details of this situation," said Microsoft spokesperson Lou Gellos.

"We apologize and are in the process of pulling down the image."

Microsoft also posted an apology on its official Twitter account, which read," Marketing site photo mistake – sincere apologies – we’re in the process of taking down the image."

Microsoft also pulled down the image from the Polish site following the controversy and replaced it with the original one appeared on the US site. But still the question persists among the online community. "Are there no black folks in Poland that you want to advertise to?" asks one blogger.

©CyberMedia News

The attack last week on the sole blogger took Twitter offline for several hours!!

TBILISI, GEORGIA: The Georgian blogger targeted by a cyber attack last week that affected millions of Internet users across the world said on Wednesday that Russian hackers were to blame, but that he would not be silenced.

The attack last week on the sole blogger took Twitter offline for several hours and caused problems for Facebook and online diary site LiveJournal.

The target of the attack was identified as a Georgian blogger going by the name Cyxymu – Cyrillic spelling of the town Sukhumi, the rebel capital of Georgia’s breakaway Black Sea region of Abkhazia.

Georgy Jakhaia, the 34-year-old economics professor behind the blog, is a refugee from Sukhumi living in the Georgian capital Tbilisi.

Jakhaia has become a fierce critic of Russia and last year’s five-day war with Georgia, when Russia crushed a Georgian assault on breakaway South Ossetia.

The attack on his blog came on the eve of the first anniversary of the war. Jakhaia said he had been receiving threatening letters from Russia.

"It was like a special operation, an organised cyber attack on my site," he told Reuters.

Jakhaia has called on the Kremlin and Russian security services to investigate.

"No one else but Russia was interested in destroying my site," he said by telephone.

But Georgy is acutely aware of the media attention surrounding him, and says he hopes to make the most of it.

He said he would not be silenced, and plans to create an English-language blog to reach a wider audience.

"It’s really cool to be at the centre of world media interest, " he said. "After all, I have another chance to make some positive PR for Georgia, without even thinking about it."

Thursday’s denial-of-service attack on Cyxymu overwhelmed Twitter’s servers with communications requests, taking the microblogging platform offline for several hours.

Members of Facebook, the world’s largest Internet social network with more than 250 million active users, saw delays logging in and posting to their online profiles.

Twitter became a key form of communication in Iran amid the protests and clampdown that followed the country’s disputed June elections. Thursday’s attack on a single blogger underscored the vulnerability of fast-growing Internet social networking sites.

©Reuters

Never in the history of the world has there been a mind half as creative as that of American hero, Benjamin Franklin. In this brief essay, I hope to explain just a few of his many inventions. An essay about all of his inventions would fill all the volumes of an encyclopedia, which was invented by Ben Franklin as a boy so that he would have something to sell door to door. Although his first encyclopedia was filled with what we now consider to be laughable errors, the basic concept and structure has remained the same centuries later. Here is a short excerpt:

"CABINS: In these structures of wood and mud the simple folk of the country make their homes. I can see a cabin from the window of my bedroom and sometimes the lady of the cabin may be viewed disrobing by the light of her oil lamp. If you put a flame next to a cabin it will burn mightily like a stack of dry grass or the fat of a slaughtered pig. Most cabins will burn only for an hour or so, but I have seen them burn for as long as an entire night. More experimentation is needed in this area."

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