Students in Texas are trying to create beer that includes red wine’s antiaging compound.

Since headlines began trumpeting the antiaging effects of red wine a couple of years ago, the traditional toast to good health has become more meaningful. But students at Rice University, in Texas, think that beer drinkers shouldn’t be left out. They’re trying to engineer a yeast that produces the antiaging chemical found in red wine–resveratrol–and use it to brew “BioBeer” with a health boost.

“It’s not going to prevent you from getting a beer gut from drinking too much beer, or from getting cirrhosis of the liver,” says Taylor Stevenson, one of six undergraduates working on the project. “But people are already drinking beer, so why not make the activity a little healthier?”

continue reading…

VERY COOL STREET ART…THANKS WWW.FRANK151.COM

Scenes from Philly

Possibly the tightest school on the planet.

Among local skateboarders, the spot on 12th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A where wooden ramps and metal-topped ledges are set up most afternoons is known as 12A. For the 9th and 10th graders of East Side Community High School, it is gym class.

What started in February as an after-school program run by a volunteer has turned into what school officials believe is New York City’s only skateboarding class for credit, one of a range of offbeat physical education electives like dancing, martial arts and spinning newly available in city schools. At 10:30 most mornings, 22 students pour onto the school’s basketball court and, after a few standard exercises, begin maneuvering on borrowed boards.

continue reading…

MEXICO CITY — Many of the mug shots of drug traffickers that appear in the Mexican press show surly looking roughnecks glaring menacingly at the camera. An anticorruption investigation unveiled last week in the Mexican capital, however, made it clear that not everybody enmeshed in the narcotics trade looks the part.

There was a gray-haired, grandfatherly type who was pushing 70, as well as an avuncular figure with a neatly coiffed goatee and wire-rimmed spectacles perched upon his nose. Some of the five men who found themselves on the front pages of newspapers on their way to jail, wore suits, which made them look more like bureaucrats than bad guys.

continue reading…

IN a city whose mayor has been one of the nation’s most outspoken proponents of gun control, Councilwoman Diana Reyna of Brooklyn has distinguished herself by considering a bill to ban sales of a different weapon: the machete.

In July and August, four machete attacks were reported in the southern part of Williamsburg, where many of Ms. Reyna’s constituents live. Late last month, worries over machete violence again rippled through the community when a stray bullet hit a 5-year-old girl in nearby Ridgewood during a shootout. One of the young people involved in the attack was seen wielding a machete.

continue reading…

After Obama’s win on Tuesday, Will.I.Am appeared on CNN in the form of a hologram.

read more