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.

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