The Idea of Travel and Leisure: Hotels in Canada are generally ...

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Canada is really a beautiful country and there a variety of great hotels in Canada to stay at. Canada is definitely the second largest country on the planet, right after Russia, and the nation spans from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans. Hotels in Canada can be found in every city and town. The country offers such mixed scenery and climate that it really is worth it to visit as many areas as feasible. Canada is really so big that it has six time zones. Canadian hotels are well equipped to take care of tourists from all over the planet and supply the latest modern benefits.
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Travelers to this country locate that hotels in Canada?are thoroughly clean as well as modern. Most of the Canada hotel rooms are available equipped with television sets and permit easy accessibility for the web. The eastern component of Canada is recognized for popular cities including Toronto and Montreal. Montreal is inside the province of Quebec along with the formal language in this part in the country is French. Tourists wanting to brush up on their French are able to do so here without needing to travel to Europe. Hotels in Canada range between basic to high-class.
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All-natural wonders such as Niagara Falls must be witnessed to be believed. Niagara Falls is shared jointly by Canada as well as the United States. Numerous individuals from all around the globe have their own honeymoons right here and also the Canada hotels?in this location focus on honeymooners. This is a excellent location to get married and enjoy the majesty of the Niagara Falls. The province of Ontario, in which the Falls are situated, has several lakes and beauty spots. The city of Toronto is a contemporary city with a lot of modern hotels for any visitor to choose from.?
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Several million individuals live in Toronto and the city is fast-paced. It could almost be referred to as the New York of Canada. There are numerous parks to check out and interesting sites to see. This city is home to world-class restaurants as well as shops. Trendy cafes can be found on virtually every single road, and also the shopping is modern because of the many immigrants from all over the world. That is genuinely a modern city with a lot to offer the visitor. Fall is surely a particularly beautiful time of year simply because of the colourful leaves shown on trees.
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Canadian hotels are identified as comfy as well as high standard. The highest cleanliness can be expected from coast-to-coast hotels given that the travel and leisure market is definitely an essential part of Canada's economic climate. Hotels in Canada need to meet quality specifications simply because of the strict wellness restrictions in Canada. Traveling further west the particular visitor encounters the Prairie Provinces. This can be the wheat growing location of Canada but many other crops also prosper here. Numerous large cities, such as Winnipeg, may be found in this particular area. Winnipeg is actually a vibrant location and has numerous wonderful points of interest. This particular city may get really cold in winter and wind-chill factors make it essential to really bundle up to be able to keep warm.
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Even further to the west the cities of Edmonton and Calgary are located. Both cities are famous for their hockey teams and many Canadians are enthusiasts of this sport. Going to see a hockey game can be an engaging component of the journey for any traveller. Throughout the summertime Calgary features the popular Calgary Stampede where cowboys and cowgirls of every age group showcase their abilities. Canada hotels within this city are usually booked up during this occasion. There's a lot to see in this area and a bit further west may be the location of the famous Rocky Mountains.?
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The Rocky Mountains are an incredible sight with snow covered peaks that make for excellent skiing. Many large ski resorts are situated in this location. Just about the most renowned of the hotels in this region is the Banff Springs Hotel. This specific resort was built decades ago and is really luxurious. Traveling further more west the visitor goes through the Rockies and can now effortlessly travel to Vancouver. Canada hotels in Vancouver are as well tended as in the remainder of Canada. Vancouver has experienced a growth spur recently and many new high-rise towers have been built in the downtown area. There's much to discover here and if the visitor desires to enjoy magnificent scenery then the Sunshine Coast, located north of Vancouver, is the place to see. This particular city is located on the Pacific Ocean and is genuinely one of the most remarkable locations to travel to.

Source: http://callier.blogspot.com/2012/12/hotels-in-canada-are-generally-modern.html

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Official: Syrian forces fired Scud missiles at rebels

WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have fired Scud missiles at rebels trying to overthrow Syria's government, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday, a step seen as an escalation in Assad's struggle to retain power.

U.S. officials said they were unaware of any previous instances in which Scuds were used against the rebels since the start of the 20-month-old uprising, which has killed more than 40,000 people.

White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to confirm the reports, saying he was aware of them but could not discuss intelligence matters.

"If true, this would be the latest desperate act from a regime that has shown utter disregard for innocent life," he said. "The idea that the Syrian regime would launch missiles in its borders at its own people is stunning, desperate, a completely disproportionate military escalation."

A senior U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Scuds had been used.

In Brussels, a NATO official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said a number of "Scud-type" short-range ballistic missiles had been launched inside Syria in recent days.

"Allied intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets have detected the launch of a number of unguided, short-range ballistic missiles inside Syria this week," the official said.

"Trajectory and distance travelled indicate they were Scud-type missiles," the NATO official said.

NATO agreed last week to send Patriot anti-missile systems to alliance member Turkey to reinforce its air defenses and calm its fears of coming under missile attack, possibly with chemical weapons, from neighboring Syria.

The NATO official said the Syrian missiles had landed inside Syria and no missiles had hit Turkish territory. He said the Western alliance had no information about what casualties or damage the missiles had caused.

Asked if there was any evidence of Syrian use of chemical weapons, he said: "We have no information concerning the payload."

U.S. President Barack Obama warned Assad last week not to use chemical weapons against Syrian opposition forces, saying there would be unspecified consequences if he did so.

The United States, Germany and Netherlands have all agreed to send Patriot missiles to protect Turkey, but the missile batteries are not expected to arrive for several more weeks.

The New York Times, which initially reported Syria's use of the missiles, quoted one official as saying more than six had been fired at the rebels. Another official said the missiles had been launched from the Damascus area at targets in northern Syria, the Times said.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters they would not dispute the Times report.

Speaking separately, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, while not confirming the use of Scuds, said the United States has also been seeing the use of incendiary barrel bombs, which she said was "another egregious weapon" that was "completely indiscriminate in terms of civilians."

"As the regime becomes more and more desperate, we see it resorting to increased lethality and more vicious weapons moving forward," she told a State Department briefing.

News of Syria's use of Scud missiles broke as Western and Arab nations sympathetic to the uprising against Assad gave full political recognition to the opposition.

(Reporting by David Alexander in Washington and Adrian Croft in Brussels; Editing by Michael Roddy and David Brunnstrom)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/syrian-forces-fired-scud-missiles-rebels-u-official-185702469.html

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ruhansingh: 15 to Spend on Food and Drink ? Chris BBQ & Grill ...

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New drug lifts hard-to-treat depression in hours

Depression need not linger if a new class of drugs that can improve symptoms within hours becomes available.

People with depression are often treated with drugs that increase levels of serotonin and other mood-enhancing chemicals in the brain. But these drugs typically take weeks, or even months, to work.

Drugs that target receptors for a chemical called NMDA appear to take effect much faster. Ketamine is one example. It can reduce symptoms of depression within hours, but also has hallucinatory side effects.

Now Joseph Moskal and colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have trialled a similar drug called GLYX-13, which also targets NMDA receptors. Moskal's team gave either GLXY-13 or a placebo to 116 people with depression that did not respond to other treatments.

Those who received the drug reported that their symptoms got better within two hours, with no significant side effects. The drug also performed significantly better than the placebo. The team presented their results at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology annual meeting in Hollywood, Florida, last week.

Moskal reckons the drug works by boosting either the strength or number of connections between neurons, although it is not yet clear why this improves symptoms.

Gerard Sanacora at Yale School of Medicine thinks that people with depression may experience a slump in activity in the frontal cortex of the brain, and that the drug might reverse this. "I'm excited about this whole class of drugs," he says. "It opens up a new vista for drug development for these disorders, although there's still a lot of work to be done." Moskal says he is aiming to get the drug to market by 2016.

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Point of light

Monday, December 10, 2012

As technology advances, it tends to shrink. From cell phones to laptops?powered by increasingly faster and tinier processors?everything is getting thinner and sleeker. And now light beams are getting smaller, too.

Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a device that can focus light into a point just a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) across?an achievement they say may lead to next-generation applications in computing, communications, and imaging.

Because light can carry greater amounts of data more efficiently than electrical signals traveling through copper wires, today's technology is increasingly based on optics. The world is already connected by thousands of miles of optical-fiber cables that deliver email, images, and the latest video gone viral to your laptop.

As we all produce and consume more data, computers and communication networks must be able to handle the deluge of information. Focusing light into tinier spaces can squeeze more data through optical fibers and increase bandwidth. Moreover, by being able to control light at such small scales, optical devices can also be made more compact, requiring less energy to power them.

But focusing light to such minute scales is inherently difficult. Once you reach sizes smaller than the wavelength of light?a few hundred nanometers in the case of visible light?you reach what's called the diffraction limit, and it's physically impossible to focus the light any further.

But now the Caltech researchers, co-led by assistant professor of electrical engineering Hyuck Choo, have built a new kind of waveguide?a tunnellike device that channels light?that gets around this natural limit. The waveguide, which is described in a recent issue of the journal Nature Photonics, is made of amorphous silicon dioxide?which is similar to common glass?and is covered in a thin layer of gold. Just under two microns long, the device is a rectangular box that tapers to a point at one end.

As light is sent through the waveguide, the photons interact with electrons at the interface between the gold and the silicon dioxide. Those electrons oscillate, and the oscillations propagate along the device as waves?similarly to how vibrations of air molecules travel as sound waves. Because the electron oscillations are directly coupled with the light, they carry the same information and properties?and they therefore serve as a proxy for the light.

Instead of focusing the light alone?which is impossible due to the diffraction limit?the new device focuses these coupled electron oscillations, called surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). The SPPs travel through the waveguide and are focused as they go through the pointy end.

Because the new device is built on a semiconductor chip with standard nanofabrication techniques, says Choo, the co-lead and the co-corresponding author of the paper, it is easy integrate with today's technology

Previous on-chip nanofocusing devices were only able to focus light into a narrow line. They also were inefficient, typically focusing only a few percent of the incident photons, with the majority absorbed and scattered as they traveled through the devices.

With the new device, light can ultimately be focused in three dimensions, producing a point a few nanometers across, and using half of the light that's sent through, Choo says. (Focusing the light into a slightly bigger spot, 14 by 80 nanometers in size, boosts the efficiency to 70 percent). The key feature behind the device's focusing ability and efficiency, he says, is its unique design and shape.

"Our new device is based on fundamental research, but we hope it's a good building block for many potentially revolutionary engineering applications," says Myung-Ki Kim, a postdoctoral scholar and the other lead author of the paper.

For example, one application is to turn this nanofocusing device into an efficient, high-resolution biological-imaging instrument, Kim says. A biologist can dye specific molecules in a cell with fluorescent proteins that glow when struck by light. Using the new device, a scientist can focus light into the cell, causing the fluorescent proteins to shine. Because the device concentrates light into such a small point, it can create a high-resolution map of those dyed molecules. Light can also travel in the reverse direction through the nanofocuser: by collecting light through the narrow point, the device turns into a high-resolution microscope.

The device can also lead to computer hard drives that hold more memory via heat-assisted magnetic recording. Normal hard drives consist of rows of tiny magnets whose north and south poles lay end to end. Data is recorded by applying a magnetic field to switch the polarity of the magnets.

Smaller magnets would allow more memory to be squeezed into a disc of a given size. But the polarities of smaller magnets made of current materials are unstable at room temperature, causing the magnetic poles to spontaneously flip?and for data to be lost. Instead, more stable materials can be used?but those require heat to record data. The heat makes the magnets more susceptible to polarity reversals. Therefore, to write data, a laser is needed to heat the individual magnets, allowing a surrounding magnetic field to flip their polarities.

Today's technology, however, can't focus a laser into a beam that is narrow enough to individually heat such tiny magnets. Indeed, current lasers can only concentrate a beam to an area 300 nanometers wide, which would heat the target magnet as well as adjacent ones?possibly spoiling other recorded data.

Because the new device can focus light down to such small scales, it can heat smaller magnets individually, making it possible for hard drives to pack more magnets and therefore more memory. With current technology, discs can't hold more than 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) per square inch. A nanofocusing device, Choo says, can bump that to 50 terabytes per square inch.

Then there's the myriad of data-transfer and communication applications, the researchers say. As computing becomes increasingly reliant on optics, devices that concentrate and control data-carrying light at the nanoscale will be essential?and ubiquitous, says Choo, who is a member of the Kavli Nanoscience Institute at Caltech. "Don't be surprised if you see a similar kind of device inside a computer you may someday buy."

The next step is to optimize the design and to begin building imaging instruments and sensors, Choo says. The device is versatile enough that relatively simple modifications could allow it to be used for imaging, computing, or communication.

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California Institute of Technology: http://www.caltech.edu

Thanks to California Institute of Technology for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/125824/Point_of_light

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Europe hails "great" Monti as Italy crisis hits markets

ROME (Reuters) - European partners heaped praise on outgoing Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti on Monday, and called for the next government to stick to his reform agenda after his surprise decision to resign rattled financial markets.

Monti's weekend announcement that he would step down early - made after former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's PDL party withdrew its support for his technocrat government - pushed up Italy's borrowing costs and prompted a stock market sell-off.

The campaign for an election expected in February is likely to be fought over Monti's reform agenda, which Berlusconi said had condemned Italy to recession and forced him reluctantly to run for a fifth term as prime minister.

By contrast, senior Europeans warned that Monti's policies must continue to prevent a return of the crisis which brought him to power a year ago to avert a Greek-style collapse.

"Monti was a great prime minister of Italy and I hope that the policies he put in place will continue after the elections," European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said in Oslo, where he was part of a European Union delegation receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

The comments echoed similar remarks in the past two days from European policymakers ranging from French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to the head of the European bailout fund Klaus Regling and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos warned that instability in Italy could spill over and put Spain's fragile public finances at risk of further turmoil.

After several weeks of calm, markets bridled at the prospect of Berlusconi's return to lead the centre-right, just over a year after a financial crisis drove the scandal-plagued billionaire from office to be replaced by Monti's technocrats.

Opinion polls suggest Berlusconi has little chance of re-election. The centre-left Democratic Party (PD) under Pier Luigi Bersani holds a strong lead and is likely to form the next government on a broadly pro-European platform, largely in line with Monti's agenda.

Berlusconi's strategy appears more designed to ensure he retains influence in the next parliament with a substantial voting bloc that, among other things, can protect his business and personal interests.

The main measure of investors' confidence, the spread between Italian 10-year government bonds and their lower risk German equivalent, widened to 362 basis points from 325 late on Friday, reflecting worries over a return to the political uncertainty which dogged Italy last year.

Milan's blue-chip share index dropped over 3 percent, with sharper falls in banking stocks that are seen as most vulnerable to a renewed debt crisis.

"You can expect a sharpening in anti-austerity, anti-reform rhetoric...and this will probably translate into a higher risk premium on Italian assets," said Goldman Sachs analysts Silvia Ardagna and Francesco Garzarelli.

MONTI'S FUTURE

Much attention has now focused whether Monti will enter politics himself, either as a candidate or by endorsing one of the centrist forces that have backed his reforms and made more or less explicit pleas for him to run.

The daily La Repubblica quoted the 69-year-old former European Commissioner as saying that he had not yet made up his mind but was worried by the situation. "I don't know," he was quoted as saying. "If I had to ... describe my feelings today, I would say that I am very concerned."

Monti's decision to resign once the 2013 budget is approved, probably before Christmas, has brought forward to February an election that had already been expected in March or by the latest April.

But it was Berlusconi's reappearance on the frontline and the prospect of a messy anti-Monti election campaign which galvanised attention in both Italy and abroad, reawakening memories of the financial and sexual scandals that plagued the media magnate's last government.

The Roman Catholic Church made outspoken and thinly veiled criticism of Berlusconi that may influence the PDL's traditional conservative voting base.

"What leaves one astonished is the irresponsibility of those who think of arranging things for themselves while the house is still burning," the influential head of the Italian bishop's conference, Angelo Bagnasco, told the Corriere della Sera.

With a new government likely to be formed in a few months, Italy's European partners have now started to look more closely at Bersani, the overwhelming victor in a centre-left primary election last month.

A no-frills former communist who is close to Italy's unions, Bersani has promised to stick to the promises on fiscal discipline the government has made and has said that Monti is likely to continue playing a role after the election.

While Italy's election laws are likely to give Bersani a strong majority in the lower house, the complicated rules may make it more difficult for him to take control of the Senate, posing a possible risk to the formation of a stable government.

Whoever wins will have to confront a severe recession, record unemployment and a ballooning public debt expected to surpass 126 percent of gross domestic product this year.

The depth of the crisis was underlined on Monday, with data showing GDP shrinking 2.4 percent in the third quarter and industrial production dropping 1.1 percent in October.

(Additional reporting by Luke Baker and Balazs Koranyi in Oslo, Lisa Jucca, Silvio Aloisi, Giancarlo Navach, Alessia Pe, Maria Pia Quaglia in Milan; editing by Barry Moody and David Stamp)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/italy-bond-yields-jump-stocks-sink-montis-early-111312742--sector.html

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Instagram courts hardcore photography fans with new filter and improved editing features

Columbia Pictures has released the first trailer for Another Earth, the Will Smith/Jaden Smith sci-fi thriller directed by M. Night Shyamalan. So... doesn't that sound great? M. Night Shyamalan hasn't made a bad movie since his last movie, and everyone loves Jaden Smith, what with his great rap songs and all. Will Smith is in it, but he doesn't do the bulk of the adventuring, as his character is stuck injured in a spaceship most of the time. So it's mostly Jaden Smith running around a world of M. Night Shyamalan's making. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/instagram-courts-hardcore-photography-fans-filter-improved-editing-024524835.html

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