FastFunds Financial Corporation and NET LIFE Financial Complete Preparation for Widespread Launch of Its Revolutionary Financial Instruments

NET LIFE Financial Processing, Inc. ("NET LIFE"), a wholly owned subsidiary of FastFunds Financial Corporation (OTCQB: FFFC), NET LIFE Financial Holdings ("NET LIFE Financial") and its joint partners, One Resource Group ("ORG") and Epic Financial Corporation ("EPIC") announced today that it is completing preparations for a widespread launch of its revolutionary financial instruments and in conjunction with ORG and its insurance carriers, are ramping up their staff accordingly.

NET LIFE Financial reports that this action comes immediately following last week's successful launch to a select group of mortgage brokers and realtors.

The recently installed new server is 2015 compliant and will handle all residential and commercial mortgage applications. The NET LIFE Financial IT department is concluding the on-line residential and commercial mortgage application testing with the new servers that have a capacity to accept 10,000 applications per hour.

A NET LIFE LCMO® (Life Collateralized Mortgage Obligation) is a residential, business or corporate real estate mortgage which is not based on credit history; only on the collateral. All that is required for which to qualify is: (a.) that you are healthy, (b.) that the property maintains and sustains its stated value and (c.) that you have the income to pay your mortgage. All NET LIFE LCMO® mortgages are processed, managed and serviced exactly like a conventional mortgage without all of the red-tape qualification. NET LIFE has only reinvented the "vehicle," not the "wheel" it rides upon.

A NET LIFE LCDO® (Life Collateralized Debt Obligation) is our second revolutionary product which has been formulated specifically for individuals and businesses seeking to raise capital. A NET LIFE LCDO® is an asset-backed lending process which is secured by the underlying collateral. A NET LIFE LCDO® is not based on credit history; only on the collateral. All that is required for which to qualify is: (a.) that you are healthy, (b.) that the asset(s) maintain and sustains its stated value and (c.) that you have the income to pay your loan. All NET LIFE LCDO® loans are processed, managed and serviced exactly like a conventional note or loan without all of the red-tape qualification. NET LIFE has only reinvented the "vehicle," not the "wheel" it rides upon.

ORG and EPIC will market and process the NET LIFE product-line (LCMO and LCDO) including the life insurance portion through their life insurance carriers and agents in all fifty states, including asset management organizations and independent financial advisors. Marketing strategies will include insurance agents, mortgage brokers, realtors and other independent financial advisors throughout the United States.

Standard Life Investments becomes first Worldwide Partner in Ryder Cup history

The 2014 Ryder Cup at Gleneagles will welcome the first designated Worldwide Partner in the event's history following an agreement between Standard Life Investments, Ryder Cup Europe and the PGA of America that will see the global asset management company become a Worldwide Partner to both the 2014 and 2016 Ryder Cups.

Never before has a company partnered with The Ryder Cup on both sides of the Atlantic, with the new ground-breaking agreement enabling Standard Life Investments to promote and market its association with The Ryder Cup on a truly global scale.

With a potential daily TV audience of 500 million people across 183 countries, The Ryder Cup has evolved into one of the sport's most valuable and prestigious global brands, making it the perfect partner for a dynamic company such as Standard Life Investments.

Keith Skeoch, CEO, Standard Life Investments, said: "Standard Life Investments is thrilled to become the first Worldwide Partner of The Ryder Cup. This sponsorship complements our reputation as a leading global asset manager with strong performance and a distinctive team culture. It is an integral part of our long-term brand building strategy and is a perfect match in terms of our heritage, client base and strong team ethos."

Pete Bevacqua, Chief Executive Officer of the PGA of America, said: "We are delighted to welcome Standard Life Investments as a Worldwide Partner to both the 2014 and 2016 Ryder Cups in what is an historical agreement.

"We believe The Ryder Cup is among the most valuable sponsorship investments in sport and are confident that Standard Life Investments will reap tremendous value from their Worldwide Partnership on both sides of the Atlantic.

"This announcement follows the launch of the unified Ryder Cup global brand identity and the stated aim of Ryder Cup Europe and the PGA of America to secure global partnerships going forward."

Richard Hills, Europe's Ryder Cup Director, added: "As a company, with a strong global reach and Scottish heritage, Standard Life Investments share our commitment to teamwork and helping people achieve their full potential.

"We look forward to working closely with the Standard Life Investments team in delivering a world class Ryder Cup at The Gleneagles Hotel; a Ryder Cup that will create a positive and long lasting legacy for the game in the 'Home of Golf'."

Notes on Standard Life Investments / Standard Life
With assets under management of £163.4bn ($263.9bn) Standard Life Investments is one of Europe's major investment houses. Employing over 1,000 people and headquartered in Edinburgh, Standard Life Investments maintains offices in a number of locations around the globe including Boston, Hong Kong, London, Beijing, Montreal, Sydney, Dublin, Paris and Seoul. In January 2012 Standard Life Investments teamed up with John Hancock Mutual Funds to make its award-winning Global Absolute Return Strategies (GARS) Fund available to the United States retail marketplace.

Standard Life Investments was launched as an investment management company in 1998. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Life Investments (Holdings) Limited, which in turn is a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Life plc. With a reputation for innovation in pursuit of client investment objectives Standard Life Investments' capabilities span equities, bonds, real estate, private equity, multi-asset solutions, fund-of-funds and absolute return strategies.

Established in 1825, Standard Life is a leading provider of long term savings and investments to around 6 million customers worldwide. Headquartered in Edinburgh, Standard Life has around 9,000 employees internationally.

The Standard Life group includes savings and investments businesses, which operate across its UK, Canadian and European markets; corporate pensions and benefits businesses in the UK and Canada; and its Chinese and Indian Joint Venture businesses. The Group has total assets under administration of over £211bn ($342bn).

Standard Life plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange and has approximately 1.5 million individual shareholders in over 50 countries around the world. It is also listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, ranking it among the top 10% of sustainable companies in the world. All figures at 30 September 2012

Standard Life Investments becomes first Worldwide Partner in Ryder Cup history

The 2014 Ryder Cup at Gleneagles will welcome the first designated Worldwide Partner in the event's history following an agreement between Standard Life Investments, Ryder Cup Europe and the PGA of America that will see the global asset management company become a Worldwide Partner to both the 2014 and 2016 Ryder Cups.

Never before has a company partnered with The Ryder Cup on both sides of the Atlantic, with the new ground-breaking agreement enabling Standard Life Investments to promote and market its association with The Ryder Cup on a truly global scale.

With a potential daily TV audience of 500 million people across 183 countries, The Ryder Cup has evolved into one of the sport's most valuable and prestigious global brands, making it the perfect partner for a dynamic company such as Standard Life Investments.

Keith Skeoch, CEO, Standard Life Investments, said: "Standard Life Investments is thrilled to become the first Worldwide Partner of The Ryder Cup. This sponsorship complements our reputation as a leading global asset manager with strong performance and a distinctive team culture. It is an integral part of our long-term brand building strategy and is a perfect match in terms of our heritage, client base and strong team ethos."

Pete Bevacqua, Chief Executive Officer of the PGA of America, said: "We are delighted to welcome Standard Life Investments as a Worldwide Partner to both the 2014 and 2016 Ryder Cups in what is an historical agreement.

"We believe The Ryder Cup is among the most valuable sponsorship investments in sport and are confident that Standard Life Investments will reap tremendous value from their Worldwide Partnership on both sides of the Atlantic.

"This announcement follows the launch of the unified Ryder Cup global brand identity and the stated aim of Ryder Cup Europe and the PGA of America to secure global partnerships going forward."

Richard Hills, Europe's Ryder Cup Director, added: "As a company, with a strong global reach and Scottish heritage, Standard Life Investments share our commitment to teamwork and helping people achieve their full potential.

"We look forward to working closely with the Standard Life Investments team in delivering a world class Ryder Cup at The Gleneagles Hotel; a Ryder Cup that will create a positive and long lasting legacy for the game in the 'Home of Golf'."

Notes on Standard Life Investments / Standard Life

With assets under management of £163.4bn ($263.9bn) Standard Life Investments is one of Europe's major investment houses. Employing over 1,000 people and headquartered in Edinburgh, Standard Life Investments maintains offices in a number of locations around the globe including Boston, Hong Kong, London, Beijing, Montreal, Sydney, Dublin, Paris and Seoul. In January 2012 Standard Life Investments teamed up with John Hancock Mutual Funds to make its award-winning Global Absolute Return Strategies (GARS) Fund available to the United States retail marketplace.

Standard Life Investments was launched as an investment management company in 1998. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Life Investments (Holdings) Limited, which in turn is a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Life plc. With a reputation for innovation in pursuit of client investment objectives Standard Life Investments' capabilities span equities, bonds, real estate, private equity, multi-asset solutions, fund-of-funds and absolute return strategies.

Established in 1825, Standard Life is a leading provider of long term savings and investments to around 6 million customers worldwide. Headquartered in Edinburgh, Standard Life has around 9,000 employees internationally.

The Standard Life group includes savings and investments businesses, which operate across its UK, Canadian and European markets; corporate pensions and benefits businesses in the UK and Canada; and its Chinese and Indian Joint Venture businesses. The Group has total assets under administration of over £211bn ($342bn).

Standard Life plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange and has approximately 1.5 million individual shareholders in over 50 countries around the world. It is also listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index, ranking it among the top 10% of sustainable companies in the world. All figures at 30 September 2012

Could Life Have Evolved on Mars Before Earth?

The discovery that ancient Mars could have supported microbes raises the tantalizing possibility that life may have evolved on the Red Planet before it took root on Earth.

New observations by NASA's Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past, when the Red Planet was a warmer and wetter place, scientists announced Tuesday (March 12).

It's unclear exactly how long ago Mars' habitability window opened up, researchers said. But the timing may be comparable to that of Earth, where life first appeared around 3.8 billion years ago.

"We're talking about older than 3 billion years ago, and we're probably looking at a situation where, plus or minus a couple hundred million years, it's about the time that we start seeing the first record of life preserved on Earth," Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger, of Caltech in Pasadena, said during a press conference Tuesday.

The Curiosity team's conclusions are based on the rover's study of material collected from the interior of a Martian rock. Last month, Curiosity used its hammering drill to bore 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) into part of a Red Planet outcrop dubbed "John Klein" — deeper than any Mars robot had ever gone before.

Curiosity's analyses show that the John Klein area was once a benign aqueous environment, such as a neutral-pH lake, researchers said. Further, the rover's instruments detected many of the chemical ingredients necessary for life as we know it, including sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon.

Mission scientists aren't claiming that life has ever existed on the Red Planet. They have found no signs of Martian microbes, which is no surprise since the car-size Curiosity rover carries no life-detection instruments among its scientific gear.

But the advanced age of the John Klein deposits does open the door to some interesting speculation. If life ever flourished on Mars — a very big if — did it predate life on Earth? And if so, could Earth life trace its lineage back to Mars?

Some microbes are incredibly hardy, after all, and may be able to survive an interplanetary journey after being blasted off their home world by an asteroid impact. And orbital dynamics show that it's much easier for rocks to travel from Mars to Earth than the other way around.

These are questions scientists and laypeople alike will undoubtedly ask if a future mission ever does find conclusive evidence of life on Mars. But for now, Curiosity will continue rolling through its Gale Crater landing site, helping scientists learn more about the Red Planet and its history.

"Mars has written its autobiography in the rocks of Gale Crater, and we've just started deciphering that story," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the agency's headquarters in Washington.

Valerie Harper: 'I'm Living A Normal Life' Following Brain Cancer Diagnosis

Valerie Harper is continuing to live her life to the fullest after going public with her diagnosis of terminal brain cancer.

The TV icon visited Access Hollywood Live on Tuesday, where she chatted with Billy Bush and Kit Hoover about her fight to continue living.

PLAY IT NOW: Superfoods To Help Fight Breast Cancer!
"I'm feeling good and I wanted people to see that and to know that... and telling people, 'Don't go to the funeral before the day of the funeral. Live each day, each moment even,'" Valerie, 73, said.
The Emmy-winning actress was diagnosed with leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, a rare form of cancer that affects the fluid-filled membrane surrounding the brain, in January.

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Through The Years: TV’s Favorite Families
"I have great doctors and I have a wonderful, wonderful husband, who has been there just incredibly," she continued, referring to her spouse, husband Tony Cacciotti. "I thought I need to share this now - and it's in the brain area - and I didn't want to start having problems with speech or anything else."

The actress is using her illness as an opportunity to help others facing medical scares.

"I want [the public] to know that I'm there and I'm fighting this thing and that death is a part of life and it's almost a privilege or advantage to know because a lot of us push death away, don't look at it, don't want to think about it... You shouldn't spend time morosely looking at it, but you do have to face it," she explained. "None of us are getting out of this alive, we are all terminal. It just depends when."

VIEW THE PHOTOS: Hollywood’s Hottest Moms & Their Loveable Little Ones
Valerie has been busy tying up the loose ends in her life, while still enjoying her time with her loved ones.
"I'm cleaning out closets, I'm getting rid of junk. I took the Emmys out of the garage and brought them into the house to make sure I know where they were. I'm going to the movies, I'm cooking dinner, I'm running, I'm lifting weights, I'm doing everything I did because of [my] wonderful team [of doctors]," she continued.
VIEW THE PHOTOS: Celebrity Cancer Survivors

"I'm living a normal life and the new era of cancer is not, 'Kill the cells! Kill the cells!' and you ruin the person, it's new. It's managing the cancer... You can die with cancer, but not of it, that's really true," Valerie said.

The actress and author of "I, Rohda" is even eyeing job offers.
"I've been asked to do some jobs, which is wonderful and I would be pleased to do it," she said.
Despite her extremely positive outlook, Valerie admitted that she's still facing her fears daily.

"I get terrified at night sometimes... and if I feel like crying, I do. If I feel like walking around the house taking deep breaths, I do," she said. "It's not crazy to be afraid of death, no one wants to embrace it, I'm just saying, don't let your fear of death rob your living now. That's your real key, stay in the moment the best you can."

One of her greatest fears is leaving behind husband Tony, whom she has been married to since 1987.
"He is the love of my life and I don't want to leave him, but I have to face what may be ahead," she told Billy and Kit. "He's my beloved, beloved heart, he's just my heart."

Edinburgh-based Standard Life profits' surge prompts payout

Shareholders will benefit from a £302m windfall after the Edinburgh-based business reported £286m in UK pre-tax operating profits, up from £156m.

Overall, the group made an operating profit of £900m, up from £544, the previous year.

It also announced it will pay a special dividend of 12.8p per share, on top of a regular payout of 14.7p.

The profits' surge follows a year in which the firm shed more than 100 jobs as part of a restructuring process.

The move was in response to regulatory changes such as pensions reform and the retail distribution review (RDR).

Increased profitability
Despite Standard Life's strong performance in the UK in 2011, the operating profit before tax for the rest of Europe was down at £37m, compared with £46m the previous year.

In the UK we are ready to benefit from the significant changes to the market and the increased customer need for savings products”

Chief executive David Nish said: "Standard Life has delivered a substantial increase in profitability and has a strong capital position supporting increased dividends for our shareholders.

"We have been building strong positions in our core markets. In the UK we are ready to benefit from the significant changes to the market and the increased customer need for savings products.

"In Standard Life Investments we have one of the world's leading asset managers whose reach and scale is increasingly global."

The 65% increase in profits came despite a significant fall in UK company pension net inflows from £2bn to £1.2bn a year, as firms put off decisions ahead of the launch of a scheme to automatically place workers in company pensions.

Pensions boost
It said employers were delaying changes to their pension plans due to the phased launch of auto-enrolment, which began on 1 October 2012 and will see up to 10 million people placed in workplace pensions, starting with the largest firms and gradually applying to other firms over the next six years.

Standard Life said it expected a significant boost from the scheme over the years ahead, forecasting a potential 400,000 extra savers.

Mr Nish said: "We've got 35,000 corporate clients, we're transitioning 300 during this year, so from our view point auto-enrolment is a very positive driver of our business."

From baseball dreams to bloody coups: The dramatic life of Hugo Chávez

Hugo Chávez’s life—and now his death—was a story straight out of Hollywood.
Chávez could not depart quietly from the presidency of Venezuela and slip into an easy retirement like most leaders. That would have been too mundane.
No, he had to have a dramatic exit, battling cancer for nearly two years, shuttling from Caracas to Havana for treatment, virtually disappearing from public view in the last weeks of his life.

It was the final chapter of what even his enemies must admit was an extraordinary life, from organizing a clandestine cell in the military for a decade to running for president against a former Miss Universe to calling George W. Bush “the devil” at the United Nations.

Chávez was literally born in a mud hut in the Great Plains of Venezuela. He was so poor as a child that the grandmother who raised him made him sell sweets at school.

As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a major league baseball player in the United States. He gained entrance to a prestigious military academy—mainly because he thought he’d have a better chance of getting discovered by scouts in Caracas than in rural Venezuela.

But at the academy he discovered Simon Bolivar, the “Liberator” and Venezuelan native son who freed six South American countries from Spanish rule and became Chávez’s inspiration for creating a more just Venezuela and Latin America.

Venezuela sat atop some of the world’s largest oil reserves, yet most of the population was mired in poverty. A tiny elite monopolized the oil money.
Incensed, Chávez formed a secret organization inside the military of like-minded soldiers. By day he was a soldier, by night he was a conspirator.
The turning point came in 1989 when the government massacred hundreds if not several thousand people after riots broke out over an International Monetary Fund, neo-liberal “shock package.” Chávez and his cohorts decided to strike back.

On Feb. 4, 1992, they launched a coup against the government of Carlos Andres Perez. The putsch failed, but Chávez became an instant hero to millions of poor people.

He went to jail for two years, got pardoned and spent a couple of years criss-crossing the country. By 1997, he was running for president. His main opponent at first was former Miss Universe Irene Saez. The campaign was dubbed “the beauty and the beast.”

In December 1998, Chávez easily won the presidency.
His presidency was equally dramatic, a series of life-and-death roller coaster rides. In April 2002, he was the object of a coup attempt himself. After bloody street confrontations by clashing demonstrations, he was essentially kidnapped by military coup leaders and disappeared from public view for two days. The president was missing—his countrymen did not know where he was.
But loyalists launched a counter-coup, snatched Chávez from a Caribbean island where he was being held, and flew him back to Caracas on a helicopter in the middle of the night.

As the chopper’s lights broke through the mist in the sky at close to 3 am, thousands of his supporters who had surrounded the presidential palace for two days waiting and hoping for his return broke into cheers and then became delirious.

They had feared Chávez was going to be executed during the coup, and by his account he nearly was. Now, on the third day, it was as if he had risen from the dead.

To his supporters, it was like a miracle. This time around, in his battle against cancer, Chávez could not produce another one.

Joachim Schorr, PhD, Named Chief Scientific Officer at Caris Life Sciences

Caris Life Sciences®, a leading biosciences company focused on fulfilling the promise of personalized medicine, announced today that it has named Joachim Schorr, PhD, as its Chief Scientific Officer. He joins Caris in this role after working as a consultant with the company during the past year. In this expanded capacity, Dr. Schorr's extensive expertise in the molecular sciences arena will help to shape and advance Caris' research and development strategy.
"Having worked closely with Caris Life Sciences in 2012 as Senior Scientific Advisor, I have seen firsthand the world-class work being done every day at Caris to advance innovation in the field of personalized medicine," said Dr. Schorr. "

Given our position as the emerging standard for cancer tumor profiling with the Molecular Intelligence Service, I am convinced that Caris is set to transform cancer diagnosis and patient care through its blood-based Carisome platform. I am excited to be part of this scientific paradigm shift."
Before joining Caris, Dr. Schorr held various leadership positions at QIAGEN N.V., the global leader in sample and assay Technologies, until April 2012. In his most recent role there, he served as Senior Vice President Global R&D and Managing Director, was a member of the Executive Committee and was responsible for research and development activities worldwide.  In addition to his expanded role as CSO for Caris, Dr. Schorr will continue to serve as a scientific consultant for QIAGEN.

During his 20-year career at QIAGEN, Dr. Schorr led the development of a global R&D function that created many new breakthrough products for use in life sciences research as well as molecular diagnostics. He also played a critical role in the successful integration of new technologies and products into the QIAGEN portfolio. In addition, he played key roles in the integrations of acquired companies, including Genovison, Operon, Artus, DxS, Digene and DxAssays.

Prior to joining QIAGEN, Dr. Schorr worked at Hoechst, the German chemical-pharmaceuticals company, and was involved in the development of an oral malaria vaccine that received the IHK research award in 1991. He was also co-founder of Coley Pharmaceuticals, EnPharma Pharmaceuticals, and QBM Cell Sciences. Dr. Schorr holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and Virology from the University of Cologne.

"The value that Joachim brings to Caris through his extensive scientific and business experiences in the industry as well as his key strategic insights have been clearly evident to our organization over this past year," said David D. Halbert, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Caris Life Sciences. "In his official capacity as Chief Scientific Officer, we look forward to Joachim making significant contributions to further advance our innovative technology platforms – platforms that will fundamentally change the way medicine is practiced. We are very pleased to officially welcome him to the Caris Life Sciences team."

Jodi Arias Sex Life: Defendant Reveals More Dirty Details

A lot of time Monday –- too much time, some might argue –- was spent by the defense questioning Jodi Arias about her sexual encounters with ex-boyfriend Travis Alexander.

Anal sex, oral sex, candy in the bedroom, were just some of the subjects covered as Arias was questioned by defense attorney Kurt Nurmi.

After numbering how many times she had anal sex prior to meeting Alexander –- approximately four times –- Arias said the first time Alexander had sex with her she had not asked for it and it hurt.

The defense has been trying to prove that Arias was humiliated and bullied by her ex-boyfriend, whom she is accused of murdering. Her lawyers say she acted in self-defense.

Asked by Nurmi if Alexander had used lubricant, Arias replied: “Not to my knowledge. I think he might of spit on his hand … it was painful.”

Nurmi asked Arias if she enjoyed it when Alexander used Tootsie Pops in their sexcapades.

"When he was using the tootsie pops on you, was it physically pleasurable to you?" Nurmi asked.

"There was some physical pleasure I guess. It wasn’t uncomfortable," Arias replied.

"What other pleasure did you derive from that?" Nurmi asked.

"His attention I guess. It sounds simple, but it was just about us. We shut the door and it was our own space and our time together. So I enjoyed that," Arias said.

Arias then testified about receiving facials from Alexander during oral sex.

"Sometimes it hurt if it got in my eyes," she said.

While the sex testimony may have been of interest to some, the momentum in the trial slowed significantly throughout Nurmi’s redirect of last week’s cross-examination.

Arias, 32, is accused of the June 4, 2008 slaying of Alexander inside his Mesa, Ariz., apartment. She faces the death penalty if convicted. Alexander was stabbed 27 times, shot twice in the face and his throat was slashed.

There was, much to the chagrin of court watchers, more recesses and sidebars than actual testimony in the case Monday.

One of the few highlights of the day was a demonstration defense attorney Kurt Nurmi had his co-council, Jennifer Willmott, participate in with Arias.

Nurmi had Willmott and Arias stand side-by-side and instructed Arias to place her arm around Willmott’s neck. Nurmi was recreating a pose seen in a photo that was previously submitted by the prosecution, in which Arias had her arm around her sister’s neck.

Prosecutor Juan Martinez had shown the jury the photo of Arias and her sister during cross-examination and pointed out Arias finger did not appear injured at the time. Martinez was attempting to show Arias finger was actually injured on June 4, 2008, the day Alexander was killed inside his Mesa, Ariz., home.


ARIAS DEMONSTRATING THE FINGER POSE: (Story Continues Below)

Nurmi then spent much of the afternoon session detailing Arias’ journal entries about her relationship and her suicideal thoughts.

The trial is scheduled to resume at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, when the re-direct of Arias will resume.

Life in the universe: Alien hunters in Edinburgh

As experts and alien hunters gather in Edinburgh on Saturday to talk ‘exoplanets’, Shân Ross finds that they are more prepared to meet ET than you might expect...

In the labyrinthine underground of corridors beneath King’s Buildings in Edinburgh is a laboratory which would be used to examine any specimen of extraterrestrial life which crashed on to Scottish soil. While the United Nations for Outer Space Affairs has a protocol in place, Professor Charles Cockell, director of the UK Centre for Astrobiology, based at the University of Edinburgh’s sprawling science complex to the south of the city, is responsible for the initial handling of any such event in Scotland. He would also be consulted by government officials on how much information is released to the public

Saturday sees a unique event – free to the public – taking place in Edinburgh, which will see Prof Cockell and a multi-disciplinary range of the UK’s leading scientists meet for the Life In the Universe – There is Life on Earth, but is There Life Out There? conference.

Among the speakers are Dr Chris Lintott of the BBC’s The Sky at Night, who recruits members of the public as “planet hunters” searching for habitable exoplanets – Earth-like planets orbiting other stars – and renowned cosmologist and mathematician Professor Sir Roger Penrose, who will reveal that he believes signals could have already been sent from a previous aeon … by some form of life which managed to manipulate black holes.

Last month’s meteorite accident which hit Russia and the potentially catastrophic asteroid which hurtled past Earth on the same day, coupled with the popularity of Brian Cox’s Stargazing Live series on BBC2, have stirred appetites for immediate answers from experts.

There has never been a more exciting time for developments, with NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope, launched in 2009, constantly sweeping the skies following the discovery of the first exoplanet in 1992. The Holy Grail now is to find one which resembles Earth in the “Goldilocks zone” – a place which, like the porridge in the fairy tale, is “not too hot” and “not too cold”, which has water and where life of some sort could be thriving. Meanwhile, NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover, currently on the red planet, is sending back data which could only be dreamt of just ten years ago.

Then, last week, space tourist and billionaire entrepreneur Dennis Tito, chair of the Inspiration Mars Foundation unveiled plans to recruit a man and woman for 501-day Mars fly-by mission to be launched in 2018.

Professor John Brown, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, who has organised the event along with Edinburgh astronomy enthusiasts backed by the Institute of Physics in Scotland, The Royal Society of Edinburgh and the UK Centre for Astrobiology, said finding life elsewhere in the Universe – even microbes or fossils of long-dead ones – could cause a huge sea change in people’s outlook and religious beliefs. “It is hugely arrogant to think we are the only life the cosmos has spawned,” says Prof Brown, who is also speaking at the event. “All the scientific indicators are that it would be very strange if life has only formed and developed here.

“The discovery could be hundreds of thousands of years ahead or next week. But in my view it will happen sooner rather than later. We should prepare ourselves for that and given the level of interest, there’s no time like the present.”

Prof Cockell, whose work involves the study of life in extreme environments and the possibility of life beyond Earth, said that while he believed there was no evidence for extraterrestrial life at the moment, he did not rule it out.

“It would be staggering to find that there was nothing out there. It is perplexing we don’t see anything. Either it is too rare or can’t travel across intergalactic distances.”

Prof Cockell, who has worked at NASA, is chair of the Earth and Science Foundation which links Earth and space exploration and runs an alien-hunting night class at the university, added: “If something did happen the public would have to be made aware. There would have to be a decision on how much to tell them, but I don’t know any government who would be competent enough to hide it.”

The fascination with outer space has a long history, with the majority of “aliens” being pre-judged as aggressive and hostile.

HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) conjured up an image of aggressive Martians invading Earth who were only wiped out by their lack of resistance to microbes. Indeed, Martians continued to receive a bad press with the release of the movie Devil Girl from Mars (1954) in which a leather-clad woman from Mars, armed with a ray gun and a menacing robot, lands in a spacecraft in the Scottish Highlands to recruit virile males after a battle on the Red Planet wiped out most of the men. Clips of the unusual encounter, which now has a cult following, can be viewed on YouTube.

Dr Lintott, an astrophysicist at Oxford University, who will be giving a talk on Cosmic Environments, was one of the main driving forces behind the planethunters.org website which gets volunteers to sift through time-lapsed data from the NASA Kepler space telescope looking for any “blips” in light indicating a planet.

Kepler has already discovered nearly 3,000 potential exoplanets, with 50 found by the public. A total of 114 have been confirmed as exoplanets, with the vast majority still waiting for verification predicted to be real. While computers can deal with high-volume processing the human eye is still far advanced in pattern recognition.

Scottish scientists are at the forefront in the search for habitable exoplanets with the building of the massive £950 million European Extremely Large Telescope, some of it at the UK Astronomy Technology Centre at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. Billed as “one of the key astronomical facilities of the 21st century” and planned to begin operating around 2022, it will also attempt to solve two of the biggest mysteries baffling astronomers – the formation of “dark matter” and “dark energy.”

Dr Lintott said: “My background is work on the chemistry associated with star formation, but these days I run citizen workshops to investigate galaxy formation. Rocky Earth-like planets are common and we’re close to being able to say they are in the Goldilocks zone. The real acceleration has been due to Kepler, which stares at around 150,000 stars and waits for them to blink.

“If there is a repeated pattern they know there’s a planet candidate – potential alien planets. My guess is that there is life out there – the exciting thing is, we’re about to be able to test the idea.”

Dr Lintott says that as well as the search for habitable exoplanets, scientists are searching 24/7 for a signal being sent across the universe from another life form.

“The UN procedure if a repeat-pattern signal is received is to make that signal public very quickly as we would need every telescope to track it. But the real question is, ‘do we reply?’”

Speculative debate about life in outer space has been rife since at least the time of the ancient Greeks. As a finale to the conference Prof Sir Roger Penrose will talk about his research on how signals might have been sent from a previous aeon by alien life forms for us to see today.

“You could ask is there any signal we would be able to see in our aeon which indicates a signal from a previous aeon with life in it?

“I’m claiming that we actually see these things. Maybe people from a previous aeon found a way. That sounds pretty wild, but not inconceivable. The only thing I can think of is that they could somehow manipulate the motion of black holes when they run into each other.” Stranger things have happened – haven’t they?

CEO Challenges and Life Time Foundation Partner to Improve Children’s Nutrition

CEO Challenges, the world leader in sport competitions designed specifically for CEOs and business owners, today announced Life Time Foundation(SM), the charitable giving component of Life Time – The Healthy Way of Life Company (NYSE: LTM), as its designated charity partner for 2013. Throughout the year, a portion of the money raised through each competitor’s entry fee will be donated to the Life Time Foundation’s current mission to improve children’s nutrition through healthier school lunches. Because Life Time contributes all administrative costs, 100% of every dollar donated to the Life Time Foundation directly supports its missions.

“The CEOs who participate in our events demonstrate a positive, healthy way of life in all they do,” says Ted Kennedy, president of CEO Challenges. “As we looked to find a new charity partner, we were drawn to the Life Time Foundation and its mission — inspiring healthy people and supporting a healthy planet. In many ways, the Life Time Foundation is helping to raise the CEOs of our future. It’s a perfect match.”

In 2012, CEO Challenge events generated $82,000 for multiple charities through its various sport competitions for C-Level Executives. The 2013 CEO Challenges feature 13 sport competitions including cycling and triathlon events, and a portion of the CEOs’ entry fees from each event will benefit the Life Time Foundation. The CEO Endurance World Championship alone will generate $50,000 for charity.

“We are honored to be selected as the official charity partner of CEO Challenges as we aim to make dramatic improvements in the quality of nutrition we're providing our young people,” says Barb Koch, Director of the Life Time Foundation. “The opportunity to partner with a like-minded organization and executive participants who understand the value and importance of giving back is critical. Improving school lunches for healthier futures is our mission and we thank CEO Challenges for their much-needed support.”

Life cover levels still too low for families

Research conducted by Caledonian Life on its life assurance business, has revealed that the average life cover pay out for all recipients was €101,200 in both 2011 and 2012. A substantial sum one may think, but not nearly sufficient to look after a family for the years to come, according to the life assurance experts.

“It’s unsurprising that just under two thirds of claimants (63%) were over 55. CSO figures reveal that 2,800 people of this age group died in Cork over 1 12 month period. However, what should be noted is that a further 37% were 54 and under, according to Tony Burke of Caledonian Life.

Further CSO statistics show that over the course of one year in Cork 258 people between the ages of 35–50 died, this is the period of one’s life which is generally regarded as having the greatest financial responsibilities, such as a mortgage, the costs of raising a child and so on.

"These statistics hold a poignant message, people in the earlier stages of life unfortunately do fall ill and their family and dependants are often left to cope for a significant period of time without them,” Mr Burke said.

The report also revealed that female average claim amounts fall short of their male counterparts by about €6,000 – experts at Caledonian say that this is most likely down to the fact that they traditionally insure themselves for less than men.

Tony Burke went on to say: “What would most concern us is the fact that the average pay-out is actually quite low relative to the incomes of the people, and would signal that most people have insufficient cover to meet the future financial needs of their dependants. At 58 years of age an increasing number of people in this country still have dependent children living at home, and a €101,000 lump sum is very little for a family to substitute loss of income of the primary breadwinner. Life assurance policies are intended to provide customers with peace of mind and financial security for their families should the worst happen – they pay out when people need it, but there needs to be a sufficient sum to provide the necessary security.”

The company states that for a family with a monthly income requirement of €4,000, a lump sum payment of €100,000 would only last for just over 2 years. So in many instances, the life cover pay-out is exhausted after this short period of time, but the bills will be still there.

“It is important for those people seeking life cover to give careful consideration to the amount of cover that would be sufficient given their life stage and financial requirements. In simple terms, they need to look at the income shortfall that would occur in the event of their untimely death and multiply that by the number of years that their dependents will need to be supported”.

Hanwha Life Tumbles After Shares Sold at Discount: Seoul Mover

Hanwha Life Insurance Co. (088350), South Korea’s second-largest life insurer, tumbled the most on record in Seoul trading after a shareholder sold stock at a discount.

Shares of Hanwha Life sank 9 percent to 7,250 won as of 9:56 a.m. on the Korea Exchange, the worst performer on the MSCI Asia Pacific Index.

Hanwha Chemical Corp. (009830) sold about 17 million Hanwha Life shares at 7,200 won apiece before the market opened today, Park Jeong Hwan, who heads Hanwha Chemical’s finance team, said by phone. That’s a 9.7 percent discount to yesterday’s closing price. Proceeds will be used to improve finances and fund future investments, Hanwha Chemical said in a filing yesterday.

“The discount rate was very big,” Song In Chan, an analyst at Shinhan Investment Corp., said by phone today. “Still, I think the stock price is near its bottom given its stable earnings prospects.”

Morgan Stanley and Hanwha Investment & Securities Co. arranged the transactions.

Literary Idol Comes To Life in 'Farewell, Dorothy Parker'

What would you do if your literary idol came to life — came into your life — and then you couldn't get rid of her? Violet Epps, heroine of the new novel Farewell, Dorothy Parker discovers being a fan isn't the same as being a roommate when Dorothy Parker's spirit rematerializes from an ancient Algonquin Hotel guestbook — and then follows her home.

Author Ellen Meister tells NPR's Rachel Martin that she first encountered Parker's work as a teenager.

"I was from the generation, we probably thought that we invented sex, and we invented sarcasm, and we invented snark and disrespect," she says. "So to be a young kid like that, and discover this writer who was so brilliantly witty, and so edgy, and so out there, and with all of that, she had such a keen understanding and knowledge of the tender, broken young female heart. ... That was the very first thing that turned me on to her."

The more she read, Meister says, the more she loved Parker — and eventually, she made Parker the central character in her novel.

Enlarge image
Ellen Meister is the author of four novels. She was born in the Bronx and now lives on Long Island.

Hy Goldberg, Visions Photography/G. P. Putnam's Sons
"I pictured her, in a contemporary setting, really, the ghost of Dorothy Parker literally coming back to life," she says. "And I saw her sitting in the easy chair in someone's house, and becoming the resident ghost and adviser to some modern woman."

In this case, the modern woman is Violet, a movie critic who's ferocious on the page, but wilts when forced to interact with actual people.

"And then through this device within the book, the ghost of Dorothy Parker literally comes to life and hitches a ride onto her life, and becomes mentor to this woman so she can help her develop her voice and overcome her timidity," Meister says. "So in addition to becoming mentor, in some ways she also becomes her tormentor."

Don't lie: Your life insurance depends on it

As you fill out that life insurance application, what if you choose to leave off pertinent information about your past or current health? Could the medical decisions you make in the future inadvertently void the life insurance policy you purchase today?

These are questions that may have crossed your mind if you've had a serious illness or condition such as sleep apnea or cancer; or if you avoid mainstream medicine in favor of alternative treatments, reject medical treatment as a tenet of your religion or refuse treatment for a potentially life-threatening issue.

Lying on your life insurance application is one thing; it can void your policy. But once the ink dries on your life insurance policy, in most cases, you're covered under the terms of your contract, regardless of the health care decisions you make going forward.

"If you have your policy in place and you've been paying for your policy, the changes in health that you have going forward would not be material," says Jacki Goldstein, vice president and chief medical officer for MetLife in New York.

You're covered, no matter what
Dr. Robert Pokorski, chief medical strategist for The Hartford's Individual Life Insurance Division in Woodbury, Minn., agrees. "You will still be covered no matter what you do. Somebody may have high blood pressure and after a period of time stop taking their medicine. Even if you stop, your insurance continues. If your doctor recommends surgery for cancer, some people say no. We will still pay the claim when it occurs."

That said, you could endanger your policy before it's written based on the information you disclose -- or fail to disclose -- on your life insurance application.

"The only thing, generally, that can void a life insurance policy is fraud on the medical application," says Rick Nathanson, Seattle-based insurance expert and author of "Can You Afford to Grow Old?"

IGY Life Sciences Announces North American Launch of Vector450, an Athlete Immune Health Dietary Supplement

IGY Immune Technologies & Life Sciences Inc  ("IGY Life Sciences") is pleased to announce the launch of its new sports nutrition supplement brand Vector450 (www.vector450.com) aimed at the athlete market.

Vector450 works safely and effectively at the gut level to modulate the immune system and functions to improve its efficiency. According to Terry Dyck, CEO of IGY Life Sciences, "Vector450 is designed to re-balance the immune system, which is often over stressed in competitive athletes. Once they can alleviate the pressure on their immune system, athletes compete at their optimal level."
"Maintaining optimum immune health is a top priority for athletes at all levels especially when competing in high intensity ultra-type events such as marathons, triathlons and other sports requiring prolonged exertion," says Terry Dyck.  "Studies have shown that high intensity training can suppress normal immune function over a period of time anywhere from a few hours to several days."

The risk of an impaired immune system for top athletes is further exacerbated by other factors such as the exposure to new pathogens through travel, lack of proper sleep, weight loss, mental stress, inadequate nutrition or adoption of unusual diets. The consequences of an impaired immune function for athletes are missed workouts or competitions, and a general decrease in performance.
"You have to concern yourself,"  Leafs head coach Randy Carlyle said earlier in the day about trying to keep a team rested, alert and healthy with that kind of schedule. "You can't expect your player to give you 110 percent if they don't have the proper rest and nutrition." - Globe and Mail, Jan. 25, 2013

Vector450 contains Muno-IgY, a purified IgY protein naturally extracted from hen eggs. What sets Muno-IgY apart from any other product available on the market today is the high purity of the ingredient. And with its new technology, IGY Life Sciences can finally offer consumers a cost-effective, highly-purified product priced at $35 for a bottle of 60 capsules.

IgY antibodies have been closely studied and documented for their ability to target many specific pathogens. Muno-IgY is not aimed toward any individual pathogen, but toward maintaining a strong immune system. Having an optimal immune system can lead to improved stamina along with increased anaerobic power and decreased submaximal heart rate, shorter exercise recovery times and faster muscle repair while supporting the body's natural process of inflammatory balance.

Vector450 is available to consumers at vector450.com. It will also be available at select retail locations in the United States.

About IGY Immune Technologies and Life Sciences Inc.
IGY Life Sciences & Immune Technologies Inc. is a privately held biosciences Company specializing in the extraction, development and commercialization of broad spectrum antibodies, or immunoglobulin (IgY), for use as OTC nutraceutical and for development of antibodies for targeted pathogens. The company was formed in 2009 to commercialize a superior proprietary process for extraction of avian immunoglobulin from chicken egg yolks. IgY is a natural antibody for which there is an existing global demand.

'Heir care' product: Survivorship life policy

A couple's best-laid plans to pass down assets such as real estate, businesses, investments or art work could easily go awry if the children have to sell off that stuff at fire-sale prices because Mom and Dad failed to set aside enough cash to pay the estate taxes.

To avoid this sad scenario, estate planners turn to an obscure life insurance instrument called survivorship insurance, or second-to-die insurance.
Unlike a traditional life policy that pays benefits upon the death of an insured individual, a survivorship policy covers the lives of two people and pays benefits only when the second person dies.

Why would you want this? Well, estate planners typically use these policies to cover the estate taxes of wealthy couples. Since the unlimited marital deduction allows assets to pass tax-free to a widow or widower, a survivorship policy delays the life insurance benefit payout until the death of the second spouse, when the infusion of cash is needed to take care of the estate taxes.
A second-to-die policy also may be useful for business partners, dual-income parents and couples who want to provide lifelong care for a special-needs child. The purpose is always essentially the same: to provide the cash to pay anticipated estate taxes on an illiquid estate so the assets don't have to be sold off piecemeal or at an inopportune time.

Survivorship policies have been on the uptick recently with the Bush-era estate tax exemption set to expire Dec. 31, 2012. Unless Congress extends it, the current $5 million exemption would revert to $1 million, exposing even more estates to federal estate taxes.

"Right now, the recommendation is that if your estate is worth $5 million-plus, you better get the survivorship insurance," says life insurance analyst Tony Steuer, author of "Questions and Answers on Life Insurance." "The estate tax is not going to go away; it's just a question of where it's going to land."

Single purpose, many advantages
Besides the help with estate taxes, survivorship policies typically offer these other advantages:

Favorable underwriting: Because the policy is based on two lives, underwriters use a different and more lenient mortality table than those used for individual policies. "Because they're underwriting both of you, even if one person is uninsurable, if the other person is in good health, you can usually still get the policy," Steuer says.

Lower premiums: Since survivorship policies usually don't build cash value and don't pay out until the second spouse dies, the rates are typically lower than for two comparable, more traditional life insurance policies.

Return on investment: A survivorship version of permanent, universal life, or UL, with a guaranteed death benefit may pay out the full benefit long before the insured persons have paid off the policy.

While a survivorship policy itself is more complex than a standard life insurance policy, its effectiveness depends on how well it is integrated into a comprehensive estate plan, according to Suzanne Krasna, a Certified Financial Planner professional in Walnut Creek, Calif.

"First of all, you want to have an irrevocable life insurance trust set up where the trust is the owner and beneficiary of the life insurance," Krasna says, explaining one strategy for maximizing the tax advantages. "As the trustees, the husband and wife would gift the money to the trust to pay the premiums; currently, between the two of them, they would be able to put in $26,000 a year at the current (tax-exempt) limit."

Steuer says some couples cash out their individual whole life policies and place the accrued cash in a trust to fund a survivorship UL policy designed to cover their likely estate taxes.

"Even if they have to pay some taxes on the cash value from their whole life policy, they'll still have enough cash there to pay the premium for the new policy and still come out ahead," Steuer says. "You want the lowest-cost guaranteed UL product you can get."

Survivorship and young families
Young parents also might want to consider a survivorship policy, though for more basic reasons than estate planning, says Jonathan Bauer, an estate lawyer and partner at Meuleman Mollerup, a law firm in Boise, Idaho. He and his wife took out a $1 million survivorship term life policy for several years to protect their children.

"If you're a young couple and one of you has a medical condition that makes life insurance really expensive, it's a cheaper alternative than even individual term policies," he says. "It's a comfortable alternative to address every parent's natural fear of, 'Gosh, what happens if we both go down on this vacation to Hawaii?' It isn't the best option if money weren't an issue, but it is a stopgap that is reasonably affordable."

Intrigued by second-to-die life insurance? Steuer says don't try it alone.
"If you need it, it makes sense. If you don't need it, it doesn't. But probably the biggest mistake people make is they try to do this without a properly qualified estate planning attorney," he says. "This is one of those areas where you really cannot get by without one."

‘American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath,’ by Carl Rollyson

Carl Rollyson’s refreshingly judicious and often eloquent portrait of Sylvia Plath, the sixth major biography published in the half-century since the poet’s death in 1963 at age 30, arrives at an interesting moment. The confessional style, which Plath made famous with the searing lyrics of “Ariel,” written during the months following the breakup of her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes, is no longer dominant. Robert Lowell, credited with starting the movement and with whom Plath studied, didn’t make it into the top-10 list of 20th-century American poets recognized last year in a series of U.S. postage stamps. Plath was the only one of the best-known Confessionals to qualify, and her celebrity status as author and thinly disguised heroine of “The Bell Jar” may have helped her case.

Both Lowell and Plath would have been surprised to find Lowell’s friend Elizabeth Bishop, whose work Plath dismissed as “lesbian and fanciful & jeweled,” in the lineup. But these days, Bishop’s style, marked by emotional restraint, sharp description and formal play, has gained the ascendancy, a victory amply illustrated in a villanelle on marital dissolution by Mary Jo Salter, a former student of Bishop’s, recently published in the New Yorker, the magazine that maintained a first-read contract with Plath during the last years of her life. Salter reveals little of herself in the poem, preferring instead to toy artfully with “complaint for absolute divorce,” a phrase extracted from a legal document, which serves as the title and refrain. Contrast that with the furious truth-telling of Plath’s reactions in verse to her betrayal by Hughes: “The Other,” “Words Heard, by Accident, Over the Phone” and “Burning the Letters.” Fifty years have wrought significant changes in literary taste, and “Sylvia mania,” in Hughes’s terms, has largely abated.

And so, surprisingly to those who followed the “biography wars” that began within a few years of Plath’s suicide, there may be many readers in need of a book that aims simply, as Rollyson puts it, to tell “what she was like and what she stood for.” Even those who kept track of the skirmishes — beginning with Hughes’s destruction of a key Plath diary and continuing through the decades as the couple’s friends and family members took sides and offered up contradictory accounts — could use some sorting out.

Rollyson opens by announcing that he has “dispensed with a good deal of the boilerplate most biographers feel compelled to supply,” such as background on Plath’s parents and Smith College, where she earned her undergraduate degree as a scholarship student. He will “do very little scene setting,” choosing not to duplicate the work of previous biographers.

Such streamlining is his usual preference: “Biography strips bare,” Rollyson wrote in a 2008 manual on the form. His approach signals a writerly affinity for Plath, whose best work achieved a tightly focused immediacy. The author of nine other biographies of subjects including Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and Marilyn Monroe, Rollyson writes with assurance and as an advocate of this “American Isis,” as he titles the book, who “wanted to be an ideal mother and wife — but with her power, her magic, intact.” His primary interest is in conveying the quality and meaning of Plath’s relationships as they can be traced through the available journals and correspondence, as well as the published poetry and fiction, in which Plath “deliberately transgressed the separation of art and autobiography.” Rollyson adds to this written record his own interviews with Plath’s associates at Smith and others willing to talk — an unfortunately small number given Ted Hughes’s injunction to at least one friend: “The truth about Sylvia can only be told when you are dying.”

Rollyson’s account credibly outlines the claustrophobic effects on Plath of social, familial and marital pressures that may have proved her undoing. Rollyson cites her reading of Philip Wylie’s popular “Generation of Vipers” with its notion of the suffocating mom, which may have fed Plath’s animosity toward her widowed mother. Less convincing are his recurrent allusions to Plath’s sister-suicide Marilyn Monroe, in which he stresses similarities in their marriages to powerful male intellectuals. But Monroe’s lethal anguish was surely abetted by the knowledge that a screen actress’s career could be over at 30; a poet, even one so determinedly precocious as Plath, has time on her side.

The even-handedness of Rollyson’s rendering of the Plath-Hughes relationship, which presents the volatile marriage as one made impetuously by two people of mismatched backgrounds but dangerously alike in ambition and competitiveness, breaks down in a final chapter on the aftermath of Plath’s suicide. He blames Hughes for a “dogged but futile effort to dictate the gospel of Sylvia Plath’s biography.” But here too, Rollyson offers a biographer’s sympathy: “It does not seem possible to discern any consistency or logic in Hughes’s management of his papers and Plath’s, perhaps because his view of their marriage kept changing.” Had Hughes lived to read “American Isis,” even he might have found passages to admire in this reverent work of resurrection.


Marshall, a former student of both Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, is the author of the forthcoming biography “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.”

Beyonce's (Tear-Streaked) Face Could Be Your Life

The pop goddess presents the inspiring, tightly edited film version of her life, and even Oprah bows down

A few hours before Beyoncé's notoriously labored-over Life Is But a Dream made its debut on HBO, the March issue of American Vogue showed up in my mailbox, as if by magic, or the collective will of the Beyhive, or Anna Wintour's secret influence over the U.S. Postal Service. Beyoncé's second cover has already been largely circulated, but subscribers received a different image: it's Ms. Knowles-Carter's washboard-straight posture in profile, wearing couture Givenchy, sharpshooting enough passion from her eyes that you wonder if her determined stare busted photographer Patrick Demarchelier's camera lens. There is only one headline. "Power Issue 2013: Beyoncé Rules the World." That lust in her face might look sensual, but Bey is about her business. She wants our minds. This year, not a moment will pass when we're not thinking about her. She is power. Vogue decrees it. Also, she is releasing a new album and touring, so prepare for her face to become your world.

Life Is But a Dream was the first manifestation of the mystical Beyoncé archive, in which she has been recording and chronicling every moment of her life for more than seven years, a revelation that caused some short-sighted commenters to characterize her as crazy, or overly controlling. The result, however, showed how not-crazy she actually is — just incredibly shrewd. She knows that to engage with her fans, who drain every last bit of Beyoncé blood from the Internet in a devout frenzy, she must reveal bits about who she is. But as the most famous and powerful woman in music, she must protect herself, retain some semblance of a personal life lest she lose sight of herself. So she gave us Beyoncé on her terms (as she put it), opening up a straw-sized peek into her life through an impressionistic assortment of live footage, old home videos, a chat in a living room with a barely-seen interviewer (a white man with glasses who I was pretending was Gideon Yago), and some zeitgeistical PhotoBooth confessionals — Bey's own video diary, recorded on "the camera in the computer." It's the most revealing document of the superstar yet, essentially a chronicle of her powerful evolution as a woman. The time frame captured in the film, coincidentally, was shot over the course of the 31-year-old star's Saturn Return. Don't say astrology never gave you anything.

If you want an example of how hard it must be for Beyoncé to stay grounded, watch Oprah's pre-Life Is But a Dream interview with the star on OWN, aired as a promo fluffer for the actual film. Winfrey spent the entirety of the hour-long chat visibly genuflecting at Bey's altar, her convo dripping with astonishing hyperbole that showed even Oprah knows Bey is more powerful than Oprah. Oprah. "You are the preeminent mistress of the universe," Oprah gushed. Oprah asked, with awkward-auntie earnestness, whether Beyoncé was the reason for the Super Bowl power outage. Of her performance, Oprah said, "It was the moment when art met God." How do you retain your humanity, your humility, when freaking Oprah Winfrey is addressing you like she's the world's most basic stalker?

You talk to your MacBook. Life Is But a Dream begins with Beyoncé on the day she let her father go — when she made the decision that Mathew Knowles could no longer be her manager. She appears in crappy light and no make-up, looking broken-down and utterly vulnerable, worrying about her future relationship with her dad, and you get the feeling that maybe Beyoncé doesn't have a whole lot of people to confide in. But it's also how the film sets up its arc: the next 90 minutes are not just about stunning performance footage, but about Beyoncé coming into her own, from the dadager-dump, to shedding alter-ego Sasha Fierce, to a painful miscarriage, to ultimately communicating with her daughter in the womb and becoming a woman. She is an A type who never stops, even performing when she wants to puke from pregnancy and practicing her vocals from a laptop in a car. (If anyone's still pressed about that whole National Anthem thing, the many shots of Bey singing a cappella should put your concerns to rest. This woman has the Holy Ghost in her.)

But here's where the unprecedented openness comes in: we get to see that Bey's not just a workhorse, but a woman who says the word "shit" when she fucks up in the studio (gasp!), who bursts out with laughter after comparing the fury of her angrier performances to the blast of a tommy gun, who looks genuinely geeked when she feels Blue Ivy kick for the first time. She opens up about her miscarriage, calling it the "saddest experience of my life," and sings the song she wrote about it. She drinks wine, looks kinda twisted, and sings a Coldplay song with Jay-Z. At times, this film makes it easy to forget she's not just like us. (For one, there's that whole $40 million net-worth situation.)

Aside from the full, unobstructed look at Blue Ivy's Jay-Z face, the most heartening aspect of Life Is But a Dream is how fiercely Beyoncé identifies with womanhood. "It's nothing like a conversation with a woman that understands you," she says. "I need my sisters." Cut to a shot of Bey, Solange, and Kelly Rowland singing "Love Fool" in what looks like their parents' kitchen, doing "typical teenhood" with aplomb. And then there's her feminist speech:

"Women have to work much harder to make it in this world," she says. "It really pisses me off that women don't make the same opportunities as men do. Or money for that matter, 'cause let's face it, money gives men the power to run the show... to define our values and to define what's sexy and what's feminine."

And:

"At the end of the day, it's not about equal rights, it's about how we view ourselves... We as women have to reach as high as humanly possible."

That last caveat to the "Girls Run the World" missive is probably going to get lambasted by feminists, because, you know, Bey, it kinda actually is about equal rights. But in the context of this film, you can see why Beyoncé applies a bootstrap mentality to her girl power: Nothing's really been handed to her, and she works incredibly hard to be the most dazzling entertainer in the business. Her statement seems less about not aspiring to the basic tenets of equal rights, and more rooted in the belief that we're not gonna get them, so we better steel ourselves for a fight. Doubly so as an African-American working mother; fact is, the most powerful woman in show biz almost had her documentary rejected by HBO. And it's that attitude that keeps Bey at the top — as someone who deserves our respect even if you hate her music. Get used to it, she's gonna be here forever. And she's got an archive.

Jupiter's Europa moon 'likeliest to have life'

US astronomers looking for life in the solar system believe that Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, which has an ocean, is much more promising than desert-covered Mars, which is currently the focus of the US government's attention.

"Europa is the most likely place in our solar system beyond Earth to possess .... life," said Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"And it is the place we should be exploring now that we have a concept mission we think is the right one to get there for an affordable cost," he continued.

"Europa is the most promising in terms of habitability because of its relatively thin ice shelf and an ocean ... And we know there are oxidants on the surface of Europa."

At the request of NASA, a proposed mission to explore Europa was revised to significantly reduce the cost, the scientist told the media on the sidelines of an annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) underway here.

As a result of this review, the JPL and the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland developed a new exploration project named Clipper with a total coast of two billion dollars minus the launch.

Following the successful example of Cassini, a probe that explored Titan, a moon of Saturn, a spacecraft would orbit Jupiter and conduct numerous close flybys of Europa.

"That way we can get effectively global coverage of Europa by doing many many flybys," Pappalardo argued. "And that can do outstanding science -- not quite as good as an orbiter, but not that bad -- for half the cost, which is two billions dollars over the life of the mission excluding the launch."

If the plan is approved, Clipper could be launched by 2021 and take three to six years to reach Europa. By comparison, it takes six months to reach Mars.

But NASA already announced at the end of 2012 that there will be no funds for the Clipper mission in the current atmosphere of budgetary cuts, he said.

However, the space agency announced in December that it was sending to Mars in 2020 a new robot similar to Curiosity, a project that cost an estimated $2.5 billion.

Curiosity, which arrived on the Red Planet in August 2012, is trying to find out whether life was possible on Mars in the past.

Under the current plans of robotic exploration, after the arrival of the probe Juno to Jupiter's orbit in 2016 and its planned crash a year later, the United States will no longer have probes in the distant reaches of the solar system.

NASA could, however, participate in a mission to Jupiter by the European Space Agency (ESA) called "Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer," during which a spacecraft is expected to arrive to its destination around 2030.

Noting that Mars consumed most attention in the course of NASA's exploration of the solar system, Pappalardo said the agency should not ignore planets that have a high scientific priority.

In his view, life could have existed on Mars several billion years ago, but Europa could have life today.

"If Europa is the best place in the solar system after Earth to host life, Encelade (a Saturn Moon) is right up there as well," said Amanda Hendrix, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona. "It has at least a subsurface sea, if not an ocean, and there is geological activity.

"It has heat at the south pole and is ejecting water particles in a geyser and other components in the south pole plume.

Europa was closely observed for the first time by the twin Voyager probes in 1979 and then, in more detail, by Galileo in the 1990s.

A NASA photo shows reddish spots and shallow pits peppering the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa in this view combining information from images from NASA's Galileo spacecraft 31 May, 1998. US astronomers looking for life in the solar system believe that Europa, which has an ocean, is much more promising than desert-covered Mars, which is currently the focus of the US government's attention.

A 12-frame mosaic released by NASA 06 March 2000 provides the highest resolution view ever obtained of the side of Jupiter's moon Europa that faces the giant planet. US astronomers looking for life in the solar system believe that Europa, which has an ocean, is much more promising than desert-covered Mars, which is currently the focus of the US government's attention.

Five life terms for multiple killer Christopher Speight

A Virginia man who said an Egyptian goddess ordered him to shoot eight people dead in 2010 has been sentenced to five life prison terms.

Christopher Speight, 42, pleaded guilty to murder charges, attempted murder of a policeman, and five weapons charges.

Speight killed his sister and her family, three neighbours, and a teenage boy at his home.

He was ruled insane at the time of the attack, making a death sentence unlikely, a prosecutor said.

He told police an Egyptian goddess named Jennifer told him to shoot his family because they were possessed by demons.

'Monster'
Speight, who lived in a rural home in Appomattox with his sister, her husband and their two children ages 15 and four, killed the entire family inside the house.

He ambushed the other victims from a hidden position in a tree when they arrived at the house.

Speight told investigators Jennifer ordered him to shoot the second group to prevent them helping the first victims, whose bodies needed to rot, according to a statement of facts read at the sentencing hearing.


Families of the victims expressed anger and dismay at the hearing
Families of the victims were present in court and four relatives gave testimony on how the murders had affected their lives.

"Christopher Speight, you look at me," said Kim Scruggs, whose 16-year-old son was among the victims.

"You were a coward up there that day when you shot my son in the back, running for his life."

Meghan Durrette, who lost her mother, stepfather and 15-year-old sister in the attack, said: "How could someone commit such a heinous crime? I've asked myself that question for three years, and all I could come up with is monster.

"You are a monster. I hope you rot in hell."

Explosives at home
Other relatives accused Speight of tricking the authorities into believing he was insane.

In January 2010, Speight turned himself in after an all-night stand-off with police, who had surrounded the woods just outside Appomattox.

Police earlier found a "multitude" of explosives at the home where most of the victims were shot.

The victims were identified as Lauralee and Dwayne Sipe, both 38, their four-year-old son Joshua, and Lauralee's 15-year-old daughter Morgan Dobyns.

Karen and Jonathan Quarles, both 43, their daughter Emily, 15, Emily's boyfriend Bo Scruggs, were also killed.

Life Technologies: Preview

Life Technologies (LIFE) is scheduled to report its fourth-quarter and fiscal 2012 results on Monday, Feb 4, 2013, after market closes. Let’s see how things are shaping up before the announcement.

Growth Factors This Past Quarter
Life Technology’s performance has been thwarted by a sustained slowdown in government and academic research funding. Although the company does not expect the scenario to worsen in the near future, yet this global biotechnology company is repositioning for a slower growth environment by lowering the cost structure and increasing focus on R&D initiatives. Moreover, Life Technologies has consistently adopted a conservative outlook and expects the overall growth of the European region to be impacted by macroeconomic pressures through continued reductions in discretionary spending. Further worsening of the economic scenario in Europe might adversely impact the company.

However, over the last two years, the company has been focused on creating an optimal portfolio of products through innovation and acquisition, the latest being Ion Torrent. We are also encouraged by Life’s strategy to strengthen its presence in high growth geographic markets such as Latin America, the Middle East, China and India.  Over the next few years, Life’s focus on developing industry-leading franchises in high-growth technology areas, applied markets and emerging geographies will be the key drivers of long-term growth.

Earnings Whispers?
Our proven model does not conclusively show that Life Technologies is likely to beat earnings this quarter. This is because a stock needs to have both a positive Earnings ESP (read: Zacks Earnings ESP: A Better Method) and a Zacks Rank of #1, 2 or 3 for this to happen. This is not the case here as you will see below.
Zacks Earnings ESP of -0.90%: The Most Accurate Estimate stands at $1.10, while the Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged at $1.11. This comes to a difference of -0.90%.

Life Technologies’ Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) lowers the predictive power of ESP because the Zacks Rank #3 when combined with a negative ESP makes surprise prediction difficult. The sell rated stocks (#4 and #5) should never be considered going into an earnings announcement.

Life on Mars? Don't bet on it, says Smithsonian geologist

Life on Mars? Forget about it, according to geologist Bob Craddock.

“If there was life on Mars, we shouldn’t have to look this hard for it,” said Craddock, a 1985 University of Georgia graduate who’s now with the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies.

That’s not counting possible life introduced in the modern era by the Soviet Union, which did not wash its spacecraft before sending them to explore the red planet, he said.

The idea that there might be life on Mars, or might have been in the distant past, has gripped the public imagination for more than a century, Craddock said last week in a talk in UGA’s Geography and Geology Building.

Peering through 19th-century telescopes, Percival Lowell and other early astronomers saw what looked like intelligently designed canals and dark areas that appeared to wax and wane with the seasons — what it might look like if astronomers far from Earth could see forests changing with the passage of seasons here, they imagined.

Lowell’s canals might be the last vestiges of an ancient civilization that dried up along with its planetary water supply, he thought, and the notion inspired some of the great science fiction movies, including H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles.”

But those canals were created by erosional forces, and mission after mission to Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor has failed to come up with any evidence of life there, he said.

Some scientists have suggested looking for Martian life in the planet’s hottest, coldest or darkest environments, where so-called “extremophiles” might lurk — creatures that have adapted to living in extreme environments, like bacteria on earth that live in hot geysers.

But Mars’ environment is extreme everywhere, the geologist said.

But even though the prospects are dim for finding life, continued exploration of Mars is important, Craddock said.

Studying Mars’ geology and environment can help us understand how life began on Earth billions of years ago, he said.

Art Marketing Ideas and Strategy from ByReputation's New Art Promotion Service

Art marketing can now be found with ByReputation’s new marking service which promotes the use of organic search engine optimization, local search directories, and content marketing. To get a free art marketing consult from an expert, please click on the link below:
Get a Free Art Marketing Consult

Search engine optimization gives industrial firms the opportunity to raise their site rankings within Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Focusing on the previous trends in past site data, the search engine optimization locates keywords and phrases that hold the highest conversion rates. Page factors of the website are gathered and readjusted by a search engine specialist to really increase their roles in the search algorithm. To finalize it all, an ongoing off page optimization begins making sure to use only white hat and penguin safe techniques.

Art marketers have found it absolutely key to use local directories for their successful promoting. Local directories such as Yahoo Local, Yelp, Yellowbook, and the Superpages receive over 100 million views each month, making them hot spots for locals when searching for art marketers in the area. ByReputation focuses on the top 30 of these local directories and pushes the art listings to the top over other local art listings.

Content marketing is the last and final piece of successful art marketing. Publishing an article two to three times a week gives an active approach to promoting the art business. These unique articles will then increase the overall Google freshness score of the domain name for the art marketer. This allows the art to pop up more in search results when key phrases are looked up.

Life Time Fitness Announces Preliminary Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2012

Life Time Fitness, Inc. (LTM), The Healthy Way of Life Company, today announced preliminary results for the fourth quarter and full year ended December 31, 2012.

The Company expects to report revenue in the range of $273.0-275.0 million, net income of $22.0-23.5 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.53-0.56 for 4Q 2012. For the year, expectations include revenue of $1.125-1.127 billion, net income of $110.0-111.5 million and diluted earnings per share of $2.63-2.66. The Company previously provided guidance of $1.127-1.137 billion in revenue, net income of $114.5-116.0 million and diluted earnings per share of $2.73-2.76 for 2012.

Included in the preliminary results is approximately $0.07 of diluted earnings per share impact in the fourth quarter from losses related to the effect of Hurricane Sandy upon operations, other unrelated self-insured expenses, and costs related to the inaugural launch of Commitment Day. Commitment Day is a year-round movement involving events and activities commencing on January 1 and continuing throughout the year, urging people to commit to healthy eating, exercise, personal responsibility, giving and a healthy planet. Additionally, during the fourth quarter, the Company experienced slightly lower year-over-year membership growth than planned, coupled with higher membership acquisition costs. For the year ended 2012, the Company expects dues growth of nearly 10% and memberships to increase by approximately 1%. Finally, during the fourth quarter, the Company also made incremental investments in consumer-facing technology, including scheduling systems and mobile applications.

The Company also announced preliminary 2013 guidance. Three new center openings are planned during the year, including one in the first half and two in the second half of 2013. Expectations include revenue of $1.200-1.220 billion, net income of $120.0-124.0 million and diluted earnings per share of $2.85-2.95 for the year. 2013 revenue and earnings are expected to be driven primarily by price and mix optimization, and growth in in-center and ancillary business revenue. The Company’s preliminary guidance includes the anticipated impact of the timing of 2013 new center openings, pre-sale expenses for centers opening in early 2014 and the investment in growth initiatives.

Bahram Akradi, chairman, president and chief executive officer, Michael Robinson, executive vice president and chief financial officer, and John Heller, senior director, investor relations and treasurer, have provided a webcast message today in connection with these preliminary results. The webcast may be accessed via the Company’s Investor Relations Events section of its website at lifetimefitness.com or via this link.

Life Time Fitness’ fourth quarter and full year financial results remain subject to regular year-end closing processes, including conclusion of the Company’s 2012 financial audit. The Company plans to announce its fourth quarter and full year financial results on Thursday, February 21. Details regarding the conference call will be announced later.

Here's to the Hereafter: Celebrating Life With a Party

At the Three Flames Restaurant in San Jose, Calif., the banquet hall is packed. When they get the cue, 140 people raise their glasses for a toast. A sign in the corner reads "No Tear Zone." With a fully stocked open bar, catered food, and even favors, it looks like a fabulous party—which is exactly what Ursula Stock had in mind.

"She would love what's going on," said Michael Stock, her husband of nearly 47 years. "You look around, and there are people from her second grade class! There are people from management, people from the picket line, and neighbors. She's the reason why."

It's a party Ursula Stock knew she'd never attend. She decided back in the '70s that she wanted a celebration of life instead of a funeral. So she chose everything -- from the music to the guest list, Ursula left Michael with no doubts about her final wishes.

"There was some surprise," said Michael ."The open bar was one. Some of the relatives said, 'Oh, no!' and I said, 'She's not coming back to haunt me on this, OK? That's what she wants, that's what she's going to get."

Boomers Do Funerals Their Way

Faced with aging parents and their own mortality, it's something more and more baby boomers are doing: taking life -- and death -- into their own hands.

Joanne Grady-Savard is one of them. The avid runner and president of a Boston-based staffing company has already planned her final exit.

"After funeral services, they go to my favorite spot from my running route," she said. "We would have a tent. We could have a lobster bake or a clam bake. No high heels, no black dresses; just an opportunity to sit on a bench and be in a beautiful environment."

Grady-Savard plans to have an engraved memorial bench placed at her "favorite spot," which overlooks the Atlantic on Massachusetts' South Shore. She's even developing a book of life lessons to be passed out at her funeral, instead of traditional Mass cards.

"We spend so much time and effort and energy planning our children's weddings and birthdays and anniversary parties," she said, "that this is, in my opinion, one of the most critical pieces of our life. It's something that you have control over; you manage the legacy."

That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer

The other morning, I escaped unscathed from a dangerous situation. No, an armed robber didn’t break into my house, nor did I find myself face to face with a mountain lion during my bird walk. What I survived was my daily shower.

You see, falls are a common cause of death in older people like me. (I’m 75.) Among my wife’s and my circle of close friends over the age of 70, one became crippled for life, one broke a shoulder and one broke a leg in falls on the sidewalk. One fell down the stairs, and another may not survive a recent fall.

“Really!” you may object. “What’s my risk of falling in the shower? One in a thousand?” My answer: Perhaps, but that’s not nearly good enough.

Life expectancy for a healthy American man of my age is about 90. (That’s not to be confused with American male life expectancy at birth, only about 78.) If I’m to achieve my statistical quota of 15 more years of life, that means about 15 times 365, or 5,475, more showers. But if I were so careless that my risk of slipping in the shower each time were as high as 1 in 1,000, I’d die or become crippled about five times before reaching my life expectancy. I have to reduce my risk of shower accidents to much, much less than 1 in 5,475.

This calculation illustrates the biggest single lesson that I’ve learned from 50 years of field work on the island of New Guinea: the importance of being attentive to hazards that carry a low risk each time but are encountered frequently.

I first became aware of the New Guineans’ attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest when I proposed pitching our tents under a tall and beautiful tree. To my surprise, my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us.

Yes, I had to agree, it was indeed dead. But I objected that it was so solid that it would be standing for many years. The New Guineans were unswayed, opting instead to sleep in the open without a tent.

I thought that their fears were greatly exaggerated, verging on paranoia. In the following years, though, I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view.

Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.

I now think of New Guineans’ hypervigilant attitude toward repeated low risks as “constructive paranoia”: a seeming paranoia that actually makes good sense. Now that I’ve adopted that attitude, it exasperates many of my American and European friends. But three of them who practice constructive paranoia themselves — a pilot of small planes, a river-raft guide and a London bobby who patrols the streets unarmed — learned the attitude, as I did, by witnessing the deaths of careless people.

Traditional New Guineans have to think clearly about dangers because they have no doctors, police officers or 911 dispatchers to bail them out. In contrast, Americans’ thinking about dangers is confused. We obsess about the wrong things, and we fail to watch for real dangers.

Studies have compared Americans’ perceived ranking of dangers with the rankings of real dangers, measured either by actual accident figures or by estimated numbers of averted accidents. It turns out that we exaggerate the risks of events that are beyond our control, that cause many deaths at once or that kill in spectacular ways — crazy gunmen, terrorists, plane crashes, nuclear radiation, genetically modified crops. At the same time, we underestimate the risks of events that we can control (“That would never happen to me — I’m careful”) and of events that kill just one person in a mundane way.

Having learned both from those studies and from my New Guinea friends, I’ve become as constructively paranoid about showers, stepladders, staircases and wet or uneven sidewalks as my New Guinea friends are about dead trees. As I drive, I remain alert to my own possible mistakes (especially at night), and to what incautious other drivers might do.

My hypervigilance doesn’t paralyze me or limit my life: I don’t skip my daily shower, I keep driving, and I keep going back to New Guinea. I enjoy all those dangerous things. But I try to think constantly like a New Guinean, and to keep the risks of accidents far below 1 in 1,000 each time.

Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of the new book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?”

Flowers From the Cotton Fields

The most startling moment in “Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter,” a genial new opera conceived, directed and designed by Robert Wilson, comes near the beginning.

A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics.

A young woman wearing a boldly patterned dress emerges from a door-shaped opening in a brightly painted curtain. She grins widely. “I’m Clementine Hunter,” she exclaims.

As a “life of” piece, “Zinnias,” which opened on Saturday as part of the Peak Performances series at Montclair State University, is a throwback to Mr. Wilson’s early years. He made his name in the 1960s and ’70s with a series of slow, sprawling abstractions posing as biographies: “The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud,” “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” “Edison” and of course, “Einstein on the Beach,” his epochal collaboration with Philip Glass.

The ostensible subjects of those frequently mystifying pieces would never stoop to something as conventional as introducing themselves. Einstein does a lot of violin playing but says nothing throughout a five-hour opera.

So the forthright enthusiasm of Mr. Wilson’s Clementine Hunter, in real life a black plantation worker in Louisiana who achieved renown as a self-taught painter, comes as something of a shock. Mr. Wilson has made “Zinnias” recognizably his own while working with a sweetly easygoing score by Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founder of the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Toshi Reagon, her daughter; and a book by Jacqueline Woodson. Its colored-light backdrops, elegant white furniture and angular, repetitive gestures will be familiar to his fans.

Unfamiliar though is the 90-minute opera’s sunny straightforwardness, a clarity that occasionally feels excessive. When a character recited the cloying line, “Clementine, you’ve got to share your colors with the world,” I found myself longing, as I never before had during a Wilson production, for a little more abstraction.

Hunter was born in late 1886 or early 1887 and died on New Year’s Day 1988. The opera skips lightly over this vast span, touching on her early work in Melrose Plantation’s cotton fields and the beginnings of her painting career, encouraged by the plantation’s artistically minded owner.

Turning out prodigious quantities of happily colored, unremittingly nostalgic portraits of plantation life and flowers, especially the zinnias of the title, Hunter gets her first exhibition in a segregated building at Northwestern State University in Louisiana that she is not allowed to enter for the opening. She begins to sell her work and is acclaimed for it, eventually receiving an honorary degree from Northwestern State.

This inspiring story is told through unpretentious, fluent songs that are amalgams of folk, rockabilly and gospel performed with gorgeously full-throated gusto by a talented cast of 10. In one memorable scene just a few performers on a bare stage, armed with the show’s swinging six-person band and Millicent Johnnie’s unassuming yet sharp choreography, conjured the sweaty delirium of a Saturday-night dance.

The show has a firm anchor in Carla Duren’s Clementine, a potent combination of vulnerability and strength in both voice and gesture. She saves her honorary-degree moment from syrupy sentimentality with the fierce focus of her grip on the diploma.

But that sequence, capped with teary repetitions of “thank you,” feels not so much illuminating as routine, like checking off a biographical box, the problem with many of the scenes in “Zinnias.” Too often the show takes on the cheerful didacticism of a children’s book, with pat lines like, “That’s how it is in the segregated South,” offered when Hunter is not permitted to attend her opening. Neither an alluring song about the sinking of the Titanic nor that Saturday dance party advance the story quite so clearly, but they convey the vibrancy of Hunter’s paintings more evocatively.

If artistically “Zinnias” is an amiable blip in Mr. Wilson’s output, it evidently carries personal meaning for him: He met Hunter as a child and collects her work. He has lavished on her story the production’s strangest element, a solemn undertow in the imposing person of Sheryl Sutton.

A veteran of Mr. Wilson’s early works, Ms. Sutton is billed here as the silent Angel, gliding darkly on the edges of scenes. She spends “Zinnias” in a funereal 19th-century-style black dress, much like the one she wore in Mr. Wilson’s 1971 breakthrough, “Deafman Glance.”

Arm slightly raised in an enigmatic gesture, she sits for long minutes in the downstage left corner, the same spot in which she sat, arms slightly raised in an enigmatic gesture, for much of “Einstein on the Beach.” At one point she pours water into a glass until it overflows and runs off a table. I don’t know what that moment means, but it had a terrifying sobriety that contrasted with the jauntiness of the rest of “Zinnias.”

In a recent interview in The New York Times, Mr. Wilson observed of Broadway style, “It’s all in the one-liners — you have to get it and react. This thing” — “Zinnias” — “is different because you can get lost. And it’s O.K. to get lost.”

Contrasting his new work with Broadway productions, Mr. Wilson misses the point. Bright, charming and tuneful, “Zinnias” is perhaps the first of his productions that could be happy there.

March for Life in front of Supreme Court decries landmark 1973 ruling

Abortion opponents from around the country marched on the Supreme Court on Friday protesting the landmark ruling establishing a constitutional right to abortion, and cheered on speakers who vowed to work for more restrictions.

Though some in the crowd were veterans of previous marches held annually since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, the majority seemed to be teenagers and young adults, many of whom carried signs identifying themselves as part of a “pro-life generation.”

Buses from around the country, mostly chartered by Catholic schools and organizations, brought groups of people to the Mall for a pre-march rally in which politicians, religious leaders and activists decried the 55 million abortions they said had been performed since the Roe v. Wade decision.

The archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, read a message posted early Friday by Pope Benedict XVI from his personal Twitter account: “I join all those marching for life from afar, and pray that political leaders will protect the unborn and promote a culture of life.”

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) appeared on a giant video screen and vowed to work for passage of a bill banning taxpayer funding for abortions. Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) told the crowd that she would fight for a bill she has introduced that would prohibit family planning grants from going to groups that provide abortions, such as Planned Parenthood. Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), chairman of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, called President Obama, who has stated his commitment to protecting abortion as a constitutional right, the “abortion president.”

“Know this, Mr. President,” Smith said to loud cheers from the crowd of protesters. “We will never quit.”

The March for Life is typically held on Jan. 22, the actual anniversary of Roe v. Wade. This year, it was delayed until Friday to allow for cleanup after Monday’s presidential inauguration and make it easier to travel to the District.

Despite a bitter, Arctic cold that descended over the region, Friday’s crowd was large. Police no longer estimate crowd size, so it is difficult to judge how many people attended. The march permit was for 50,000 people, though organizers said the attendance was several times that number. People at the rally were concentrated on the Mall between Seventh and 12th Streets, and the march up Constitution Avenue stretched for at least five blocks.

The most commonly carried posters simply said “Defend Life” or showed a black and white photograph of a newborn infant, plump and healthy-looking. Posters with graphic images of aborted fetuses were rare.

Jeanne Monahan, the new head of the March for Life, said the movement is making progress in changing laws and attitudes. She noted about 200 pro-life measures introduced in state legislatures, and said Americans are growing more pro-life.

“Pro-life is the new normal in the United States,” she told the crowd.

Many who participated came in groups, identifiable by the banners they carried or the matching scarves they wore. Chartered buses dropped off people several blocks away, and they approached the Mall on foot, often carrying placards, crosses and flags bearing the name of the college, high school or diocese they represented.

A group of 24 eighth graders from Spiritus Sanctus Academy in Plymouth, Mich., spent the past year raising $3,000 for the trip through fish fries, rummage sales, can returns, paper recycling and poinsettia sales. Going to the march has been an eighth-grade tradition at the school for several years, said Sister Maria Guadalupe, 37, who was chaperoning the class.

“From the time they’re in kindergarten, we teach them about the dignity of the human person,” she said.

“It’s kind of, for them, an introduction into what we hope for them,” she added. “Standing up as citizens, standing up as believers. These are our rights as Americans, this is what we do as Catholics.”

Jan Fox, who accompanied 37 students from Cerra Catholic High School in McKeesport, Pa., said she had attended the march virtually every year since she was brought to one when she was an eighth grader in 1998.

“As a committed Catholic, we should always be optimistic,” she said, expressing her hope that abortion will be banned again. “Things can change.”

Many young protesters carried placards saying “Defund Planned Parenthood” on one side, and on the other side “I am the Pro-Life Generation.”
Veronica Estigoy, 16, a junior who is treasurer of the pro-life club at Ladywood High School, a Catholic girls’ school in Livonia, Mich., said more teenagers probably fit that description than are willing to admit it.

“I still feel like we’re struggling,” she said of the pro-life movement among teenagers. Too many teens consider abortion “as a get out of jail card,” she said. “But I have the feeling something’s going to change, there are going to be steps taken so we’re not coming back here in another 40 years.”

Cathy Flowers, who came to the Mall on a bus with about 50 fellow members of St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church in Annandale, said there was something auspicious about Roe v. Wade being 40 years old.

“Forty is a religious number,” she said. “The Israelites spent 40 years in the desert. There were the 40 days and nights of rain for Noah. So I’m hoping maybe it will start getting better.”