The "most amazing" iPhone yet. Again.

"The next big thing is here!" Says every tech company ever. It seems like whatever you buy, no matter what it is, as long as you buy an electronic, something "bigger and better than ever" will come out approximately right after you pay for your new toy. Rumors that Apple will be launching the iPhone 6 later this year have already been circling the web, and the new iPhone 5s and 5c have barely been our for a month. Everyone is excited as ever to hear about all of the "revolutionary" new things these gadgets will bring us, possibly like a fancy new "retina display" or even a neon colored colored rear coating. As for the amazing new iPhone 5c, that is exactly what it brought us. Maybe Apple couldn't think of any new invention that would

revolutionize the tech industry, and they needed to make money. So when in doubt, just make it colorful! They added a little spice, gave it a fancy name, put their advertisements on every single billboard and bus stop in the city, and Voilà! Millions of dollars in sales.

 Hopefully, this isn't all they're planning to do with the iPhone 6, as there have been leaked rumors about what its new features will be. Some of these rumors include that they will be releasing two models, a normal sized one and a larger one (wow, we've never seen that one from Apple{see picture at right}) to keep up with their competition, such as the Samsung Galaxy phones which became very popular within the last year with their size. This isn't the first time we have heard rumors about larger sizes for future phones, in fact, the latest iPhone 5 had what "amazing" feature? A quarter-of-an-inch bigger size. And that is all. Step your game up Apple! Some of these other phone companies are coming up with awesome new technology and Apple is still stuck on making the size slightly larger and releasing a phone with a new name dedicated to it's color, and people will still buy it anyway. But that's okay, because they still have the amazing "retina display", which based on my experiences, either every phone has, or it simply doesn't work, because iv'e seen many other phones with better picture quality.

 According to various reports, the handset could sport a dual sensor camera array that captures luma (brightness) data and chroma (color) data, and combines them into one image. We've also heard that the next iPhone 6 could use the same 8-megapixel camera found in the iPhone 5s, though with more impressive features, or a 10-megapixel shooter. Further rumors suggest the iPhone 6 will come with a wicked fast quad-core, 64-bit A8 processor and sport a Liquidmetal chassis. Of course, all of this is still just conjecture, and should be treated as such. So wether this will truly be something new from Apple or just a bigger, more colorful product, we'll just have to wait until Apple unveils the iPhone 6 later this year to find out.

Sprang Break!

Spring break is right around the corner for a lot of schools and universities in the U.S. this week and next, and what better way to celebrate by taking a vacation to some of the best known beaches? Below you will find the very best spring break destinations:


Cancun, Mexico

Cancun is the definition of Spring Break. From incredible resorts properties that you have to see to believe, to world-class entertainment, stunning beaches, incomparable day parties and nightlife, and plenty of opportunities for adventure, Cancun has everything you could want from your Spring Break destination!




Panama City Beach, Florida

In Panama City Beach, the partying never stops! If you aren't into crazy parties and loud music then this is probably not the destination for you. You will be going nonstop for a week straight with major attractions like StudentCity in the world's LARGEST Spring Break destination, where more than 250,000 spring breakers go each year. We hope you can handle it. After all, it will probably be the best week of your life.




Nassau, Bahamas

Nassau is the place to be for Spring Break 2014. No aspect has been forgotten when it comes to raging day parties, the best hotel accommodations, and awesome night events. Now imagine all of this wrapped up in one package, with the tropical Bahamian paradise as a backdrop for it all! Pirates are closely associated with the Caribbean (hence, the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean”). According to legends, pirates called Blackbeard and Calico Jack used to call this city their home!

Acapulco, Mexico
Acapulco is located on the Western side of Mexico on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, located in rural Mexico, away from popular city centers. The landscape includes white, sandy beaches, mountainous coastal regions and mysterious forests. Acapulco, the party never stops, so you may want to choose your spring break hotel based on the noise-level. Chances are that if you don’t choose a quiet one, you’ll just be up for 7 days straight. And that may not be a bad thing for some of you.




Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
In Puerto Vallarta the word “boring” does not exist. Get crazy at your spring break hotel or enjoy the life of luxury in one of our many private villas. Puerto Vallarta has something for every type of spring breaker with countless restaurants, shops, unique excursions, and insane nightclubs. It is located on the Pacific coast in the Mexican State of Jalisco, within the Banderas Bay (Bahía de Banderas), which is considered to be one of the most beautiful bays in the World and happens to also be one of the world’s largest, measuring 26 miles from east to west and 20 miles from north to south.

Sleep Deprivation

Spring break is coming up, and since every single teacher at school is either scheduling a test or project day before spring break, what better topic to do than sleep deprivation?

Everyone has those long nights with too much work to do, and every so often we end up staying up the entire night, some of us surviving on a cup of coffee or energy drink. Obviously success doesn't come without hard work, which can mean not sleeping some nights, but did you know about all the effects it will have on you? First off, there are many causes of sleep deprivation. The stresses of daily life may intrude upon our ability to sleep well, or perhaps we trade sleep for more work or play. We may have medical or mental-health conditions that disrupt our sleep, and be well aware that we are sleep deprived. 

There are many prices to pay for sleep deprivation. This doesn't mean that if you pull an all nighter once that any of these conditions will happen, but if you get into a daily routine and it becomes second nature, these side effects can sneak up on you and start taking over your life. Side effects include:

• High Blood Pressure 
• Heart attack
• Heart failure
• Stroke
• Obesity
• Psychiatric problems, including depression and other mood disorders
• Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)
• Mental impairment
• Fetal and childhood growth retardation
• Injury from accidents
• Disruption of bed partner's sleep quality
• Poor quality of life

Sometimes if you feel like you cant do anything about it and life just keeps dragging you down, just think about the things that really matter in the long run. Sometimes in life we can take things too seriously, but just remember that if we feel stressed out about everything, especially things that just really aren't that big of a deal, we will live our already-too-short lives being depressed, tired and miserable. Its always good to catch some Z's!

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1690

 http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/important-sleep-habits

Flight 370

It's something you usually would read out of a book or see in a movie, a plane vanishing mid-flight and being cut off by all communications. It's a Bermuda Triangle type of story, a massive Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers disappearing into thin air, and the only way of knowing where it actually is right now is guessing where it has gone since the last time it pinged the satellite, or exchanging information of its whereabouts. After the plane lost communications with the commercial radar, about thirty minutes later the Rolls Royce engines pinged a satellite, which means that when the plane lost communications, it didn't crash.

There have been a lot of investigations on the incident, including one hopeful discovery. When the friends and family of the passengers called the phones of the people riding the Malaysia Airlines flight, the other end rang. If it would have gone straight to voice mail, they would have known that the phones would have been destroyed from water damage. This still shed a little light of hope at the end of the tunnel, but it has already been a week since the plane left the ground on its way to Beijing. A big part of the investigation was that the two passengers who managed to enter the plane with fake passports could have hijacked the plane and diverted its course to a possible terrorist attack location.

So...where could it be? Its crazy to think that a massive plane with 239 people on it, people just like all of us, with jobs, families, friends, homes, have just disappeared and now not a single person, except the possible survivors of the plane, know where they are. The scary thing is, they could all be alive, alive in our very world, stranded on an island or lost at sea, and not a single one of the 7 billion people in this world has any idea of where they are. They could be trapped somewhere, alone in their own little world, with no food or water, or for that matter, too much water. It's like in the movies when people are stranded on an island or at sea, except real life. But hey, best case scenario, maybe one of these days a helicopter finds them and saves the survivors, (survivors who have possibly turned into cannibals), and then make a multi-million dollar movie about the story. (And if it happens, I called it and i want 10 percent of all profits.)

WIIIIILLLSOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!
                          




http://www.cbsnews.com/news/malaysia-airlines-flight-370-authorities-wide-search-for-missing-plane-again/#
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/03/15/malaysia-airlines-search-heads-toward-indian-ocean/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/world/asia/pilot-and-first-officer-newly-scrutinized-in-planes-disappearance.html?_r=0

Daylight Savings Time

This Sunday marks an important date on the calendar; daylight savings time (DST). Although it is obvious that not many people are happy about the fact that they will lose an hour of sleep, there are still some positive things about DST. The good thing is that we will gain an hour of daylight,  so those gloomy days of walking out of school or work at 4 o'clock  in the afternoon and it's already dark out are over.

Many people don't like the system, stating that it is an inconvenience and has too many negative effects. Try telling that to Benjamin Franklin, the man credited with DST. He cane up with DST to make the best use of daylight hours by shifting the clock forward in the spring and backwards in the fall. Some states, including Arizona and Hawaii don't even follow DST, and some states are even trying to pass bills to allow them to opt out of the system. Some people even say that it increases the risk of a heart attack because some people are already sleep deprived. Whether you like it or not, or for that fact, think you will actually have a heart attack because you got 60 minutes less of sleep for one night, we can all at least enjoy an extra hour of some good ol' sunlight.


https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=F6QcU8SvFq_n7AacpIGgCg&url=http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/&cd=7&ved=0CD4QFjAG&usg=AFQjCNHdThPgLvgWMXpWAiMmf1iOggN6zA&sig2=a_Yh-3nvrnh5xEVgIwbkog

http://www.date and time.com

When will the cold STOP???

Man, we're really seeing the effects of global warming this year with these abnormal temperatures smacking us in the face every morning we leave our homes. There has been one thing on everyone's mind if anything; when will this miserable weather stop?? This has been among one of the most harsh winters for the middle east United States with many records being set for these cold days and snow days. The average temperature between December and February was 8.2 degrees less than it usually is, striking the fourth coldest winter on Illinois record. It was also one of the years with the most snowfall. Jaw-dropping measurements have been recorded across the state, including a total of 79.8 inches of precipitation in the Lincolnwood and Oak Park area.

Now, we are nearing the end of the first week of March, we still have most of the snow that has been left for us since mid-February. Every time I think to myself , "Surely that's the last of it," mother nature surprises us with yet another three inches here, three inches there. Today, it got up to about 45 degrees, only to trick us into thinking spring is finally coming, because tomorrow, more snow is on it's way. With a couple feet still in the ground in some places, most people are looking forward to spring break more than ever, except if your the genius that planned a family ski trip to Colorado during one of Illinois' coldest winter.

http://www.wsoyam.com/pages/18127204.php?
http://elburnherald.com/34165/2014/03/08/winter-2014-fourth-coldest-in-illinois/

How do they make zero gravity effects in movies?

Technology is advancing faster than ever these days, and one movie lately left me wondering; how the heck do they do it? After watching the movie Gravity, the story of two shuttle astronauts hurtled through space by a space disaster, I couldn't figure out how they made Sandra Bullock and George Clooney float effortlessly for the entire two hours of filming. The movie takes place in space, not just snippets and parts, but the entire movie. "There's no way this movie was filmed in space," I thought to myself, and there was no way the actors agreed to film it free-falling from below the atmosphere in a 747, known as parabolic airplane flights, which is usually how they film plane dives and  those short, action filled gunfights you see in the James Bond movies. One of the recent movies that uses this type of filming was Apollo 13, which only allows about thirty seconds of zero gravity at a time (unless you want about two-minutes worth which will also include a dramatic crash landing). This wasn't an option, however, because thirty seconds was not near long enough for all the shots needed for the film, and also Sandra Bullock is deathly afraid of flying.

It turns out, the movie was filmed using a "light box", or a huge contraption that the actors sit in which is made up of thousands of LED lights. These lights produce high-definition moving images that spin around a motionless actor to make it seem as if they are spinning. This is how they were able to portray the enormous planet Earth in the background while Bullock was being thrown through space. The actors sit on small pedestals while the light box displays different images around them. The actors were also in a harness for some scenes free floating, while they had green cords and strings attached to some parts of their body like a human puppet. They were then controlled by puppeteers who made their arms and leg move. When the actors were locked up inside the light boxes, computer-controlled robotic cameras captured close-ups under just the right lighting conditions — even for the scenes where Bullock looks as if she's spinning out of control. In reality, it's the light patterns that are spinning around her. 

Click the link below to see a behind the scenes video on how the movie was filmed using the light box!
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18svz7_gravity-behind-the-scenes_shortfilms

GEORGE CLOONEY DIES.

Spoiler Alert...

Controversial Concussions

Debate regarding the health effects of concussions in the NFL and on all American football players has caused considerable controversy across the nation. Not only is it a problem for these professional athletes, but every day in the US, players suffer the consequences of these sports and the side effects of concussions. 

A concussion is a type of traumatic brain injury that is caused by a blow to the head or body, a fall, or another injury that jars or shakes the brain inside the skull. Although there may be cuts or bruises on the head or face, there may be no other visible signs of a brain injury.

Players in the NFL are making known the serious risk of concussions, while the rest of them are dishing them out to the rest of the other players. Former NFL safety Hazma Abdullah went on a twitter rant about how horribly the NFL treats its players, making sure the poor helmet safety didn't go unnoticed. 

There has been arguments popping up here and there for the past 20 years in the NFL about how safe the helmets are for the players and how safe it is to return to play after a concussion. Most of the players reply with the same statement; "Every player understood the risks of playing football, and we did it, and would do it over again!" The long term effects on these athletes is the bigger part of the problem. Retired players with significant amounts of concussions, especially those who returned to play too early, end up being suicidal, have depression, memory loss, and moderate to even severe brain damage. Players have even died from concussions. Since 1997, at least 50 high school football players have died or received serious head injuries.

There have been numerous attempt to promote concussion safety and reduce the number of these accidents. The only way to prevent it from happening in the first place, is to develop safer, more shock-absorbent helmets. Since it is harder to do this, companies like Schutt and Reebok have developed new indicators that hook up to helmets that can alert a coach if the player has a concussion. These are sensors that are attached to the helmet that turn from green to red when a player is hit with a g-force of more than 100. Although this does not prevent the concussion from happening, it can alert someone that the player is at danger if left in the game, and can prevent further injury. Doctors have found out that when a player is hit with a g-force of more than 100, there is a significant increase in the chance of getting concussed, even though when a quarter back is sacked by a linebacker, there is about a g-force of 150. Doctors and sportswear developers are working on new ways to develop safer equipment for players so they can be safer and in better shape not only on the field, but off the field, so that their heads aren't full of useless mush by the time they're 40. Some of the players who are in the NFL are only there because they managed to pass college with their masters in underwater basket-weaving, so the last thing we need is a bunch of brain-dead athletes who talk like Jameis Winston after winning the BCS Championship on a daily basis.

http://www.webmd.com/brain/tc/traumatic-brain-injury-concussion-overview

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2013/10/31/nfl-hamza-abdullah-twitter-rant/3324749/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concussions_in_American_football#Concussions_in_high_school_football

Grading Scale

Many private schools in the nation use an adjusted grading scale. The scales at public schools are a different letter grade for every 10 points. As for private schools, if you were to receive a 92 percent on that big final; yep, you guessed it, you would receive a B. This has many students talking as they think they should receive higher grades for their hard work, which in turn which translate to a higher GPA and give you a better chance at getting into better colleges. One of my friends lat year had gotten between a 90-92 in every class. in a public school with the honors classes, it would have been a 4.2 GPA. Instead, he got a 3.1 and was not very happy with the grading scale.

The grading scale, like everything, has its pros and cons. Despite the fact that you receive a B for working hard to get a 92 percent, when the colleges look at grades, that's what they will see. It may not be very pleasing when your parents yell at you for having a B in your catholic morality "class", but it will be rewarding when you work harder to get a 93, because that way it basically seals the grade and gives you a cushion.

The best thing about the harder grading scale is that it makes you work harder for your grades and makes you appreciate good grades and all the hard work that comes with it. If the scale was an A for a 90, kids would be satisfied with only a 90, and will not work as hard once they have it. This means that it is easier to slack off and hover around a 90, which heightens the chance of dropping into the high 80's after finals.  Getting a 93 means working that much harder, and when it comes down to finals, its not very promising when you have to get a 114 percent or higher to get an A. This is why it is smart to work harder earlier, that way you're in a good spot going into finals.


http://oakcreek.patch.com/groups/editors-picks/p/school-board-settles-on-new-grading-scale
http://hamptonroads.com/2010/01/va-beach-school-board-approves-change-grading-scale

Michael Sam

Michael Sam, the openly gay NFL prospect from Mizzou, stepped into the spotlight this week to answer all the questions the media has been just dying to bombard him with. The real question is; besides the media, who really cares?? Now days, whether we care about something or not, the media will sure seem to make people care about the most pointless things. If they wouldn't try to brainwash people with nonsense and useless information, nobody would care what Justin or Miley's "moron move of the week" was. So why make a bigger deal out of a gay football player than we really have to, but better yet, why is this kid making a big                   NOT FOOTBALL ^
deal about it himself? Seriously. SERIOUSLY. This isn't the Real Housewives of Orange County, this is football. The only show on television that's supposed to be one-hundred percent manly, American and drama-free one-hundred percent of the time. ESPN shouldn't even consider bringing up the topic, leave it for TMZ or another scripted "reality" show. Not only does it hurt their reputation by showing that they
are doing what they want them to do by publicizing the whole thing, but how many die-hard gay football fanatics do you know that come home from work, grab a beer, and sit down to watch Monday Night Football every week? If you answered correctly, the answer was slim to none. Ninety-nine percent of the people watching the show simply DO NOT CARE. And as for the other one percent, well you were never really a true fan anyway. So why would you get people all heated up about it? Next time, both ESPN and Sam just need to keep this on the low. Stop making a big deal out of it, we just want to see someone on the field get their lights                       
knocked out already, and some of us wouldn't be happier for it to be "Pioneer Sam". So, can we all just enjoy some drama-free football without this turning into a reality show? Hopefully TMZ doesn't buy out Monday Night Football after FOX Sports' contract runs out, and I think it's safe to say we can all keep our fingers crossed that Sam won't enter the draft with fake pair of pecs and lips the size of Russia.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/22/michael-sam-nfl-combine-press-conference_n_4838623.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA80jnJ-6Gk

Pre- Workout or Heart-Attack Powder?

Athletes and bodybuilders everywhere are doing anything to squeeze out that last rep when lifting, and if this means taking a pre-workout drink to get them through it, they'll risk a lot, in fact, everything, to train their body to the max. Last year, a kid in the Army took pre-workout before running with his squad for training and passed away after going into cardiac arrest. This caffeine and who-knows-what filled powder dilates your blood vessels and pumps blood harder and faster through your body, as well as giving you enough caffeine to fill about 3 cups of coffee. But is it safe? Most doctors would s*** a brick if you showed them what was under the ingredients list, filled with words you've never heard of, or much less can't even pronounce (see right).



 I see it in the weight room, before practice and games and even in the morning before kids are going to class to give them the energy they need to perform to their best, or in some cases, just to get through the school day. But is it really necessary? For all the potential risks these drinks have, there is a lot to risk just for just a small, extra push in muscle development, including strokes, cardiac arrest, liver problems, and even addiction if you are taking it to often. After continuous use, it starts to not have an effect on your body, so we can end up taking double dosage, which leads to twice the risk of all these side effects. I think as long as it is taken with the recommended dosage, not on an empty stomach and not regularly to avoid unintentional addiction, it it fine to take. However, I think most of us can still stick to the old-fashioned healthy diet full of carbs and lean proteins to give us the proper energy to boost us through these workouts.

http://www.livestrong.com/article/1003313-preworkouts-bad-you/