Bumblebees like outline clowes memorial hall their nectar clowes hall schedule displays hot and can use floral color as a way to find it, according to a study published Thursday. "What the bees appear to be doing is a bit like us drinking a hot drink on a cold day," said lead researcher Lars Chittka, a behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary College of the University of London. "The interesting thing is that bees don't just prefer the warmer drinks -- they learn to predict the flower temperature from the flower color. "The study was published in the journal Nature. The researchers presented bumblebees with artificial flowers that all contained the same amount of sugar water. Pink flowers were heated to about 69 degrees and purple flowers to about 84 degrees. The bees preferred the warmer purple flowers. When the temperatures were switched, the bees favored the pink flowers. The researchers then selected one color for all the flowers but heated them to different temperatures. The bees failed to consistently find the warmest flowers. The result suggested that the bees relied on color, and not some other heat-sensing method, to discern which flowers were the warmest. Bee expert Jurgen Tautz, a biologist from Germany's University of Wurzburg who was not affiliated with the study, said bees work to maintain an elevated body temperature that allows them to forage for food during cooler, less competitive times of day. The study shows that bees prefer to visit a flower that is "rewarding not only for chemical energy but also for its heat," Tautz said. . The space shuttle Atlantis was rolled to the Kennedy Space Center launchpad Wednesday for an end-of-the-month flight to resume construction of the International Space Station. The four-mile trek from the Vehicle Assembly Building in Cape Canaveral, Fla. , took less than eight hours. During the 11-day mission, Atlantis' six astronauts are to conduct three spacewalks and install a 35,000-pound addition with giant solar arrays to power the station The window for launching Atlantis opens Aug 27 and closes Sept 13. . Tests of a 450-year-old pinkie finger confirm that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V was debilitated by gout and the painful joints it produces, Spanish researchers reported Wednesday. Jaume Ordi of the University of Barcelona and colleagues examined the finger, preserved in a red velvet box, and found telltale signs of gout, including the buildup of uric acid crystals. Charles V ruled from 1516 to 1556, controlling lands in Europe, Africa and Asia. "Despite this power, Charles V had to live within the limitations of very intense arthritic pain," the researchers wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. . Life in the Iron Age may have been nasty, brutish and short, but men still found time to style their hair and polish their fingernails, according to researchers who have been examining the two latest preserved prehistoric bodies to emerge from Ireland's peat bogs. Both were tortured to death. One of the 2,300-year-old bodies, churned up by a peat-cutting machine at Clonycavan near Dublin in 2003, had raised Mohawk-style hair, held in place with plant oil imported from France or Spain.

The other, unearthed three months later and 25 miles away in Oldcroghan by workmen digging a ditch, had well-manicured fingernails. clowes memorial hall seating chart Clowes Memorial Hall - cloweshall . The widow of 1992 presidential candidate Paul Tsongas defeated the brother of an American Airlines pilot who died in the Sept 11 attacks in a special election for the U. S clowes hall . House. Democrat Niki Tsongas won with 51% compared with 45% of the votes for Republican Jim Ogonowski with all precincts reporting. Flanked by three daughters and relatives, Tsongas said she was humbled by her victory but eager to help the district's residents clowes hall seating chart . Tsongas, 61, could be sworn in as early as Wednesday to fill the northeastern Massachusetts district seat once held by her husband. Ogonowski's brother John died when his plane was flown into the World Trade Center. The seat was left empty in July when Democrat Martin Meehan resigned to become chancellor of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. clowes hall tickets . A group of airline employees exploited weaknesses in security procedures to help a New York drug ring smuggle heroin and cocaine through John F. Kennedy Airport, federal authorities said. At least 18 people have been charged in the plot, including seven workers at Delta Air Lines Inc . , one at American Airlines, and two who worked at JFK. Prosecutors said the group concealed drugs in luggage on jets traveling from the Dominican Republic, then retrieved the bags at JFK before they could be inspected by customs agents. . THE LATEST SKIRMISH in the Mommy Wars is taking place in Britain, where American ex-pat journalist and mother of two Helen Kirwan-Taylor has confessed her dirty secret in a London tabloid.

Hang onto your wigs! -- she's bored by her kids. In her engineered-to-inflame, first-person essay titled, "Sorry, but my children bore me to death!" Kirwan-Taylor brazenly confesses to blowing off birthday parties to get her highlights done, text messaging friends through Disney movies and using work as a means of escape from her two young sons: "To be honest, I spent much of the early years of my children's lives in a workaholic frenzy because the thought of spending time with them was more stressful than any journalistic assignment I could imagine. "The world has taken the bait, placing Kirwan-Taylor at the center of a recent blogosnit stomp clowes memorial hall . Mommy websites are buzzing with angry responses, and the Daily Mail followed up the article with two pages of readers' reactions along with the requisite weigh-in from a psychologist, Pam Spurr, who has coined the acronym du jour, SMUM, or Smart, Middle-Class, Uninvolved Mother. So now it's on between the SMUMs and the SCAMs (Smart, Child-Centered, Active Moms -- my coinage) clewes hall . SCAMs are the superachieving moms who hand-letter birthday invitations, spend their days in imaginative play with their toddlers, bake from scratch and joyfully embrace each moment spent with their supergifted offspring. I know (and have been known to like) these women clowes hall seating Clowes Memorial Hall . I even have moments when I wished I had their game, but I can only be the SMUM that I am: distracted, well-meaning, ambitious for myself murat theatre seating . But my kids know I'll always be there for them when the chips are down, even if I'm not actually going to get up to serve them any chips. We daughters of second-wave feminist mothers were raised to dream big and strive for goals beyond the hearth and home. We launched careers, gained the respect of our peers and defined ourselves as individuals Then we had kids, and everything changed. Motherhood can be fascinating, challenging, life-affirming work It can also be mind-bendingly dull.

Having a child can feel like a sudden erasure of all that we have worked for out in the world. Smart, educated, highly skilled women find themselves trapped alone in their homes with demanding, pre-verbal people, doing a fulltime job they have no training for clowes memorial hall . Our executive decisions concern snacks and toys, and our negotiations are about whether the 4-year-old is allowed to wear her tap shoes to the mall murat theatre seating chart . We give up proximity to our friends and colleagues and substitute it with the all-too-often tepid conversation found in a Mommy and Me group murat . It's enough to make any SMUM turn to retail therapy. Kirwan-Taylor gets to the guilty heart of the matter when she asks, "What kind of mother hates reading bedtime stories? A bad mother, that's who, and a mother who is bored rigid by her children. " (I would posit that the mother who wants to skip another Barney retread at bedtime isn't so much a bad mom as a tired mother. )Despite her strident confession, Kirwan-Taylor seems to have internalized the message behind this latest stroke of feminist backlash: Independent, self-determined moms who seek fulfillment outside the home are selfish and neglectful, and the quality of their love doesn't measure up to that of moms who dote on their kids. Clowes Memorial Hall tickets SMUMs, or Slacker Moms as we're dubbed stateside, may be characterized as "bad" moms, but SCAMs have their critics too stomp clowes . They're accused of mollycoddling, raising over-programmed kids who will be unable to function independently as adults. Nobody comes home from the Mommy Wars intact. Like all media-fueled frenzies, this issue has been oversimplified, framed as a good-mother/bad-mother standoff rather than a debate about the real challenges facing real moms who fall somewhere between selfless and selfish. This cooked-up catfight distracts us from the real problem: We live in a society that still doesn't accord the same value to women's work as men's, that leaves stay-at-home moms isolated and unsupported, criticized and guilt-tripped. Until we allow women to be genuinely who they are and not force them into some outdated "good mommy" mold, everyone will lose -- SMUMs, SCAMs and the children we are all trying our level best to raise. .

Democratic lawmakers denounced federal authorities for not intervening in the "Jena Six" case, citing racist noose-hanging incidents far beyond the Louisiana town where a school attack garnered national attention. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing with federal officials and community activists examining the case of the six black teenagers charged with beating a white student. The lawmakers blasted federal authorities for staying out of the local prosecutor's case against the six, particularly that of Mychal Bell, who is in jail after a judge decided he violated probation for a previous conviction. clowes memorial hall seating chart . OVER THE LAST 25 years, the number of corporations that dominate television, movies, music, radio, cable and the Internet has dwindled from more than 50 to just a handful of massive conglomerates murat theater seating . Do we really want Big Media to get even bigger?Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin does murat seating chart . He just relaunched the FCC's formal review of media ownership rules wicked tickets murat . The agency's "Further Notice of Proposed Rulemaking," issued July 25, is vague, but its intent is clear: to let a few giant media corporations swallow up more local television channels, radio stations and newspapers in a single market. Martin's main target is the ban on "newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership" that prohibits one company from owning the major daily newspaper as well as radio and TV stations in the same area. He'd also like to allow one company to own more than one TV station in smaller markets, and more than two in the largest cities. A few powerful firms in major cities have won waivers to the ban, or at least delays on enforcement, but those are the exceptions (In Los Angeles, the Tribune Co Clowes Memorial Hall - cloweshall .

owns the Los Angeles Times and KTLA-TV Channel 5, an arrangement that probably would be affected by Martin's actions. )If the changes are approved, one corporation could own the major daily newspaper, eight radio stations and three television stations in the same town stomp clowes memorial hall . Once the digital television transition is completed in 2009 -- allowing stations to broadcast multiple signals -- one company could control 12 or even 18 television channels in a single city. If Martin gets his way, the last vestiges of local media competition would be swept away, smoothing the way for "media company towns" in which News Corp or, yes, the Tribune Co could dominate public discourse murat theater seating chart . Would it really be good for Los Angeles if the Chicago Tribune's parent company owned The Times, KCAL-TV, KCBS-TV, KTLA-TV and radio stations KABC, KFI, KFWB, KLAC, KLSX, KNX, KRLA and KSPN?That deja vu you're feeling is because the FCC tried to push through the same rule changes in 2003 under then-Chairman Michael Powell murat centre . In response, millions of people -- spurred on by groups as diverse as the National Rifle Assn theatre . and the National Organization for Women -- contacted the FCC and Congress to voice their opposition. The FCC approved the rule changes anyway, only to see them nearly overturned by Congress and then rejected by the courts. Despite the overwhelming public opposition, Martin's latest attempt to eliminate cross-ownership rules is driven by the massive lobbying of a cartel of second-tier big media companies specializing in newspaper and broadcast station ownership, such as Gannett, Media General and Tribune. Their motive? Bigger profits. But what's good for Big Media's bottom line isn't always good for the rest of us.

The first casualty of "media company towns" would be journalism . When one firm owns most of a city's news outlets, who needs a bunch of competing newsrooms? Investigative reporting and extensive local coverage requires a costly staff wicked tickets . It's far cheaper to syndicate fare from headquarters than to support a diversity of local voices mama mia . If your readers and viewers don't like it, where else are they going to go?Once the big chains start selling and swapping their properties to build up larger fiefdoms, the already declining number of independent and minority owners will be further squeezed out . Today, just one in five daily newspapers are owned by individuals or companies that don't own any other newspapers. According to the most recent FCC data, fewer than 4% of radio stations and 2% of TV stations are owned by minorities. Industry and Wall Street propaganda says local media can't compete without further consolidation. Yet media companies already enjoy higher profit margins than most industries They say we must deregulate.