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Tuesday, 9 Nov 2010
Chris Pine confesses to gulping vodka before presenting Oscar
H
ollywood actor Chris Pine said that presenting the Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards made him so nervous that he had to gulp down glasses of vodka before going on stage. The Star Trek actor believes that though the show was one of his career highlights, he was too petrified to hand out the coveted trophy. “The Oscars were absolutely terrifying. Awesome. But petrifying. I was a presenter and I was downing vodkas in the back praying to God to help me out,” the actor said. The 30-year-old actor will be seen sharing screen space with Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington in his upcoming film Unstoppable and said that he was “intimidated” by him. “Man, I was nervous about that. Knowing I was going to go head to head with Denzel on the entire film, it was incredibly intimidating, but like they say, ‘If it scares you, you’ve got to face it’,” Pine said. Unstoppable traces the story of two railway workers who try to stop a runaway train carrying dangerous chemicals. Though Pine tackled most of his stunts in the film, he opted against those which could have caused serious injury. “I tried to do as many as I could but it’s a hairy thing with those trains, because it’s not like doing a fight scene with another person where you can say, ‘Stop’. You’re dealing with three tons of fast-moving trains. I’ve decided that if it’s going to endanger my life, I’m giving it up to the guys who know what they’re doing,” he said.
Men don’t ask me out: Emma Watson
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he may be one of the most good-looking young actresses in Hollywood now, but Harry Potter star Emma Watson says that she isn’t wooed by men often. The 20-yearold actress who plays Hermione Granger in the wizard franchise says she wants to be in love even though she is happy being single at the moment. “I’m very romantic and of course I want to be in love. I’ve been in love once in my life, but it was complicated. I like men with quick wit, good conversation and a great sense of humour. I love banter. I want a man to like me for me – I want him to be authentic. But men don’t really ask me out. And I don’t get marriage proposals any more either. At the moment I’m just happy to be single,” said Watson. The British actress, who attends Brown University in Rhode Island, reportedly ended her two-year relationship with financier boyfriend Jay Barrymore when she moved to America. Watson was then linked to Spanish musician Rafael Cebrian and sparked rumours of a romance by appearing in a video with singer George Craig from Brit indie band One Night Only. “George and I were only ever friends. But he’s fantastic,” Watson clarified. “In terms of men I fancy, I think actor James Franco is gorgeous. But I find it odd to be described as a sex symbol myself. I mean - really? But of course it’s flattering,” she said.
New Clues to Effective HIV Vaccine
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light differences in five amino acids in a protein called HLA-B may explain why certain people resist the human immuno-deficiency virus, US researchers said recently in a study that lends new clues about how to make a vaccine to prevent AIDS. “For a long time, we’ve known that some people progress extremely rapidly when they get infected, and others can stay well for three decades and never need treatment and still look entirely well,” said Dr Bruce Walker of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, whose study appears in the journal Science. “We thought we could apply new techniques from the human genome project to understand what the genetic basis was for that,” he said. About one in 300 people infected with HIV can suppress the virus with the immune system, keeping the virus at extremely low levels. The team searched the genetic makeup of nearly 1,000 people with that ability and compared it with the genetic code of 2,600 others who were infected with HIV. That helped them identify some 300 different sites in the genetic code that were linked with immune control of HIV, all located on chromosome six. They narrowed that down to four single-letter changes in the DNA, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs all related to the immune system. “We did a second study where we looked amino acid by amino acid in that region,” Walker said. They found five amino acids in the HLA-B protein linked with differences in a person’s ability to control HIV. That protein is important for helping the immune
system tag and destroy cells infected by a virus. Walker said those genetic variants could make a big difference in a person’s ability to control HIV. Knowing how some people mount an effective immune response to HIV could be an important step in understanding how to make a vaccine to fight the virus. It was not a vaccine yet, Walker cautions, but it is promising. “We’ve got a clearer indication of why people can survive in the face of HIV, and we’ve gotten more focused in terms of the research we need to do to get where we’ve got to go,” he said. No vaccine exists against the human immuno-deficiency virus that causes AIDS. Since the AIDS pandemic started in the early 1980s, almost 60 million people have been infected with HIV, many of them in Africa, and it has killed 25 million. In September 2009, scientists reported their biggest success yet with an experimental vaccine that showed a modest effect and appeared to slow the rate of infection by about 30 per cent. In July, US researchers found antibodies that can protect against a wide range of AIDS viruses and said they may be able to use them to design a vaccine.
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Obama told me he has heard about myfilms: Aamir Khan
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n invite to the Prime Minister’s private dinner for the US first couple was an honour enough, but when President Barack Obama praised his work, Aamir Khan was on cloud nine. The star, who was invited to the dinner by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at his 7, Race Course Road residence, was cornered by the waiting media persons as soon as the do got over at around 10pm on Sunday. “President Obama said he has heard a lot about my work and my films,” said Aamir, who was clad in a cream coloured kurta-pyjama. “The dinner was an opportunity to meet big personalities. I am a big fan of Manmohan-ji and I am happy that he called me up,” he told the journalists. Aamir, 45, also praised the dinner platter and revealed that First Lady Michelle Obama had told him she danced to his title number from Rang De Basanti. Bollywood lyricist Javed Akhtar and his actress-activist wife Shabana Azmi were also invited to the grand feast.
I was ignorant about Chittagong uprising: Abhishek
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fter box-office dud Raavan, Abhishek Bachchan is returning to the big screen as freedom fighter Surjya Sen in Ashutosh Gowariker’s Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, based on the Chittagong uprising. The actor says he was embarrassed when offered the role as he was ignorant about the historical episode. “I was embarrassed because as an Indian citizen I didn’t know about Surjya Sen, the great Chittagong uprising and these great freedom fighters who laid their lives for our freedom. I felt the story should be told at a wider scale,” said Abhishek. Based on journalist Manini Chatterjee’s book Do and Die: The Chittagong Uprising 1930-34, the film is a true story about revolution against the British in Chittagong, then a district in undivided Bengal. The film also stars Deepika Padukone as Kalpana Dutta. The actor says the film is an attempt to pay tribute to the people involved in the Chittagong uprising. “I did Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey because I wanted to pay tribute to the freedom fighters of our country. Very little is known about the Chittagong uprising and when I got to know about it, I felt it was a story worth telling. It is Ashutosh and my small way of paying tribute to some great people involved in this revolution,” he added. The actor confesses he always tries to do films that present him in a different avatar. “I have always tried, in whatever films I do, to bring out an unexplored side of mine and that’s why I do films. As an actor I wish to do something new and something more challenging which brings out a different side of me. There’s lot more work to be done,” he said.
RockMelt’s Secret Social Web Browser makes Debut
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he web has evolved drastically during the past two decades. But the web browser remains much as it has since it was first created. That is the premise behind RockMelt, a new browser that bills itself as having been built from the ground-up for the realities of today’s Web 2.0 world, in which interacting across social networks is as important as viewing web pages. The new browser has been under development in stealth mode for two years and has been the subject of much speculation, particularly since one of the company’s main investors is Marc Andreessen, the man credited with creating the first mass-market graphical web browser. Now RockMelt is pulling back the curtain and letting users try a beta version of the browser. The browser weaves social networking directly into the browser, and uses cloud-based servers to save users’ preferences, providing a consistent experience among the various PCs a person surfs the web from. Unlike a traditional browser, you have to log-in when you use RockMelt. That allows you to access your Facebook or Twitter feeds directly from the browser, instead of navigating to each service’s website. The browser also displays a list of your closest friends and contacts along the left-hand side of the browser, making it easy to quickly share news articles, videos and other interesting web finds. Search is similarly integrated, with a drop-down list of search results accessible within the browser. RockMelt says its technology pre-fetches the most relevant web pages after a user enters a search query, meaning that you can quickly inspect the various web pages without having to wait for each page to load. The search feature is powered by Google’s search engine, and the browser itself is based on Chromium, the open-source version of Google’s Chrome browser. It will be interesting to see whether mainstream users cotton to RockMelt’s new take on the browser. At least one company, Flock, introduced a ‘socially-aware’ browser a few years back yet has a scant 0.05 per cent share of the browser market according to Net Applications. And RockMelt is facing heavyweight competition in the browser game, including Microsoft (the dominant player with 59 per cent share), Google, Mozilla and Apple. But the 30-person company, which has raised $10 million in funding, has big names in its corner of the ring, including Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Intuit chairman and Apple board member Bill Campbell, and VMware co-founder Diane Greene.
What is it with Men Always wanting Sex? Is a Man’s Sex Drive Simply Uncontrollable?
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ell first of all not all men or women have an equal sex drive. In fact sex drive is quite an individual issue, although generally in men it is known to be rather high. There are other factors which effect both males and females. People, who maintain a healthy lifestyle, exercise regularly and avoid the consumption of alcohol, cigarettes and drugs tend to have a higher sex drive than individuals who neglect their nutrition and health in general. There are many instances where the woman is actually more sexually driven than the man; however women somehow seem to be much more in control and most times would only have sex if they feel it is appropriate or are totally infatuated.
Editor –in-chief: R F Fernandes. Editor: Ashwin Tombat. Chief Editor-Features: Christina Viegas.
So is it always men who initiate sex? Perhaps not always but a good 90 per cent of the time it is. Why? Sex is also a means of expression, one which men find extremely convenient. While a woman might feel she is connecting with her partner by laying in bed at night and talking about everything that occurred during the day a man would much rather just get down to business roll over and sleep. The problem is that most men have trouble expressing themselves verbally so often sex appears like the ideal substitute. Many times it is simply the physical attraction which creates that sexual desire in a man, and it is absolutely no reason for a woman to feel insulted. (Courtesy: Agencies)
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