Good News to Schumacher fans ! ! ! He has 'blinked' and 'responding to instructions'

It will come as really good news to Michael Schumacher fans. British newspaper The Telegraph, has quoted a French newspaper which has reported that the former Formula One world champion is responding to instructions as doctors started on Thursday to try and coax the German legend out of an artificial deep sleep he was placed in after a near-fatal ski fall in December.

The Telegraph on Thursday reported that the L'Equipe newspaper, citing "very reliable sources", said Schumacher has responded "positively" to several neurological tests since Monday. Apparently, the 45-year-old former Ferrari driver, has even "blinked" during tests.

L'Equipe is not the only paper that has reported that Schumacher is responding positively. SKY News has also quoted its sources suggesting Schumacher is responding to instructions. Schumacher was plunged into an artificial coma after suffering brain injury in his near-fatal skiing accident on December 29 in the French resort of Meribel.

Emerging from an extended, drug-induced coma could take several days or not happen at all, medical experts say. After a progressive reduction of the sedative dose, it can take several more days for the last drug traces in a patient's system to disappear, according to Gerard Audibert, a neurosurgeon at the University Hospital in Nancy, eastern France. "There is a grey zone (between wake and sleep) that lasts several days, but it varies from one patient to another," he said.

But awakening is not guaranteed. "The patient may well stay in a coma," said Audibert. When it does happen, the awakening is always "visible", according to Parisian anaesthesiologist Bernard Vigue: "the patient opens his eyes or moves a bit".

The purpose of an induced coma is to allow the brain to rest so as to lower the pressure inside the skull caused by bruising and bleeding in the brain. Once the pressure had been lowered and stabilised, doctors can start lifting an induced coma, said Audibert.

Also factored into the decision is the patient's vital functions and ability to breathe independently -- all artificial coma patients require a ventilator. Doctors would now watch the patient for any response to external stimuli like voice commands, while also monitoring his brain with scanners.

A patient's loved ones play a crucial role at this stage by helping to coax the patient out of sleep, say the experts -- also later to help stimulate the brain back to health.

Vigue said Schumacher could have months, if not years, of therapy ahead of him. "Recovery can be a very long road. In some case, patients improve between a year and three years later," he said.

How to Make Sweet Potato Pancakes

Sweet potatoes have a lot of good nutrients in them, including vitamins C and A, the mineral potassium and lots of dietary fiber. As well as being a nutritional powerhouse, they're very tasty. This makes sweet potatoes ideal as a breakfast dish. So start your day with a healthy energy boost of sweet potato pancakes––even the kids will wolf these down.

Ingredients

• This amount of batter will make about 8 small pancakes:
• 150 g mashed sweet potato (cooked and mashed) (about a quarter pound)
• 1 egg (beaten)
• 2 egg whites (beaten)
• Cinnamon, ground (about 1 teaspoon)

Steps

1. 
   1
   Turn on the stove. Heat to medium.
   
   
2. 
   2
   Mix all of the ingredients together.
3. 
   3
   Pour the mixture onto the hot griddle.
4. 
   4
   Cook each side for about two minutes. Adjust as needed.
5. 
   5
   Finished. Serve as they are or with syrup, cream, etc.
   
   

Tips

• These pancakes are ideal for those who suffer from gluten intolerance, in place of wheat-based pancakes.
• To make egg-free pancakes, try substituting egg replacer for eggs. Follow the package instructions for amounts required.

Warnings

• Be sure to use proper safety equipment when handling kitchen tools, a burn can seriously hurt and will kill some of your skin cells as well.

Things You'll Need

• Mixing bowl
• Mixing spoon
• Griddle or frying pan
• Plates (warmed if possible) for serving

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Deepika Padukone on list of world's most beautiful women

Ash clinched the fourth position while Deepika stood at number 29 on the list

Bollywood actresses Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Deepika Padukone are among the World's 30 Most Beautiful Women of 2014 in a poll conducted by the website Hollywoodbuzz. While Ash clinched the fourth position - after Italian actress Monica Belluci, model Kate Upton and Hollywood star Angelina Jolie - Deepika ranked 29 on the list. 

A statement from an elated Ash read, "The results of this poll by Hollywood Buzz was brought to my notice in fact by my well-wishers whatsapping me, believe it or not, and I must admit it's overwhelming to hear that over 4 million people across the globe have voted and listed me amongst their top choices with such beautiful and talented women. I say a huge loving thank you to all my well-wishers (fans) for making me smile and always being there for me. More power to our love."

Ash and Deepika are the only Indian women to figure in the list which consists largely of Hollywood names including actresses Charlize Theron, Amber Heard, and Jennifer Lawrence. The list of 30 also includes musicians Beyonce, Katy Perry and Rihanna, with a sprinkling of models like Adriana Lima, Irina Shayk and Miranda Kerr.

The following are the names in the complete list:

1. Monica Bellucci
2. Kate Upton
3. Angelina Jolie
4. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
5. Irina Shayk
6. Meryem Uzerli
7. Charlize Theron
8. Amber Heard
9. Rihanna
10. Scarlet Johansson
11. Megan Fox
12. Adriana Lima
13. Halle Berry
14. Eva Mendes
15. Miranda Kerr
16. Katy Perry
17. Amanda Seyfried
18. Olivia Wilde
19. Mila Kunis
20. Kristen Stewart
21. Kim Kardashian
22. Jennifer Lawrence
23. Taylor Swift
24. Haifa Wehbe
25. Beyonce
26. Candice Swanepoel
27. Jessica Alba
28. Anne Hathaway
29. Deepika Padukone
30. Fan Bingbing

Frankly Speaking with Rahul Gandhi ...

Must 'WATCH'

Arvind Kejriwal targets top leaders in 'India's most corrupt' list

A day after he announced that his new Aam Aadmi Party will contest more than 350 of the Lok Sabha's 543 seats,Arvind Kejriwal listed his choice for "India's Most Corrupt" and vowed to put up strong candidates against them.  (AAP to field more than 350 candidates for 2014 Lok Sabha polls)

Union ministers like Kapil Sibal, Kamal Nath and Farooq Abdullah were among his nominees; so was Nitin Gadkari, BS Yeddyurappa and Anant Kumar of the BJP and Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi who is helming his party's campaign for the national election due by May. "Don't let a single corrupt politician enter Parliament," he told party workers. 

Think of that election as a revolution to cleanse parliament, Mr Kejriwal urged party workers in Delhi. He has declared that his party will prioritize defeating about 160 candidates who have criminal records. 

Positioning his party as the putative antidote to a deeply-corrupt system has served the former tax inspector well. A month ago, he took over as the chief minister of Delhi after the Aam Aadmi Party or AAP emerged as a breakout hit in the first election it contested. 

After the hyper-change it escorted, national interest in the AAP has spiked. Opinion polls project about 12 seats for the AAP, but its impact is visible in the national campaign, with the two major parties, the Congress and the opposition BJP, aping its anti-elite, anti-corruption language.

Today, Mr Kejriwal and his cabinet will discuss the anti-graft Jan Lokpal Bill that seeks to punish corrupt government officials with a maximum sentence of life in jail.

NextGen glass that bends but does not break

Afraid of keeping glass-made decorative pieces at home as your naughty kids won't spare them for long? Not any more.

Here comes a NextGen glass that bends but does not break when dropped - thus offering improved man-made designs in the future.

Engineers at McGill University in Canada have developed a technique that makes the glass simply bend and become slightly deformed when dropped.

The inspiration comes from the mechanics of natural structures like seashells in order to significantly increase the toughness of glass.

"Mollusk shells are made up of about 95 percent chalk which is very brittle in its pure form," says professor Francois Barthelat from McGill's department of mechanical engineering.

But nacre - or mother-of-pearl - which coats the inner shells is made up of microscopic tablets that are a bit like miniature Lego building blocks and known to be extremely strong and tough.

"Imagine trying to build a Lego wall with microscopic building blocks. It's not the easiest thing in the world," explained Barthelat.

Instead, the researchers studied the internal 'weak' boundaries or edges to be found in natural materials like nacre.

They used lasers to engrave networks of 3D micro-cracks in glass slides in order to create similar weak boundaries.

The results were dramatic.

The researchers were able to increase the toughness of glass slides 200 times compared to non-engraved slides.

By engraving networks of micro-cracks, they were able to stop the cracks from propagating and becoming larger.

According to Barthelat, the process would be easy to scale up to any size of glass sheet since people are already engraving logos and patterns on glass panels.

"What we know now is that we can toughen glass, or other materials, by using patterns of micro-cracks to guide larger cracks, and in the process absorb the energy from an impact," said Barthelat.

The reseachers now plan to go on to work with ceramics and polymers in future, said the study published in Nature Communications.

Hundreds of living, dead pythons found in US home

A schoolteacher was arrested on Wednesday after hundreds of living and dead pythons in plastic bins were found stacked floor to ceiling inside his stench-filled suburban California home.

As investigators wearing respirator masks carried the reptiles out of the house by the score and stacked them in the driveway, reporters and passers-by gagged at the smell. Some held their noses or walked away from the five-bedroom home to get a breath of air.

"The smell alone - I feel like I need to take a shower for a week," said police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna. "They're pretty much in all the bedrooms - everywhere."

Officers said they found more than 400 snakes - at least 220 of them dead - as well as numerous mice and rats, in the Santa Ana home of William Buchman after neighbors complained about the smell. He was arrested for investigation of neglect in the care of animals, Bertagna said.

Buchman, 53, was still in custody Wednesday afternoon, Bertagna said. The Newport-Mesa Unified School District, where he works, declined comment, saying it was a police matter.

Buchman has not yet had a court appearance or been formally charged and it wasn't clear if he had an attorney.

Authorities said he lived alone, and neighbors said his mother, who had lived with him, had passed away within the past few years.

Microsoft board close to naming Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella as CEO

Microsoft Corp is close to naming a new chief executive, most likely its cloud-computing head Satya Nadella, a source close to the matter said on Thursday, concluding a five-month long search for a heavy-hitter to lead the world's largest software company.

As part of the move, co-founder Bill Gates may step aside as Chairman but remain on the board, while lead independent director John Thompson will take on the Chairman role, the source said on condition of anonymity because the process is private.

Bloomberg first reported the news on Thursday.

Nadella, a native of Hyderabad, India - where Microsoft has its largest non-U.S. research center - was promoted to run the company's fast expanding cloud, or internet-based, computing initiatives in July last year as part of current CEO Steve Ballmer's radical re-organization of the company.


Nadella's appointment would make him the most powerful Indian-born tech executive in the world and put him alongside PepsiCo Inc's chief Indra Nooyi as the leader of a well-known, large-cap U.S. corporation.

Before his role in shaping Microsoft's cloud computing business, Nadella was in charge of the company's growing server and tools unit, following on from high-level roles in Microsoft's Office and Bing search engine teams.

"He's a solid choice," offering continuity of strategy and proven execution, said Sid Parakh, an analyst at fund firm McAdams Wright Ragen,

Some investors had campaigned for an external CEO who might be more likely to shake up the company and reward shareholders with greater dividends and share buybacks, but Parakh said that did not mean Nadella would necessarily be unpopular with Wall Street.

"Any new CEO is going to have to have the shareholders' say in mind. But it's not certain that will translate into actions," said Parakh.

NASA to make water on Moon and oxygen on Mars

This NASA image obtained January 23, 2014 shows a mosaic of images recorded by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity for this self-portrait about three weeks before completing a decade of work on Mars.

NASA is planning to launch robotic missions to make water on the Moon in 2018 and oxygen on Mars in 2020.

The Moon mission will be the US space agency's first attempt to demonstrate in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) beyond Earth.

The purpose of ISRU, or "living off the land" is to harness and utilise space resources to create products and services which enable and significantly reduce the mass, cost, and risk of near-term and long-term space exploration.

"Every pound that you don't have to launch from the Earth of dumb mass - things like water and air and propellant - means that you can add a pound of intelligent mass - an experiment, a computer, something designed to accomplish some job or give us some capability," said lunar geologist Paul Spudis, with the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

"Doing ISRU gives you incredible leverage because you're changing the fraction of intelligent-to-dumb mass on your spacecraft in favour of the intelligent part," he said.

The first in-space ISRU test is targeted for 2018, 'Discovery News' reported.

NASA plans to launch a mission called Resource Prospector that includes a rover with instruments to scout for telltale hydrogen, drill out samples, heat them and scan for water vapour and other volatiles on the moon.

Vapour also could be re-condensed to form a drop of water.

"A lot of the technologies have broader use than just lunar...it's just a convenient location to be testing the ISRU technology," said Jason Crusan, director of Advanced Exploration Systems at NASA headquarters in Washington DC.

A second ISRU experiment is due to be aboard NASA's next Mars rover, which is slated for launch in 2020.

The device, which is yet to be selected, would pull carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere, filter out dust and other particles and prepare the gas for chemical processing into oxygen.

The demonstration also could include actual oxygen production, the report said.

US doctor walks 10 km in snow to perform brain surgery

Where there is a will, there is a way; an old adage was proved by a US surgeon who walked nearly 10 kilometres through snow to perform a life-saving brain surgery.

Dr Zenko Hrynkiw, the only brain surgeon at Trinity Medical Centre in Birmingham, was at a hospital when he was called at a different hospital for an unexpected, life-saving brain surgery.

According to reports, Hrynkiw tried to make the drive, but a sudden snowstorm unfortunately produced a traffic nightmare. He was only able to drive for a few blocks before it became clear that he would not be able to make it behind the wheel.

So, he walked about 10 kilometres to the hospital and then performed the surgery on a patient suffering from a traumatic brain injury.

According to a nurse Steve Davis, Hyrnkiw called up and said: "I'm walking".

On reaching, he spoke to the family of the patient and performed the surgery, Davis said.

"Without the surgery, the patient would have most likely died," hospital sources said.

Despite a light dusting of snow in the south on Tuesday, many cities were dealing with bad road conditions and terrible traffic, with some abandoning their cars on the roads and taking refuge in nearby stores.

In Tarun Tejpal case, photos leaked of reporter he allegedly raped

A photograph that shows Tarun Tejpal with the young journalist he is accused of raping has become the latest flashpoint in the case, with both sides asking the police to determine who is responsible for circulating the picture via email.

Mr Tejpal, 50, is the former editor-in-chief of Tehelka, an investigative newsmagazine.  He was arrested in late November for allegedly sexually assaulting his younger co-worker at a Tehelka conference in Goa earlier that month. 

The emailed photograph shows the young woman with Mr Tejpal and Hollywood star Robert DeNero, who was among the speakers at the Goa event. The journalist's face is clearly seen in the photograph in violation of the law that says the identity of rape survivors must be protected. In a case filed with the Goa police, she has alleged that the photograph violates her privacy and is being circulated to slander her. The email that forwards the photograph includes comments described as slanderous by the journalist. Mr Tejpal's lawyers have argued earlier that her attendance proves that the encounter with Mr Tejpal was consensual; if she was in trauma, they have said in court, there were no visible signs.
  
The journalist says the email is being used to reinforce that argument.

However, sources close to Mr Tejpal say that he believes that the email and photo are being circulated to make it seem like he is trying to intimidate and defame the young woman in the hope that this will hurt his chances of bail. He is likely to file a case asking the Delhi Police's cyber experts to determine the source of the email.  Mr Tejpal is expected to ask the police to check the servers at the Tehelka office to identify whether they were used.

The reporter who quit Tehelka days before Mr Tejpal was arrested has in the past accused his family members of trying to intimidate her.

How to Make Spaghetti with Creamy Mushroom Sauce

This creamy mushroom sauce is like a dream; 10 minutes to make. Toss in your spaghetti or any kind of pasta and you're good to go.

Ingredients

• 1 packet of spaghetti or any pasta of your choice
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 8-9 flakes of garlic, finely chopped
• 1 pound/450g Portobello mushrooms, finely sliced
• 1 tablespoon mixed herbs
• 1 cup stock
• 2 tablespoons cornstarch
• Salt and pepper to taste

1. 
   1
   Cook the spaghetti or pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water according to the package directions. Cook until al dente.
   • Sprinkle a bit of olive oil to prevent sticking.
   
   
2. 
   2
   In a large saucepan, heat the butter and fry the onion and garlic until translucent.
3. 
   3
   Add the mushrooms and cook until soft.
4. 
   4
   Mix the cornstarch with the stock and keep aside.
5. 
   5
   Add the herbs and cook for a while until fragrant.
6. 
   6
   Add the stock and cook till the sauce thickens to a desired consistency.
7. 
   7
   Check the seasoning.
8. 
   8
   Pour the sauce over the prepared spaghetti or pasta. Serve immediately.

Andhra Pradesh assembly rejects Telangana bill, embarrassment for Centre

The Andhra Pradesh assembly today emphatically rejected the draft Bill to create Telangana, embarrassing the Centre and posing a moral dilemma for President Pranab Mukherjee, who has to forward the bill for passing in Parliament. A majority of MLAs backed Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy's resolution to reject the bill that creates the new state.

HERE ARE THE LATEST UPDATES ON THIS STORY:

1. In a largely symbolic exercise, the state assembly passed a resolution rejecting the bill to create Telangana by a voice vote. The resolution says the bill "ignores the very basis of creating Andhra Pradesh." Though the assembly's vote does not matter, the rejection poses an ethical question for the Centre and the President.
2. It is now the President's prerogative to clear the bill for discussion and vote in Parliament in the session that starts on February 5. Sources say he is likely to consult legal experts on his next step. 
3. The Congress will also find it hard to muster support among other parties to push the bill through. Sources say the government has begun discussions with BJP to ensure bipartisan support for the bill that proposes to divide Andhra Pradesh and turn the 10 districts of Telangana into India's 29th state.
4. Pro-Telangana leaders said the resolution was expected, and "not even worth the paper it was printed on." KTR Rao, leader of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti, said "The role of the assembly in creating a new state, especially in a state this divided, is limited. The president should now take the next step in this process." 
5. Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy had dared his own party and said he will quit politics if the bill is introduced in its current form in Parliament.
6. This is the last time that Parliament will meet before the national elections, so if the Telangana proposal is not cleared, Andhra Pradesh will be undivided for the national polls.
7. That will rescue politicians like the Chief Minister who belong to the non-Telangana regions of Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra, which will form the residuary state.
8. A Group of Ministers will meet on February 4 to discuss the road ahead after the bill is returned by Andhra Pradesh.  
9. Residents of "Seemandhra" as the two regions are together referred to, are worried about receiving less water and power than they have so far. Telangana has been arguing for decades that its resources are unfairly exploited by Seemandhra.
10. The president's extended deadline for the assembly to return the bill ends today. 57 legislators, including the Chief Minister, had asked for three more weeks for a detailed discussion.