Fans of the 1960s-1970s TV show "Dark Shadows" have been following with interest the production of the big-screen movie, due in theaters May 11. Actor Johnny Depp, a longtime fan of the show, plays vampire Barnabas Collins, and released photos of him smeared in white makeup have been much discussed online.
But many fans were working under the assumption that the film was a drama, or perhaps even a bit of a horror film. After all, the series featured vampires, witches, warlocks and more -- mixed in, of course, with soap-opera romance and intrigue.
But the trailer shows that the film is really a comedy in which Collins is freed from his coffin and is shocked to find himself in the year 1972. A Volkswagen microbus, lava lamp, disco ball and other signs of the era figure prominently, as does Collins' confusion about modern technology.
In one scene, he asks for a horse, only to be told, "We don't have horses, we have a Chevy." In another, he breaks a television that is featuring Karen Carpenter singing "Top of the World," calling out "Reveal yourself, tiny songstress!" And in another, when he's asked if he is "stoned," he replies, "They tried to stone me ... it did not work."
The movie blog I Watch Stuff wrote of the trailer, "If earlier, staid photos of 'Dark Shadows' had you thinking Johnny Depp might wear some refined dignity atop his plastered-down hair, this first trailer for the film should make clear how wrong you were. It is zany times! Specifically, it is zany time 1972 ..."
Even if it wasn't what fans expected, there's precedent for a TV drama turning into a funny big-screen comedy. The movie version of TV cop show "21 Jump Street" hits theaters Friday, and reviews are overwhelmingly positive. Critic Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars, and said while he didn't feel there was much call for a film version of the old show, "filmmakers have abandoned any pretense of being faithful to the series, and turned to a mashup of screwball comedy, action and "The Odd Couple" formula."
Perhaps "Dark Shadows" can have the same success, but the vampire soap opera has a large and devoted fanbase who may not be as forgiving as "Jump Street" viewers.
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By admin | March 17, 2012
Studies done on green tea have linked drinking green tea with weight loss. This is possible because of the tea?s ability to boost metabolism. Green tea plays its part in fat burning by activating those genes involved in this process. At the same time, it helps in reducing fat absorption from the food we eat. The Chinese are fond of drinking tea after a heavy meal. Studies have also shown that the catechins from the green tea leaves help in prolonging the lifespan of heart muscle cells, thus boosting heart health. So instead of drinking the sugar laden coke, it is better to have a cup of green tea instead.
There are many reasons an enterprise should ideally include search engine marketing among their web promotion secrets. This gives the business the highly competitive edge it requires to prosper in the cut throat contest. Many surveys have concluded that engines are the hottest strategies used to find internet sites. A majority of Internet users prefer this means.
Scanning the web is also relatively common as it is done by 57 % of users. Checking e-mail is the sole activity done more often than use of engines. Surveys indicate that excess of 320 million searches are carried out every day. There are uncountable billions of internet sites and this raises dependency on engines to find info on the internet.
Carefully targeted traffic also will be acquired as purchasers are actively hunting for the services and goods. This distinguishes it from banner advertising. It has been found to be more effective than banners by five to 6 times and cheaper.
Most web marketing experts suggest this strategy if one needs to derive traffic to a website. It was rated at 66% followed by email marketing at 54%. These experts recognize this technique works.
A business may also utilise this excellent opportunity as rivals have been found to be inactive. A survey found that most companies allocate less than 0.5% of their marketing budget on SEO services. Less than 10 % were discovered to increase their visibility by use of this strategy.
The commonest and most straightforward technique utilized for search engine marketing is S.E.O. This is attained by use of certain phrases or keywords. The aim is to generate words or phrases which will be most likely used by consumers. This increases the brand visibility as the site will be placed higher in the result of looking engines. The internet site will thus have the ability to be featured among household brands and common image builds primarily based on organisation.
Though Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony have kept quiet about their divorce and remained amicable in public, the actress is finally opening up about the heartache involved in her separation. In the new issue of Vogue, Lopez reveals how emotional the process has been for her.
WASHINGTON (AP) ? It might be dismissed as an election year gimmick by the big shots who run Capitol Hill, but frustration over Congress' failure to pass a budget since 2009 has given surprising momentum to a bill that would cut off lawmakers' pay if they can't ? or won't ? pass a budget blueprint.
The "no budget, no pay" idea is still a long shot, but it's actually getting an official hearing Wednesday from the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee as part of a package of congressional reform proposals from a centrist group called No Labels.
The idea is simple. If Congress doesn't pass a budget and all 12 of the accompanying spending bills setting annual agency budgets on time, every lawmaker's paycheck would get cut off. No exceptions.
"Congress has been slack for many years and we used to be able to get away with it, but now we can't," Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said. "The downgrade of U.S. Treasury bonds last year showed that the financial markets are losing patience and that we need to start adhering to deadlines."
No Labels is a 500,000-member group started a little more than a year ago by both Democrats and Republicans in hopes of easing the partisanship and gridlock that has engulfed Washington, which it says is a place overtaken by political games and pettiness.
"The parties have organized themselves into warring clans that value defeating the other side over even the most basic acts of governing, like passing a budget on time," a statement on the group's website says.
The last time Congress passed a budget was 1,050 days ago, way back in 2009. That's not the end of the world since the annual congressional budget resolution is a nonbinding measure that mostly sets goals for follow-up legislation like the annual appropriations bills. If there isn't a budget resolution in place, such legislation ? or bills like last month's extension of payroll tax cuts ? can still go forward.
Since Congress' budget often doesn't have much of an impact, congressional leaders sometimes cancel the debate altogether ? especially in election years, when votes on it can expose rank and file lawmakers to political risk.
But the failure of Congress to pass a budget is symptomatic of the broader failure of the institution to accomplish feats that not long ago were considered relatively routine. And there's a simple, powerful political appeal to the idea that if members of Congress don't do their most basic job, they shouldn't get paid.
The top Senate sponsor is Sen. Dean Heller, a Nevada Republican who, not surprisingly, is embroiled in a difficult re-election campaign. He says the inability of Congress to tackle the debt or figure out what to do when the Bush-era tax cuts expire at the end of the year is contributing to the weak economic recovery.
"I'm trying to help people understand that if you don't have a job it has to do with uncertainties in the markets and it has to do with the fact that Washington, D.C., refuses to do its job, which is to tell people what their tax rates are going to be," Heller said. "You take any other Nevadan or any other American and tell them you don't have to do their job for 1,000 days ? they probably don't keep their job."
Other lawmakers, however, aren't so keen on the idea, starting with the chairman and top Republican of the panel holding Wednesday's hearing, Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn, and Susan Collins, R-Maine. The panel has jurisdiction over Cooper and Heller's legislation, but the hearing will focus on other ideas as well, such as requiring senators who filibuster bills to actually stay on the floor and talk the legislation to death, banning filibusters of presidential nominees and requiring monthly bipartisan get-to-know-you sessions among lawmakers.
"It's a hearing on the whole No Labels platform," Lieberman said.
Collins noted there are many rich people in the Senate who might not care whether they get paid or not.
"Given how many wealthy members there are ? of which I am not one, regrettably ? I wonder whether it would really have the kind of impact that its sponsors believe it would," Collins said.
A related idea by Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., to prevent the House and Senate from taking up any legislation ? of any kind ? if it hasn't passed a budget by the April 15 deadline has support from Kent Conrad, D-N.D., the chairman of the budget panel. And both Democrats and Republicans have rallied behind the idea of doing a budget every two years instead of annually.
Fertilization by invasive species threatens nutrient-poor ecosystemsPublic release date: 13-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Dr. Christiane Werner c.werner@uni-bielefeld.de 49-521-106-5574 University of Bielefeld
Biologists at Bielefeld University have developed a new method for quantifying the effect of non-native species on ecosystem functioning
This release is available in German.
They can estimate whether native plants in the neighbourhood of invasive species incorporate the nitrogen fixed by the latter. The biologists examined the Sydney Golden Wattle (Acacia longifolia), an Australian shrub that has established itself in Mediterranean climates worldwide. They found that the invasive species threatens native ecosystems not only through its prolific growth but also by fertilizing the surrounding soil with nitrogen this effect markedly extended beyond the area occupied by the invader. This innovative method (called 15N isoscapes) is being published today (13 March) in the renowned journal Ecology Letters.
Most plants can only take up nitrogen from the soil. The Sydney Golden Wattle (Acacia longifolia) in contrast, is able to assimilate nitrogen from the air with the help of nitrogenfixing bacteria. As a result, this acacia has a large advantage over native non nitrogen fixing species on nitrogen-poor soils such as the dunes on the Portuguese coast at Tria which the research team from Bielefeld University are investigating. On some of these dunes, a massive encroachments of the non-native acacia has already taken place. It suppresses other plants by using more than its share of the limited nutrients and rainwater. Its leaves and branches also shade out smaller plants in the understory. The ecologists Professor Dr. Christiane Werner and her team - Katherine G. Rascher, Christine Hellmann, and Cristina Mguas - wanted to know whether the invasive impact of this acacia is even broader.
Through the decomposing leaves of these acacias, large amounts of fixed nitrogen originating from the air are passed into the soil. One central question for the researchers was whether the native plants in the neighbourhood of the invader use this nitrogen. The additional nutrients would then potentially enhance the growth rates of neighbouring native species. Although this seems positive at first glance, it has problematic consequences for the species diversity in the dune system, because 'dunes are sensitive ecosystems that depend on slow growth and a sustainable use of resources', Christiane Werner says. If the plants grow more quickly than usual, then they use more water, soils becomes drier, endangering the sensitive equilibrium between the native plant community.
For testing whether nitrogen from the air passes via the acacia to neighbouring plants that only use nitrogen from the soil, the researchers took advantage of a different isotopic forms of nitrogen: The most common stable isotope of nitrogen, 14N, has seven protons and seven neutrons, that is, 14 nuclear particles. The less abundant 'heavy' isotope of nitrogen has an additional neutron and thus a total of 15 nuclear particles, 15N. The concentration of 15N in the air is higher than that in the soil of the Portuguese dunes. Hence, if one species fixes nitrogen from the air and if neighbouring plants take up this additional nitrogen, then the leaves of these neighbouring plants should also reveal a higher concentration of heavy nitrogen isotopes.
The research team has now confirmed that the Portuguese crowberry (Corema album), a native shrub on the Portuguese coast, uses a significant amount of the nitrogen that the Sydney Golden Wattle fixes from the air. 'The effect of the non-native acacia on these shrubs is considerable', says Christiane Werner. Her team took leaf samples in a section of the dunes while mapping the locations of the plants. Using an isotope ratio mass spectrometer to analyse the proportion of 15N in the samples, they compared the results with the plant distribution maps. 'This showed that the acacias influence the nitrogen level and the growth of native plants for a radius of up to eight metres outside their canopy', says Christiane Werner. 'Although the acacia is present in only one-fifth of the area under study, it changes the nitrogen dynamics in almost two-thirds of this area'.
For the biologists, this is a significant finding, because it helps to understand how invasive species such as the Sydney Golden Wattle from Australia manage to proliferate in new ecosystems and suppress native species: in this case, fertilizing their surroundings contributes greatly to the success of this acacia.
The method the ecologists are applying is called 'isoscaping'. It is normally used to pinpoint the landscape in which material originates by determining the isotope ratios, e.g. of mineral or plant residues. The research team in Bielefeld is the first to downscale the procedure to the level of a plant community. Christiane Werner reports that the new method is not only suitable for measuring the impact of non-native plants. In future, it could also be used to study, for example, the effect of factory effluents or agricultural fertilizers on ecosystems.
###
Original publication:
Community scale 15N isoscapes: tracing the spatial impact of an exotic N2-fixing invader. Katherine G. Rascher, Christine Hellmann, Cristina Mguas, Christiane Werner. 13 March 2012, Ecology Letters, Impact Factor 15.2
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Fertilization by invasive species threatens nutrient-poor ecosystemsPublic release date: 13-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Dr. Christiane Werner c.werner@uni-bielefeld.de 49-521-106-5574 University of Bielefeld
Biologists at Bielefeld University have developed a new method for quantifying the effect of non-native species on ecosystem functioning
This release is available in German.
They can estimate whether native plants in the neighbourhood of invasive species incorporate the nitrogen fixed by the latter. The biologists examined the Sydney Golden Wattle (Acacia longifolia), an Australian shrub that has established itself in Mediterranean climates worldwide. They found that the invasive species threatens native ecosystems not only through its prolific growth but also by fertilizing the surrounding soil with nitrogen this effect markedly extended beyond the area occupied by the invader. This innovative method (called 15N isoscapes) is being published today (13 March) in the renowned journal Ecology Letters.
Most plants can only take up nitrogen from the soil. The Sydney Golden Wattle (Acacia longifolia) in contrast, is able to assimilate nitrogen from the air with the help of nitrogenfixing bacteria. As a result, this acacia has a large advantage over native non nitrogen fixing species on nitrogen-poor soils such as the dunes on the Portuguese coast at Tria which the research team from Bielefeld University are investigating. On some of these dunes, a massive encroachments of the non-native acacia has already taken place. It suppresses other plants by using more than its share of the limited nutrients and rainwater. Its leaves and branches also shade out smaller plants in the understory. The ecologists Professor Dr. Christiane Werner and her team - Katherine G. Rascher, Christine Hellmann, and Cristina Mguas - wanted to know whether the invasive impact of this acacia is even broader.
Through the decomposing leaves of these acacias, large amounts of fixed nitrogen originating from the air are passed into the soil. One central question for the researchers was whether the native plants in the neighbourhood of the invader use this nitrogen. The additional nutrients would then potentially enhance the growth rates of neighbouring native species. Although this seems positive at first glance, it has problematic consequences for the species diversity in the dune system, because 'dunes are sensitive ecosystems that depend on slow growth and a sustainable use of resources', Christiane Werner says. If the plants grow more quickly than usual, then they use more water, soils becomes drier, endangering the sensitive equilibrium between the native plant community.
For testing whether nitrogen from the air passes via the acacia to neighbouring plants that only use nitrogen from the soil, the researchers took advantage of a different isotopic forms of nitrogen: The most common stable isotope of nitrogen, 14N, has seven protons and seven neutrons, that is, 14 nuclear particles. The less abundant 'heavy' isotope of nitrogen has an additional neutron and thus a total of 15 nuclear particles, 15N. The concentration of 15N in the air is higher than that in the soil of the Portuguese dunes. Hence, if one species fixes nitrogen from the air and if neighbouring plants take up this additional nitrogen, then the leaves of these neighbouring plants should also reveal a higher concentration of heavy nitrogen isotopes.
The research team has now confirmed that the Portuguese crowberry (Corema album), a native shrub on the Portuguese coast, uses a significant amount of the nitrogen that the Sydney Golden Wattle fixes from the air. 'The effect of the non-native acacia on these shrubs is considerable', says Christiane Werner. Her team took leaf samples in a section of the dunes while mapping the locations of the plants. Using an isotope ratio mass spectrometer to analyse the proportion of 15N in the samples, they compared the results with the plant distribution maps. 'This showed that the acacias influence the nitrogen level and the growth of native plants for a radius of up to eight metres outside their canopy', says Christiane Werner. 'Although the acacia is present in only one-fifth of the area under study, it changes the nitrogen dynamics in almost two-thirds of this area'.
For the biologists, this is a significant finding, because it helps to understand how invasive species such as the Sydney Golden Wattle from Australia manage to proliferate in new ecosystems and suppress native species: in this case, fertilizing their surroundings contributes greatly to the success of this acacia.
The method the ecologists are applying is called 'isoscaping'. It is normally used to pinpoint the landscape in which material originates by determining the isotope ratios, e.g. of mineral or plant residues. The research team in Bielefeld is the first to downscale the procedure to the level of a plant community. Christiane Werner reports that the new method is not only suitable for measuring the impact of non-native plants. In future, it could also be used to study, for example, the effect of factory effluents or agricultural fertilizers on ecosystems.
###
Original publication:
Community scale 15N isoscapes: tracing the spatial impact of an exotic N2-fixing invader. Katherine G. Rascher, Christine Hellmann, Cristina Mguas, Christiane Werner. 13 March 2012, Ecology Letters, Impact Factor 15.2
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 13-Mar-2012
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