Stardom

A British teen becomes a pop sensation after posting a video to youtube


A British teenager has become a huge pop sensation in the Far East after posting a video of herself singing in Korean on the internet.Rebecca Strachan, 19, received over 130,000 hits when she uploaded the footage on to video-sharing website YouTube.It has become so popular record executives have even offered her a series of concerts in the South Korean capital Seoul.Rebecca said: "I can't believe the amount of interest we've received in Korea and the whole thing seems like a dream. When I posted the video, I was totally unprepared for all the attention."My family don't know what to make of it and my friends have been really supportive. I can't wait to go out there and, hopefully, with a bit of luck and hard work, I can make it as a star."

Toothy tale

A British dentist is starting to give patients check-ups over the internet



Jerry Watson, from London, examines their teeth via webcam and then decides if he needs to see them in person.At the moment, patients still have to go to a clinic to be filmed and pay to have their teeth cleaned by a hygienist.But Dr. Wilson is convinced it is dentistry of the future, meaning patients can eventually get a check-up at home.He said: "There's no reason people couldn't get seen from home if they've a high-quality camera."What we need for the future is cameras in electric toothbrushes. That would be fantastic."

Glossy Travails

Long before rouge came into existence, women were applying colour to their faces by many different means.During the Egyptian queen Cleopatra's time, berries and other natural ingredients were used to enhance the face.Nowadays different ingredients are used in the colors for the face.Today's average woman uses six pounds of lipstick in a year but few of them know that one ingredient frequently used to manufacturing lipsticks is fish scales.

Cursing Technology

For years now there has been a certain principle that drives technology forward. It’s not a rationale, cohesive or tangible standard, but more to do with emotion and passion. This is called the WOW Factor and it describes the emotional state that you enter when you see a new category of technology that completely and totally knocks your socks off. The first time you saw a ultra portable super slim notebook, the initial euphoria of using a digital camera for the first time, the pure bliss of wire free browsing on your Wi-Fi computer, the initial shock of seeing the clarity of a High Definition Plasma display, the pure sensory experience of hearing a perfectly tuned 5.1 Home theatre – that Ladies and Gentlemen is called the Wow Factor; and sadly it may be time for us to bid goodbye to this incredible experience.Face it; when was the last time you truly felt like the earth had moved when you had either heard or seen something new in the consumer technology arena. Innovations and inventions in this field have been few and far between for quite sometime now. Things have moved to a evolutionary phase and it’s always add on features that come to mind. The iPod is in its fifth generation and still looks pretty much the same, Plasma Displays have entered their eighth generation and still suffer from burn in, CD’s have been around forever and still get scratched, mobile phones still crash, cameras still generate red eyes, notebook batteries are exploding all over the world and it will take about 3 wrong key presses to bring your computer to a grinding halt.Just about the biggest thing that we have all been waiting for in the last 3 years have been High Definition Displays. While it is has been slow to come, today most companies have delivered some cutting edge products. They are rock solid, crystal clear, bigger than ever (140 inch is in the works), have great color depth and amazing resolution. But what now? These display are already as clear as the human eye can perceive. Going any clearer or increasing the resolution anymore will be a zero sum game with very few benefits. They also can’t make them bigger as even the 110 inchers weigh about 400 pounds and need 8 people to carry them. The fact that your house doors and maybe a few walls will have to be torn down to carry the TV in - may be another damper.Consider the other Holy Grail of Technology. We all want it lighter, smaller, thinner and sleeker. Today we have hybrid camcorders so small that they barely fit in our hands, mp3 players the size of our fingernail, notebooks so slim that they look like they may snap into two and phones that are pure featherweights.While these micro machines are radical devices - the small ergonomics and form factor may have hit the law of diminishing returns. Have these products become so diminutive that they are now effectively unusable? Our fingers are already too large and clumsy to press the buttons on our gadgets, our eyes can hardly comprehend their tiny screens and most of us cannot grip or control such small gadgets properly. It’s just not possible for them to make them any thinner or smaller without sacrificing usability completely.Technology will still continue to enthral us - but in tiny surges. It may well be time for us to embrace the fact that from here on technology will only move forward in small incremental steps. It’s lights out for WOW technology and the sooner we all realize it - the lesser the chances of being disappointed.Having said all this let me also add that consumer level technology has always defied standard norms. The fall of future innovations has been predicted many a time and yet every year the gadgets and gizmos around us continue to mesmerize us in every way.

Idea Conceived

In 1947, Bell Labs originally conceived the idea of a cellular phone.Panther, Jaguar, Tiger and Leopard have in common? All are Apple Macintosh operating systems.The name iPod was proposed by Vinnie Chieco, a freelance copywriter. After Chieco saw a prototype, he thought of the movie 2001: A Space Odessey and the phrase "Open the pod bay door."Thomas the Tank Engine was not a game you could buy for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Strict Zone

Bikers not allowed. This zone is strictly for those with a four-wheel crush. If you are a car-lover you have the license to drive in. Come, swap stories with fellow enthusiasts. Twenty-three year old Vir Raina is one of them. His red hot Toyota Celica is our centrefold this week.Vir has had the pleasure of owning some of the finest cars from early on. Not hard to guess why. Car-love runs in the family of this Delhi boy. “I think the passion for cars has been in my family for generations. It goes as far back as my grandfathers. Both had quite a collection. My maternal grandfather used to have Bentley, Rolls Royce, Mercedes, the works. Any car that was considered luxury he has had. My paternal grandfather used to have Buicks and a Rolls Royce back in the day which he bought on an auction from the King of Kashmir.”When Vir turned 21, his father, noted theatre personality M K Raina, decided to gift him something out of the ordinary – A Toyota Celica. Va-va-voom, talk of swanky wheels! For Vir it was everything he could ask for and more. “It’s just been great as it’s a sports car yet works like an everyday car. It has no issues, after all it is a Toyota, and Toyotas are the most reliable cars in the world. So I got performance, reliability and a great looking car,” he beams.Like most Toyotas, Vir’s Celica is a low, snazzy-looking, fast machine. The alloy wheels were turned black to add to the look. It has a classic four cylinder engine which easily burns up 240 BHP and the interiors have a slick leather finish.For the uninitiated, the Celica is one of the most popular sports cars from the Toyota stable. They have been around for six generations and have got the required makeovers. But one constant is the four-inline engines which power the cars.For Vir the Celica has morphed into his calling card. “I just think I’m extremely fortunate to have the chance to have a car like this. Nowadays you can get carried away driving fast and having a nice car. But as long as that is under check, I think everything will work out fine.” Well said Vir.

Hey Ram or .....

Did the Father of the Nation actually utter ''Hey Ram'' before he fell to assassin Nathuram Godse's bullets exactly 60 years ago?Well, a new book Mahatma Gandhi: Bramhacharya Ke Prayog (Mahatma Gandhi: Experiment with celibacy) does not seem to think so.Its author Dayashankar Shukla 'Sagar', a journalist with a well-known Hindi daily here, questions the widely held belief and contends that the Mahatma's granddaughter Manu only heard him utter: ''Hey Ra...''.He goes on to claim that Godse had also said Gandhi had uttered ''aah..'' and not ''Hey Ram'' when he shot him on January 30, 1948.The author dwells in detail about the ''experiments'' by Gandhi with 'bramhacharya' (celibacy) and says these and the controversies arising from them had ''an effect on Gandhi's views on the freedom struggle''.''With his experiments on celibacy, Gandhi had opened a new front in addition to the objective of freedom which was unnecessary,'' the book says.The book, published by Vani Prakashan, is to be released by senior journalist and Gandhian thinker Prabhash Joshi at the International Book Fair in New Delhi on February 7.