US Military to Launch Hypersonic Rocket Plane by 2016

The U.S. military aims to fly a full-scale rocket plane at 20 times the speed of sound by 2016, officials announced last week.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, laid out its plan to develop and test-fly the hypersonic vehicle in a press release issued Friday (July 6). The so-called X-plane would travel at Mach 20 ? roughly 13,000 mph (20,900 kph) ? allowing the military to reach any spot on the globe in less than an hour.
Further, the vehicle would be "recoverable," according to the release ? meaning the government could get it back.

To help make all this happen, DARPA has started up a new program called Integrated Hypersonics. IH will build off previous Defense Department research into ultra-fast flight but will need to make some major strides of its own, officials said. [NASA's Vision of Future Air Travel (Gallery)]

Full link http://news.yahoo.com/us-military-launch-hypersonic-rocket-plane-2016-144923722.htmlhttp://news.yahoo.com/us-military-launch-hypersonic-rocket-plane-2016-144923722.html

Source: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?214996-US-Military-to-Launch-Hypersonic-Rocket-Plane-by-2016&goto=newpost

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Barrier Island Realty has Top Two Agents for Longboat Key

July 11, 2012 ? Leslie Russell and Mary Moore with Barrier Island Realty, 7000 Gulf of Mexico Drive, Longboat Key, are currently listed as the top two agents in year-to-date transactions on Longboat Key with the Manatee Association of Realtors.? Russell was the number one agent ranked by MAR and specializes as a Buyer?s Broker on Longboat Key and Anna Maria Island, and Mary Moore was ranked second and she specializes in working with sellers of homes and condos on north Longboat Key and especially Cedars Tennis Resort.? Both Moore and Russell can be reached at the Barrier Island Realty main office at (941) 387-8888.

?

Barrier Island Realty, with offices at the northern tip of Longboat Key as well as at Cedars Tennis Resort, is a sister company to both Longboat Key?s longtime vacation rental company Resort Vacation Accommodations (RVA), and the commercial real estate firm of Sperry Van Ness Commercial Advisory Group with offices in Sarasota and Bradenton.? These three companies combine to offer full service residential & commercial real estate sales, leasing and property management as well as vacation rentals.

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Source: http://madduxpress.com/index.php/2012/07/12/barrier-island-realty-has-top-two-agents-for-longboat-key-49478/

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Star ballerina born into war grows up to inspire

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa?? Michaela DePrince was little more than a toddler when she saw her first ballerina ? an image in a magazine page blown against the gate of the orphanage where she ended up during Sierra Leone's civil war. It showed an American ballet dancer posed on tip toe.

"All I remember is she looked really, really happy," Michaela told The Associated Press this week. She wished "to become this exact person."

From the misery of the orphanage "I saw hope in it. And I ripped the page out and I stuck it in my underwear because I didn't have any place to put it."

Now Michaela's the one inspiring young Africans: She escaped war and suffers a skin pigmentation disorder that had her labeled "the devil's child" at the orphanage. She's an African dancer in the world of ballet that sees few leading black females. She was adopted and raised to become a ballerina in the U.S. ? a country where she believed everyone walked around on tippy toes.

On July 19, Michaela performs in her first professional full ballet, dancing the part of Gulnare in Le Corsaire, as a guest artist of South Africa's two biggest dance companies, Mzansi Productions and South African Ballet Theatre.

Her ascent to stardom in the ballet world has been fast, if not typical. At 17, she's already been featured in a documentary film and has performed on TV-show "Dancing With the Stars". She just graduated from high school and the American Ballet Theatre's Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, and will go on to work at Dance Theatre of Harlem. Her family recently moved from Vermont to New York City to support her dance career and her sister's acting and singing. Michaela said she has been offered many opportunities to dance with companies in Europe and in the U.S.

Texan teen becomes first American to graduate from Russian ballet school

Her big brown eyes are framed by mascara-coated lashes to cover their whiteness stemming from the vitiligo skin disorder. Tiny wisps of white curls peek through the dark brown hair pinned into a bun. Her wide infectious grin turned strained as she chatted about her childhood.

"I lost both my parents, so I was there (the orphanage) for about a year and I wasn't treated very well because I had vitiligo," she said Monday. "We were ranked as numbers and number 27 was the least favorite and that was my number, so I got the least amount of food, the least amount of clothes and what not."

Michaela said she walked shoeless for miles to reach a refugee camp after word came that the orphanage would be bombed. Elaine DePrince, who adopted Michaela and two other girls, Mia and Mariel, from the orphanage, said she met the girls in Ghana in 1999. Michaela was 4.

"They came to me sick and traumatized by the war," DePrince said. "Michaela arrived with the worst case of tonsillitis, fever, mononucleosis and joints that were swollen.

Michaela said the war and her time in the orphanage affected her for years.

"It took a long time to get it out of my memory. But my mom helped me a lot and I wrote a lot of stuff down so I could recover from it," she said. "Dance helped me a lot. I had a lot of nightmares. "

Controversial adoptions
Michaela, Mia and Mariel were among children whose adoptions became controversial in Sierra Leone.

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In 2010, some parents of 29 children left at the Help A Needy Child International center, known as HANCI, stormed the office of Sierra Leone's social welfare minister demanding help finding their sons and daughters. They claimed many did not know their children would be adopted.

HANCI maintains the parents consented and said it arranged the adoptions through a U.S. agency that placed 29 of the children with American parents. DePrince confirmed three of her daughters were adopted through the U.S. agency.

In April, Sierra Leone police opened an investigation into the adoptions.

The adoptions took place as the West African country suffered a decade-long war that ended in 2002. Rebels burned villages, raped women and turned kidnapped children into drugged teenage fighters. Tens of thousands of civilians died. Countless others were mutilated by rebels who hacked off hands, arms or legs with machetes.

Michaela said her father, a trader, was shot dead by rebels and her mother starved to death. It is unclear if she has family left in Sierra Leone. While Mia told her mother that many parents visited their children at the orphanage, Michaela didn't get visitors.

Video: A ballerina who?s making history (on this page)

"I would like to say that, if she has any relatives alive in Sierra Leone they should know that she has been extremely well cared for and loved, and we have put our hearts and souls into making her dreams come true," DePrince said.

DePrince and her husband Charles have adopted nine children, and had two biological sons. Two of Michaela's brothers died before she was born, and a third died when she was young. Their deaths were a result of HIV contracted from a manufactured plasma product that was used to treat the hemorrhages associated with hemophilia.

DePrince said the family has worked hard to develop all their children's dreams.

"She says she would have not had this dream come true if she had not become Michaela DePrince" by adoption, DePrince said, adding that none of the three girls adopted from Sierra Leone have expressed interest in finding their biological family.

'Brilliance is colorblind'
But Michaela said she does eventually want to return to her birthplace to open a school for dance and the arts.

"I hope to inspire a lot of young children," Michaela said, "no matter what people tell you, you should focus on your goals and you should do what you want to do, especially if you want to be a ballet dancer."

Video: Bolshoi ?is my passion? (on this page)

Michaela counts many African American ballet dancers among her role models: "They all have conquered something in the dance world because they were black and they've slowly broken down barriers."

When she was around 8 and rehearsing for The Nutcracker, just a few days before the performance she was told, "I'm sorry, you can't do it. America's not ready for a black girl ballerina."

For Michaela, "to say this to an 8-year-old is just devastating. It was terrible."

When she was 9, a teacher told her mother: "I don't like to put money into black dancers because they grow up and end up having big boobs and big hips."

The dancer looked down at her petite figure and protested, "I don't have boobs. I don't get it."

Instead of getting her down, "It makes me more determined," she said. "Because I've been through so much, I know now that I can make it and I can help other kids who have been in really bad situations realize that they can make it too."

Her story, her technique, her focus, is set to inspire other young black and African girls who face hardship to pursue their dreams.

Michaela's presence "shakes and rattles the whole idea that ballet is not for black people and shows it's for all people," said Dirk Badenhorst, CEO-designate of South Africa Mzansi Ballet. "Brilliance is colorblind and it really is proved by Michaela."

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48158581/ns/world_news-africa/

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Are You Afraid of Mobile Phone Separation? [INFOGRAPHIC]

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/afraid-mobile-phone-separation-infographic-172625003.html

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Panasonic DMP-BDT220

The Panasonic DMP-BDT220 Blu-ray player packs a lot of features into an affordable package. It has built-in Wi-Fi, 3D support, and even an SD card reader, all for $114.99 (direct). It wasn't too shabby in our lab tests, either, with quick load times and very good video processing. It isn't quite as well-designed as the Editors' Choice budget Blu-ray player, the LG BP620 ($149.99, 4 stars), but it comes close.

Design, Remote, and Apps
The front panel of the 1.5- by 16.9- by 7.1-inch (HWD), 3.3-pound BDT220 is a single piece of glossy black plastic that tips down to expose the drive tray, SD card slot, USB port, and Play/Stop buttons. The panel is punctuated by a shiny silver Panasonic logo and a shiny blue Blu-ray logo, and part of it is translucent to let the blue LED display shine clearly through. Power and Eject buttons sit on top of the panel, accessible even when the panel is flipped up over the other ports and controls.

The back of the player holds an HDMI port, an Ethernet port, another USB port, optical and stereo analog audio outputs, and a composite video output. Strangely, you have to use the SD card slot for the required 1GB storage for BD-Live features; you can't just pop a USB drive into one of the ports. The front USB port is for playing external media, which is counterintuitive considering you'd be just as likely to pop your SD card from your camera to look at pictures on your HDTV than to put your photos and videos on a USB drive.

The 6.6-inch remote is small, clunky, and unlit. The direction pad and playback controls sit low on the remote, while the seldom-used number pad sits right under the thumb, which is slightly inconvenient. There are dedicated 3D, Internet, Netflix, and Skype buttons for accessing the player's features easily.

The player can access multiple online services through Panasonic's Viera Connect system. The Internet button loads a tiled menu showing all the installed services on the player, and offers access to other apps and services through the Viera Connect store. Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, YouTube, and Vudu are available out of the box, along with MLB, NHL, MLS, and NBA sports services. It also comes with Skype, if you want to plug in your own Webcam for video chat (it's compatible with certain Panasonic, Logitech, and Freetalk Webcams). The Viera Connect menu interface is a little clunky and doesn't offer an accessible list of all the services you have installed?instead, you have to browse through eight-icon panes. But you can organize them so your most often used services are in the front.

Performance and Conclusions
The BDT220 is pretty speedy, averaging 24.8 seconds to load a non-BD-Live disc (Ralph Bakshi's Wizards), and 22.3 seconds for a BD-Live disc (The Sound of Music 45th Anniversary Edition).

We test Blu-ray players with the HQV benchmark Blu-ray disc, and the BDT220 passed nearly every test on the disc with flying colors. It handled both 30fps video and 24fps film footage well, and it showed horizontal motion and text crawling with very little choppiness. It did little to remove random noise, but that's a minor issue.

The player upconverts DVDs relatively well. I loaded The Sitter on DVD and while the player didn't work any smoothing or noise reduction magic, the upconverted video was very watchable. No upconverting can create details where there aren't any, and you'll almost always get a better experience with the Blu-ray version of a film. For example, fine details like hair and movement in shadows were easily visible on the Blu-ray version of The Sitter, but vanished into murky blobs with the DVD version.

The Panasonic DMP-BDT220 is an excellent budget Blu-ray player. It supports 3D, has built-in Wi-Fi, and its price makes it very friendly to budget-minded home theater owners. The remote is clunky and you're probably going to want to fiddle with your online service list, but these are small complaints for an affordable, full-featured Blu-ray player. It's comparable to the Editors' Choice LG BP620, but with a less comfortable remote and slightly less convenient menu system. IF you really want to splurge, the Oppo BDP-93 ($499.99, 4 stars) still stands as the best high-end Blu-ray player you can get. Of course, for its price you can get three BDT220s and a few Blu-rays to watch on them.

More Blu-ray Player Reviews:
??? Panasonic DMP-BDT220
??? Toshiba BDX5300
??? LG BP620
??? Sony Internet TV Blu-ray Disc Player (NSZ-GT1)
??? Samsung BD-D5500
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/YluG6dwFEAI/0,2817,2402117,00.asp

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Video: The Saturday Evening Post archives ?a rich treasure?

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Source: http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/48154768/

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Bridal gown designer Wang and husband separate

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Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bridal-gown-designer-wang-husband-separate-135127600.html

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