Up until last month he was pretty much an unwritten sheet in the hip hop community. Now he’s a upcoming star in the world of rap and hip hop.

He caught my attention during the semi finals of the norwegian talent show with his own track ‘Action’. The song has a kick ass beat and it flows really well.

Listen to his studio track further down.

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The risky behaviors were: smoking tobacco; downing more than three alcoholic drinks per day for men and more than two daily for women; getting less than two hours of physical activity per week; and eating fruits and vegetables fewer than three times daily.

Overall, 314 people studied had all four unhealthy behaviors. Among them, 91 died during the study, or 29 percent. Among the 387 healthiest people with none of the four habits, only 32 died, or about 8 percent.

These habits combined substantially increased the risk of death and made people who engaged in them seem 12 years older than people in the healthiest group, said lead researcher Elisabeth Kvaavik of the University of Oslo.

The study appears in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

The healthiest group included never-smokers and those who had quit; teetotalers, women who had fewer than two drinks daily and men who had fewer than three; those who got at least two hours of physical activity weekly; and those who ate fruits and vegetables at least three times daily.

“You don’t need to be extreme” to be in the healthy category, Kvaavik said. “These behaviors add up, so together it’s quite good. It should be possible for most people to manage to do it.”

For example, one carrot, one apple and a glass of orange juice would suffice for the fruit and vegetable cutoffs in the study, Kvaavik said, noting that the amounts are pretty modest and less strict than many guidelines.

The U.S. government generally recommends at least 4 cups of fruits or vegetables daily for adults, depending on age and activity level; and about 2 1/2 hours of exercise weekly.

Study participants were 4,886 British adults aged 18 and older, or 44 years old on average. They were randomly selected from participants in a separate nationwide British health survey. Study subjects were asked about various lifestyle habits only once, a potential limitation, but Kvaavik said those habits tend to be fairly stable in adulthood.

Death certificates were checked for the next 20 years. The most common causes of death included heart disease and cancer, both related to unhealthy lifestyles.

Kvaavik said her results are applicable to other westernized nations including the United States.

June Stevens, a University of North Carolina public health researcher, said the results are in line with previous studies that examined the combined effects of health-related habits on longevity.

The findings don’t mean that everyone who maintains a healthy lifestyle will live longer than those who don’t, but it will increase the odds, Stevens said.

Source: Yahoo

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The product revamps PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, DreamWeaver and Flash and it comes with a new feature: Omniture, a tool to track the relative success of different versions of websites, such as a new home page design.

The full product, called Master Collection, is priced at $2599 and if you have the predecessor,  its upgrade is $899.Advantages ?

• Industry-leading performance enhancements – work faster with the native 64-bit support for both PC and Mac.
• Support for evolving web trends – now Dreamweaver CS5 comes with full support for content management frameworks, including Joomla!, Drupal and WordPress.
• Expressive motion graphics and blockbuster visual effects – A revolutionary Roto Brush in After Effects CS5: isolating, moving foreground elements from their backgrounds with automatic transparency is now dramatically faster.
• Truer Edge detection technology – Hair selection has never been easier !
• Crisp graphics for web, interactive and mobile delivery – Create clean artwork that aligns perfectly – no more fuzzy graphics for the web and mobile apps !

• Type enhancements for the web – create sophisticated typography for the web with support for bidirectional and vertical text, flowable text layouts, and support for more than 30 writing systems including Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, and more.

Mac OS

• Multicore Intel processor
• Mac OS X v10.5.7 or v10.6
• 1GB of RAM or more recommended
• 10.3GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on a volume that uses a case-sensitive file system or on removable flash-based storage devices)
• 1280×800 display with qualified hardware-accelerated OpenGL graphics card, 16-bit color, and 256MB of VRAM
• Some GPU-accelerated features require graphics support for Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0
• DVD-ROM drive compatible with dual-layer DVDs

• Java Runtime Environment 1.5 or 1.6
• QuickTime 7.6.2 software required for multimedia features
• Adobe Flash Player 10 software required to export SWF files
• Broadband Internet connection required for online services*

For more details, please visit Adobe.com

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Since great artists from the north are far in between I decided to do my part in terms of video promotion. You won’t regret hitting that play button below. Without another word from me, here is her newest video – Trying you on.

PS: You may also want to check out her blog.

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“It will become an historic game, a benchmark game,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said.

“Not just the way it was played, but who played in it and what comes about.” Memorable, indeed, for the way both teams battled, never giving an inch, or giving in on a single possession.

And memorable for the way it ended. It was a game where nobody led by more than six.Tiny Butler, on a mission to write a sequel to “Hoosiers,” had two chances to win it in the last 4 seconds. Hayward’s more traditional attempt — a fadeaway, 15-footer — was barely long. Then, after Brian Zoubek made one free throw and intentionally missed the next, Hayward collected the rebound, moved to halfcourt and took another shot that was on line, but barely bounced out.

“I can’t really put it into words because the last couple of plays were just not normal,” said Duke’s Kyle Singler, who scored 19 points and was named the Final Four’s most outstanding player.

The Blue Devils (35-5) got the right bounces at the end to snap Butler’s 25-game winning streak and bring the long-awaited fourth national title back home to the Cameron Crazies.

The “Big Three” — Singler, Jon Scheyer (15 points) and Nolan Smith (13) — won the Big One for Coach K, his first championship since 2001 and fourth overall, tying him with Adolph Rupp for second place on the all-time list.

Krzyzewski is now 4-4 in title games. “It’s the best one I’ve been involved in of the eight,” he said.

Nobody figured this would be easy, and it wasn’t — no way that was going to happen against Butler, the 4,200-student private school that sent millions of brackets to the paper shredder while earning the right to make the 5-mile drive from its historic home, Hinkle Fieldhouse where they filmed “Hoosiers,” to the Final Four.

Butler (33-5) shaved a five-point deficit to one and had a chance to win it, when its best player, Hayward, took the ball at the top of the key, spun and worked his way to the baseline, but was forced to put up an off-balance fadeaway from 15 feet.

He missed, but Duke’s title wasn’t secure until Hayward’s desperation heave bounded out. The first shot, caught it, tried to go left, went back right. Thought it was a good shot and missed it,” Hayward said. “The last shot, it was just a last-second shot. I don’t know. It missed.”

What a game to end one of the most memorable March Madnesses in history, filled with wild finishes, upsets and underdogs; the kind of tournament that some fear could be history if the NCAA moves forward with an expansion to 96 teams — something very much on the table for next year. It was the closest margin of victory in a final since Michigan defeated Seton Hall 80-79 in 1989.

“We came up one possession short in a game with about 145 possessions,” said Butler’s 33-year-old coach, Brad Stevens. “It’s hard to stomach when you’re on the wrong end of that.”

The Blue Devils won with defense. They held the Bulldogs to 34 percent shooting and contested every possession as tenaciously as Butler, which allowed 60 points for the first time since February.

They won with some clutch shooting. Singler went 3 for 6 from 3-point range and the Blue Devils went 6 of 6 from the free throw line in the second half until Zoubek’s intentional miss.

They won with a mean streak. It was most pointed when Lance Thomas took down Hayward hard to prevent an easy layup with 5:07 left. The refs reviewed the play and decided not to call it flagrant – one of a hundred little moments that could have swung such a tight, taut game.

They won because that last shot didn’t go in.

“Speechless. It’s the best feeling in the world,” Smith said. “That shot didn’t go in and I just hugged Kyle and just hugged my teammates. We’ve worked so hard and we finished it together.”

A perfect ending for Duke, which won a different way this season, on a team that had no superstars.

Good teams only become great in Coach K’s mind when they win it all, and though the members of this group may not end up with lottery-pick money in their pockets, they’ll have a national title forever. Teams with mega-money from power conferences aren’t the only ones that win in big-time college sports. Nothing proved that better than the Bulldogs in their run through this year’s NCAA tournament.

In the true team fashion that has defined “The Butler Way,” the Bulldog scoring was distributed almost perfectly even. Hayward and Shelvin Mack had 12 each. Matt Howard, coming off a concussion in the semifinal win over Michigan State, finished with 11, and 2-point-a-game scorer Avery Jukes kept Butler in it with all 10 of his points in the first half.

“Hate losing,” Hayward said. “It’s one of the worst feelings personally that I have, is losing. So it’s great for us to be here, but that’s not what we wanted to do. We wanted to win.” They weren’t alone. They captured America’s attention, and its heart, and came close to writing the unthinkable sequel to “Hoosiers.” In the movie, the winning team is tiny Hickory High, and Jimmy Chitwood hits the game-winner at the buzzer to strike a blow for the little guys.

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To give you an idea and a good explanation of how large the universe is I’ve added this little video from the national geographic channel.

But wait, there is so much more to come. Here are a few numbers for you to play with…For the Universe, the galaxies are our small representative volumes, and there are something like 10¹¹ to 10¹² stars in our galaxy, and there are perhaps something like 10¹¹ or 10¹² galaxies. With this simple calculation you get something like 10²² to 10²⁴ stars in the Universe. This is only a rough number, as obviously not all galaxies are the same, but that equals to about 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars.

Now, do you think we’re alone? I’ll let you ponder for a while :) Meanwhile,  here are some other interesting facts about the universe (compiled by universetoday.com).

1. It was hot when it was young

The most widely accepted cosmological model is that of the Big Bang. This was proven since the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation or CMBR. Although, strictly speaking, no one knows exactly what ‘banged’, we know from extrapolation that the Universe was infinitely hot at birth, cooling down as it expanded.

In fact, even only within minutes of expansion, scientists predict its temperature to have been about a billion Kelvin. Moving backward to 1 second, it is said to have been at 10 billion Kelvin. For comparison, today’s universe is found to have an average temperature of only 2.725 Kelvin.

2. It will be cold when it grows old

Observations made especially on galaxies farthest from us show that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. This, and data that show that the Universe is cooling allows us to believe that the most probable ending for our universe is that of a Big Freeze.

That is, it will be devoid of any usable heat (energy). It is due to this prediction that the Big Freeze is also known as the Heat Death.Accurate measurements made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) on the current geometry and density of the Universe favor such an ending.

3. The Universe spans a diameter of over 150 billion light years

Current estimates as with regards to the size of the Universe pegs it at a width of 150 billion light years. Although it may seem peculiarly inconsistent with the age of the Universe, which you’ll read about next, this value is easily understood once you consider the fact that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate.

4. The Universe is 13.7 billion years old

If you think that is amazing, perhaps equally remarkable is the fact that we know this to better than 1% precision. Credit goes to the WMAP team for gathering all the information needed to come up with this number. The information is based on measurements made on the CMBR.

Older methods which have contributed to confirming this value include measurements of the abundances of certain radioactive nuclei. Observations made on globular clusters, which contain the oldest stars, have also pointed to values close to this.

5. The Earth is not flat – but the Universe is

Based on Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, there are three possible shapes that the Universe may take: open, closed, and flat. Once again, measurements by WMAP on the CMBR have revealed a monumental confirmation – the Universe is flat.

Combining this geometry and the idea of an invisible entity known as dark energy coincides with the widely accepted ultimate fate of our universe, which as stated earlier, is a Big Freeze.

6. Large Scale Structures of the Universe

Considering only the largest structures, the Universe is made up of filaments, voids, superclusters, and galaxy groups and clusters. By combining galaxy groups and clusters, we come up with superclusters. Some superclusters in turn form part of walls, which are also parts of filaments.

The vast empty spaces are known as voids. That the Universe is clumped together in certain parts and empty in others is consistent with measurements of the CMBR that show slight variations in temperature during its earliest stages of development.

7. A huge chunk of it is made up of things we can’t see

Different wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum such as those of radio waves, infrared, x-rays, and visible light have allowed us to peer into the cosmos and ’see’ huge portions of it. Unfortunately, an even larger portion cannot be seen by any of these frequencies.

And yet, certain phenomena such as gravitational lensing, temperature distributions, orbital velocities and rotational speeds of galaxies, and all others that are evidence of a missing mass justify their probable existence. Specifically, these observations show that dark matter exists. Another invisible entity known as dark energy, is believed to be the reason why galaxies are speeding away at an accelerated rate.

8. There is no such thing as the Universe’s center

Nope. The earth is not the center of the Universe. It’s not even the center of the galaxy. And no again, our galaxy is not the entire universe, neither is it the center. Don’t hold your breath but the Universe has no center. Every galaxy is expanding away from one another.

9. Its members are in a hurry to be as far away from each other as possible

The members that we are talking about are the galaxies. As mentioned earlier, they are rushing away from each other at increasing rates. In fact, prior to the findings of most recently gathered data, it was believed that the Universe might end in a Big Rip. That is, everything, down to the atoms, would be ripped apart.

This idea stemmed from this observed accelerated rate of expansion. Scientists who supported this radically catastrophic ending believed that this kind of expansion would go on forever, and thus would force everything to be ripped apart.

10. To gain a deeper understanding of it, we need to study structures smaller than the atom

Ever since cosmologists started to trace events backward in time based on the Big Bang model, their views, which focused only on the very large, got smaller and smaller. They knew, that by extrapolating backward, they would be led into a universe that was very hot, very dense, very tiny, and governed by extremely high energies.

These conditions were definitely within the realm of particle physics, or the study of the very small. Hence, the most recent studies of both cosmology and particle physics saw an inevitable marriage between the two.

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But by remaining influential over a history that now spans 20 years, Photoshop software has achieved a place in the English language.

Over its two decades, it grew from a single black-and-white image-editing package to a multi-product franchise, a starring member of Adobe Systems’ Creative Suite line, and, of course, a verb.I have used Photoshop for as long as I can remember, atleast 16 years by now. It was love at first sight and it’s by far one of the most amazing tools on the market, EVER! I couldn’t do all the work I do if it wasn’t for Photoshop. ( That goes for my Wacom board too btw :P )

Photoshop got its start in 1987 when Thomas Knoll wrote software that could display grayscale images–those with a range of gray tones–on monitors that could show only black or white pixels. He and his brother, John Knoll, licensed the software to Barneyscan in 1988, then to Adobe in 1989. Adobe Photoshop 1.0 arrived in 1990, a Mac-only product initially, and in 1995, Adobe acquired the Photoshop software outright.

Pixel-level manipulation software turned out to be popular. Photoshop’s clone tool let people copy one part of an image to another. And even at this early stage, it enabled sophisticated tonal controls through levels and curves adjustments.

Photoshop acquired many more features over the years. By providing a nicer interface to raw mathematical image-processing algorithms, Photoshop let people sharpen edges and change colors. Layers enabled creation of composites that blended multiple photos, text, and other elements. Adjustment layers opened up the idea that changes could be revisited rather than baked into the pixel data. Camera lens problems could be corrected.

Adobe’s Photoshop franchise has been expanding gradually. At the lower end, where people rarely are willing to spend hundreds of dollars for software, the company has released a cheaper enthusiast version, Photoshop Elements. Adobe killed the free Photoshop Album Starter Edition version.

Another new direction for the software was the photography-specific Lightroom. This software is tailored for high-quality “raw” images that come directly from camera image sensors and handles cataloging, captions, titles, and other image management matters.

The company continues to work on the core Photoshop product, too. For example, it’s got refinements in the works to automate one of the most difficult processes, selecting complicated subjects to isolate them from backgrounds.

So, first of all let me give a big thanks to Thomas & John Knoll. I also want to thank Adobe and all the other people involved with the development & evolvement of Photoshop. I am looking forward to another 20 years with more exciting features and a lot of new fancy additions. Good luck!

Source: Cnet

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The new phones announced are the HTC Legend, the HTC Desire and the HTC HD Mini.

Let’s start with the HTC Legend, which is arguably the best looker (and the most talked about as well) amongst the three phones announced.

Now, for the features. The HTC Legend comes with a 3.2-inch capacitive AMOLED display capable of displaying 320 x 480 pixels. While the resolution might not be “right up there”, it is good enough. The imaging part is taken care of a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash. Under the hood, there is a zippy 600 MHz processor partnering with 384MB of RAM. The internal ROM stands at 521Mb and is expandable using microSD cards upto 32GB. Connectivity options include all the expected options- Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS. The 1300Mah batter should be good enough to power the Legend for a reasonable amount of time. This, however, is a step down from the HTC Hero, which had a larger battery. The Legend will also use HTC’s SENSE UI atop Android 2.1.

On the software scheme of things, the Legend will be Android 2.1 laden and will add new features and UI options. For example, there is a “helicopter view” using which the user ca pinch the screen and choose which of the 5 homescreen options you would like to select from. There is also something known as the FriendStream that aggregates updates from your friends and contacts from various social networks and displays them intuitively. The Legend is expected to be announced in Europe by late March and will be eventually rolled out to the rest of the globe by April.

The Mini is a shrinked version of HTC’s existing Windows Mobile 6.5 flagship, the HD2. By the looks of it, almost every major manufacturer is interested in making mini versions of flagship (that are usually large) devices these days. Nokia started of with the N97 Mini followed by Sony Ericsson with the X10 Mini and now, HTC with the HD Mini.

The HD Mini comes with a 3.2-inch HVGA display, which is obviously much smaller than the 4.3 inch goliath that the HD2 has. The housing of the HD Mini sports a very unique design. At the rear of the device, you would notice something that is not usually a visible thing on normal phones. The fasteners, that hold the shell of the phone together have been beautifully integrated so that it is now visible. However, you’ll notice the eye catching yellow color, which might put off a few, once the back panel is removed.

HD Mini is powered by 600MHz processor with 384MB RAM and 512MB ROM. What really steals show in this ‘Mini’ phone, just like Xperia X10 Mini has 5.0 megapixel with flash and auto focus. Just like Touch HD2, the HD Mini can be turned into a Wi-Fi hotspot using it’s Wi-Fi functions. This Mini phone also offers Bluetooth and GPS. On the OS scheme of things, the HD Mini runs Windows Mobile 6.5.3 which indicates that this update is up in anvil. It is expected to be released in Europe and Asia by April.

The new HTC Desire stands different from Nexus One on grounds of HTC’s Sense UI and the former doesn’t have a trackball navigation. Desire has 3.7-inch AMOLED WVGA display that is as much as existing smartphones like Motorola Droid and Samsung Omnia HD. Just like the Nexus One, HTC Desire equips 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU with 512MB ROM and 576MB RAM (while Nexus One has 512MB RAM).

New Android 2.1 operating system loaded on Desire also has layer of HTC’s Sense UI that debuted with HTC Hero smartphone. Sense UI now features new Leap function that allows viewing different home screens at the same time by pinch gesture. We already know about Friend Stream feature that collates all the social network updates to the contacts in Address Book. Other improvements come in the browser, web client, widget and better news reader application.

For more information and news, check out the official HTC website.

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