Leaping cockroach jumps as high as a grasshopper

Michael Marshall, reporter

If you like to avoid cockroaches, it may be rather difficult to stay clear of Saltoblatella montistabularis, a species that can jump. Malcolm Burrows of the University of Cambridge, UK and his team are investigating how far the roaches can leap and found that they can jump a distance of 35 centimetres, or about 48 times their own body length.

Lab studies revealed that the cockroaches experience accelerations of up to 23 g. "If you place one is in a glass vial and it jumps, you can hear a ting noise as it hits the top of the container," says Mike Picker, a member of the team. They have evolved enormous hind legs much like those of grasshoppers, allowing them to jump in a similar fashion and rely on hopping as their main form of locomotion.

The species was first spotted on Table mountain in South Africa in 2006. It was formally described for the first time last year.

Journal reference: Biology?Letters,?DOI:?10.1098/rsbl.2011.1022

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/1abc90ff/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cnstv0C20A110C120Cleaping0Ecockroach0Ejumps0Eas0Ehigh0Eas0Ea0Egrasshopper0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fonline0Enews/story01.htm

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Cheryl Cole Has A Bit Of A Shoe Fetish (Photos/Video)

Cheryl Cole Has A Bit Of A Shoe Fetish (Photos/Video)

Cheryl Cole reveals she has around 2,000 pairs of shoes! The singer, who recently showed off her first shoe collection, admits she has a shoe [...]

Cheryl Cole Has A Bit Of A Shoe Fetish (Photos/Video) Stupid Celebrities Gossip Stupid Celebrities Gossip News

Source: http://stupidcelebrities.net/2011/12/06/cheryl-cole-has-a-bit-of-a-shoe-fetish-photosvideo/

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92% Arthur Christmas

All Critics (128) | Top Critics (29) | Fresh (118) | Rotten (10)

It's as bright and twinkling as a Christmas tree, decked with warmth and humor.

It's busy but buoyant, and it honors the tradition of giving with wit and style.

The action is swift and witty, and the 3-D effects are imaginative and not simply tacked on as with so many animated movies these days.

With a clever script that successfully updates many Christmas myths and dialogue that crackles with sophisticated wit, this movie offers the kind of pre-holiday experience that parents and children alike will appreciate.

Everything you see in Arthur Christmas is fashioned in the service of telling a story ... brilliantly

The results are not only funny and fresh, but represent a new way of tackling the whole yuletide paradigm: Santa as a high-tech hereditary monarchy.

A witty and beautifully designed animated film.

Arthur Christmas has charm and a breezy confidence that makes it the epitome of a simple pleasure.

Aardman films' yuletide offering is both a heartwarmer and a sly dig at the gospel of family togetherness.

Arthur may not be perfect, but he cares. The same can be said for the film. 'Arthur Christmas' is full of just enough holiday cheer.

The opening sequence, establishing the methodology of Santa and his army of elves, is a bit frantic, especially in 3-D, but once the story-proper begins the staging and timing are right on the money.

Arthur Christmas manages to deliver some holiday cheer.

What is most surprising about Arthur Christmas is not that it is beautifully animated... but that it is, legitimately, one of 2011's funniest comedies.

A very pleasant -- if hardly overwhelmingly great -- animated Christmas fantasy with at least two inspired choices for voice casting.

A charming and inventive exploration of the mysterious workings of Santa, his sons and his elves. This animated tale is sure to be popular for Christmases to come.

There's some great stuff here... What's missing is the delightful Britishness of Nick Park's films.

A fairly inventive Christmas movie that might get lost in the current glut of family movies

The film does have a nice ending. It just takes a little too long to get there.

The holiday season is an emotional rollercoaster for many reasons and Arthur Christmas does a neat job of exploring many of them while still being both heart-warming and wonderfully entertaining

The best Christmas movies have a kind of humility about them that's lacking here ...

A scene in which zebras, elephants and other African animals float like balloons in the air after an accidental dusting of Santa's flying-reindeer magic is close to surreal poetry.

'Arthur Christmas' gets off to a terrific start by letting inquisitive viewers know how the guy in the red suit manages to get all those toys to two billion kids on a single evening.

More Critic Reviews

Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/arthur_christmas/

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Hunter Stuart: The Iron Lady Glorifies, And Then Condemns, Margaret Thatcher

"Our character is our fate," says former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to her physician in the new movie The Iron Lady, which comes out Dec. 30. "We become what we think. And I think I am fine."

Although Thatcher doesn't exactly turn out to be "fine" -- the movie's opening scene establishes the full extent of her dementia -- she's right about her character determining her fate. And it's Ms. Thatcher's character -- irresistibly charismatic, shrewd, ambitious, and (above all) maddeningly stubborn -- that makes The Iron Lady worth watching, if you can ignore its glib portrayal of Thatcherite England, which is glossed over about as blandly as if you were reading a middle-school textbook.

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher: victorious, as always

The daughter of a grocery store owner in a small English town located just over 100 miles north of London, the young Thatcher is shown to be a social outcast but a diligent student who fights her way into Oxford and then into Conservative Party politics.

Thatcher is more than a little proud of her unlikely rise to power, and she doesn't hesitate to use it to her advantage at the slightest hint of dissent, lording it over anyone who questions her policies. "There are some here who have been given everything in life," she says to her all-male Cabinet, who had the gall to advocate lowering tax rates for the poor, "and who feel guilty for it." During her three terms as prime minister, Thatcher was a notorious advocate of public spending cuts, even if it meant taking free milk away from schoolchildren.

Progressives will likely take umbrage with the movie's glorification of Thatcher. Director Phyllida Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan portray her as an underdog, someone who's widely ridiculed, doubted and misunderstood, and the snappy editing and musical crescendos that illustrate her rise to political prominence make her appear larger than life.

But Thatcher's hardline principles are shown in The Iron Lady to be hypocritical, too. When we see her pushing for a military attack on an Argentine Navy ship (which she ends up sinking, killing 323 crew members, to much controversy), she's told by her closest advisers that the country can't afford to go to war. "We shouldn't be worrying about money now," she says dismissively.

In The Iron Lady, Thatcher's self-righteousness is shown to be a force of nature, one that cannot be even remotely diminished by her closest friends or by the dozens of bombs that go off in protest of her policies, bombs that kill one of her closest advisers and that once nearly kill her and her husband, too. All this does is strengthen her resolve.

When she's accused of being "out of touch" with English society, we see her accurately quote the current market price of milk and produce to prove she's still connected with the middle class. In real life, Thatcher's priggishness was equally pervasive. When the Toxteth riots broke out in 1981 in black neighborhoods of Liverpool (the movie uses graphic archival footage from the event), after years of police beatings and mass arrests and unjustifiable stop-and-frisks, Thatcher notoriously claimed that unmowed lawns in the neighborhood were proof that the protesters had more "constructive things" to do "if they wanted."

But in the end, Thatcher's obstinacy becomes her downfall. We see her haunted by flashbacks, ignored by her country, left with a dead husband, an absentee son, and a doting daughter she seems not to care for. No matter how the movie glorifies her rise to power, her fate is the strongest indictment of her character.

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Follow Hunter Stuart on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hoont

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hunter-stuart/the-iron-lady-meryl-streep_b_1127463.html

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