Green 'Space' Slime Baffles Nature Experts

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Here we go again. My conjectureregarding a stratospheric slime mold balloon as unreal as it seemscontinues to bear fruit. Such a balloon would contain methane andrise at night from our swamps into the stratosphere. Very likelythey naturally refract the sun's light to produce high altitudelights which I have seen and has also been called Brown lights aroundmountains were the rising uplifts would jostle them around a lot.
When a meteor strikes, a sharp shockwave is produced and this likely disrupts a large number of suchcreatures that then fall to earth to appear as blobs of slime. Wehave seen that phenomena world wide and often associated with arecent meteor event.
Up there we would never even see thesecreatures unless we had special viewing hardware. To do so we needobservation balloons able to reach the stratosphere and some speciallighting to create contrast. That should work.
Alternatively, we need to captureimages of these forming up and rising out of swamps and that may bemuch easier although I suspect foam making conditions must existwhich we still do not understand. I do not expect to be lucky onthis hunt. However lighting should not affect such a search.
Setting up on the banks of the ponds discussed here would be ideal.


Green 'Space' SlimeBaffles Nature Experts
An unexplainedjelly-like substance which is said to occur during meteor showers hasbeen found on a wildlife park in Somerset.
18 February 2013
http://news.sky.com/story/1053694/green-space-slime-baffles-nature-experts


A "weird"green slime said in folklore to appear at the same time as meteorshit Earth has been found in a birdlife park in Somerset.
The RSPB has appealedfor help in identifying the slime, which is said to be scattered ongrass banks close to pools and lakes around Ham Wall Nature Reservenear Glastonbury.
The jelly-likesubstance could be bacteria, fungus or toad innards, wildlife expertssaid.
Some believe it couldbe a substance that has been written about for centuries called staror astral jelly, which is said to appear in the wake of meteorshowers.
Its appearance hascoincided with a meteor strike in Russia and the harmless fly-by ofan asteroid at a record distance from Earth last week.
Steve Hughes, the RSPBsite manager at Ham Wall, said: "This past week we've beenfinding piles of this translucent jelly dotted around the reserve.
"(It is) alwayson grass banks away from the water's edge. They are usually about10cm (4in) in diameter.
"We've askedexperts what it might be, but as yet no one is really sure. Whateverit is, it's very weird."
Tony Whitehead, anRSPB spokesman for the South West, added: "Although we don'tknow what it actually is, similar substances have been describedpreviously.
"In recordsdating back to the 14th Century it's known variously as star jelly,astral jelly or astromyxin."In folklore itis said to be deposited in the wake of meteor showers."
One of the morefavoured explanations is that it is a form of cyanobacteria calledNostoc.
Others suggest that itis the remains of the regurgitated innards of amphibians such asfrogs and toads, and of their spawn.
Alternatively, it maybe related to the intriguingly named crystal brain fungus.
Mr Whitehead added:"We've read a few articles now, and much speculation.
"One suggested itwas neither animal nor plant, and another that it didn't contain DNA,although it does give the appearance of something 'living'.
"Our reserve teamwill be looking out for the slime over the next few days, but ifanyone can offer any explanations we'd be glad to hear."
The public are beingwarned not to touch the mystery substance, and to inform naturereserve staff if they spot any.

Primal Evil's Physical Basis

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There are two types of evil.  The type this addresses is the worst kind and we will simply label it primal evil and it is strongly associated with a physical flaw in the brain itself.  Evidence exists suggesting that Hitler suffered a war injury to the head and that effected his subsequent behavior.  Other specific cases also typically are associated with brain flaw and this work polices the obvious science.
The other type of evil is derivative evil and it is learned and impressed through the social environment.  This is both forgivable and also modifiable if not outright curable.  That is not necessarily easy as the victim has a whole sense of self bound up in abhorrent behavior.  Recall that it requires time and effort to bring a soldier back down into civilized behavior at best.
My own observations and readinghad come to the general conclusion that primal evil was expressing a physicalabnormality.  This indicates that we havefound at least one such source.  It mayeven be sufficient.  Obviously the nextstep is to diagnose this whenever indicated and if this work is an indication,operate to remove the problem which may be as simple as scaring.  An unlucky blow to the head can inducebleeding and derivative tissue damage and physical scaring.  The same holds true for difficult births.
We now know these people can beidentified and are themselves victims in need of corrective surgery to makethem safe to society.
We should be so lucky as to have an equally simple solution for obsessive learned bad behavior.  Pedophiles, kleptomaniacs and many other obsessives want to be cured.  So far our only avenue open appears to be shamanism and their curious drug therapy.


What evil lurks in the brain? German neurologist says he's found a'dark patch'
By JeremyA. Kaplan
Published February 07, 2013

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/02/07/is-there-dark-evil-spot-in-brain/#ixzz2KS7MGgbM
After studying the brains of violent killers, rapists and robbers,German neurologist Gerhard Roth claims to have found a “dark patch” in thecenter of the brain -- he calls it the evil spot, a genetic source of violentbehavior.
Roth, a professor at the University of Bremen, told Germany news site Bild.de that hehad shown short films to criminals and measured their brain activity. A smallsection at the front of their brains showed no reaction to violent scenes; itremained "dark" when shown dark scenes.
"Whenever there were brutal and squalid scenes, the subjectsshowed no emotions. In the areas of the brain where we create compassion andsorrow, nothing happened,” Roth said.
BioEdge, a blog dedicated to bioethics news, translated Roth's Germaninto English: “This is definitely the region of the brain where evil is formedand where it lurks.”
Not so fast. Human behavior, affect and emotion is likely a far more intricate thing, explained Dr. Steven Galetta, chairman of the neurology department at the NYUSchool of Medicine.
'It’s probably not as simple as X marks the spot for a particularbehavior.'- Dr. Steven Galetta, chairman of the neurology department at the NYU Schoolof Medicine
“People look at the blood flow to one area and they say, ‘aha, this is the evil patch.’ It’s probably a lot more complex than that,” Galetta told FoxNews.com.
“Certain areas are likely important for certain behaviors, certainattitudes. But it’s probably not as simple as X marks the spot for a particularbehavior.”
Roth’s study, according to Bild.de, was conducted for the Germangovernment on violent convicted offenders. He said the dark mass that he hasidentified appears in all CT scans of people with such records -- and takingit out ended their “evil” behavior.Roth did not respond to FoxNews.com requests for more details on hisstudy.
Terre Constantine, executive director of the Brain Research Foundation  andthe former director of the Jack Miller Center for Peripheral Neuropathy,expressed skepticism at the report, but agreed that brain abnormalities such astumors can affect behavior.
“It absolutely can affect the brain and your personality and how youcommunicate. And it can make you aggressive -- not all tumors, of course: itdepends where it is,” Constantinetold FoxNews.com.
Her foundation, which funds research into neuroscience seeking tounderstand the brain’s workings, has aided research similar to Roth's with moreadvanced imaging techniques.
One recent study from a University of Chicago researcher studied parenting behavior. It found activity in the amygdala -- a portion of the brain connected to the limbic system -- correlated to parenting style. It “lit up” in the brains of normal mothers, while “harsh parents” didn’t react to scenes of bad parenting.
“There’s clearly differences in the brain depending on what sort ofdisease or abnormality a person has,” she told FoxNews.com. And many things cancause abnormal behaviors. “They’re either wired differently or there might besome disease that’s causing the brain to atrophy.”
But Constantine agreed with Galetta: Complex topics and behaviors are likely linked to other areas of the brain, rather than concentrated in one “evil area.”
“I would argue it’s probably not the only “evil” spot,” she said.“There are other areas in the brain, there are lots of … empathy areas orviolent areas or just social reaction areas within the brain.”
“This may be one of the spots, but I’d be surprised if it’s the spot.”

Picasso Used Common House Paint

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It let him get the look he wanted and it was the age of high quality house paints.  Thus it is no particular surprise. This merely improves analytic precision should we care.
Yet it allowed him to create a vastly more expansive style that shed the attention to the traditional stroke by stroke methodology of the past and approaches the styles of today were it is all computer assisted.    He truly led the way and was recognized forit.
It made great art.
Picasso's Genius Revealed: He Used Common House Paint
Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience senior writerDate: 08 February 2013 
http://www.livescience.com/26963-picasso-house-paint-x-rays.html
Pablo Picasso, famous for pushing the boundaries of art with cubism, also broke with convention when it came to paint, new research shows. X-ray analysis of some of the painter's masterworks solves a long-standing mystery about the type of paint the artist used on his canvases, revealing it to be basic house paint.
Art scholars had long suspected Picasso wasone of the first masterartists to employ house paint, rather than traditional artists' paint,to achieve a glossy style that hid brush marks. There was no absoluteconfirmation of this, however, until now.
Physicists at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont,Ill., trained their hard X-ray nanoprobe atPicasso's painting "The Red Armchair," completed in 1931, which theyborrowed from the Art Institute of Chicago.The nanoprobe instrument can "see" details down to the level ofindividual pigment particles, revealing the arrangement of particular chemicalelements in the paint.
The analysis showed that Picasso used enamel paint that matches the precise chemical composition of the first brand of commercial house paint, called Ripolin. The researchers were able to compare the painting's pigment with those of paints available at the time by analyzing decades-old paint samples bought on eBay.
What's more, the detailed study, which usedX-rays to probe the painting'spigment down to the scale of 30 nanometers (a sheet of copier paper is100,000 nanometers thick), was able to pinpoint the manufacturing region wherethe paint was made by studying its particular impurities.
"The nanoprobe at the [Advanced Photon Source X-ray facility and the Center for Nanoscale Materials] allowed unprecedented visualization of information about chemical composition within a singe grain of paint pigment, significantly reducing doubt that Picasso used common house paint in some of his most famous works," one of the research leaders, Argonne's Volker Rose, said in a statement.
Art scholars think Picasso experimented with Ripolin to achieve a different effect than would've been possible with traditional oil paints, which dry slowly and can be heavily blended. In contrast, house paint dries quickly and leaves effects like marbling, muted edges, and even drips of paint. Still, experts couldn't be sure house paint was the key to Picasso's look without proof.
"Appearances can deceive, so this is where art can benefit from scientific research," said Francesca Casadio, senior conservator scientist at the Art Institute of Chicago. "We needed to reverse-engineer the paint so that we could figure out if there was a fingerprint that we could then go look for in the pictures around the world that are suspected to be painted with Ripolin, the first commercial brand of house paint."
The scientists detailed their findings in a paper published last monthin the journal Applied Physics A: Materials Science & Processing.

Corn Yields Boosted

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 This will squeeze a significant gain in yield for corn likely on therange of perhaps another twenty percent. Corn is been subjected tomany other beneficial improvements that secures it position as theleading field crop. In time we will have a rich nutrient enhancedproduct that is welcome everywhere.
The conversion to corn culture worldwide continues to be rewardingand well rewarded and is handily providing us much of our foodsecurity. It will clearly continue to expand its range.
It is all good news for the long term as agriculture prepares toshift into organic methods.
Plant scientists atCSHL demonstrate new means of boosting maize yields
by Staff Writers
Cold Spring HarborNY (SPX) Feb 12, 2013
http://www.seeddaily.com/reports/Plant_scientists_at_CSHL_demonstrate_new_means_of_boosting_maize_yields_999.html

A team of plantgeneticists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has successfullydemonstrated what it describes as a "simple hypothesis" formaking significant increases in yields for the maize plant.
Called corn by mostpeople in North America, modern variants of the Zea mays plant areamong the indispensable food crops that feed billions of the planet'speople. As global population soars beyond 6 billion and heads for anestimated 8 to 9 billion by mid-century, efforts to boost yields ofessential food crops takes on ever greater potential significance.
The new findingsobtained by CSHL Professor David Jackson and colleagues, publishedonline in Nature Genetics, represent the culmination of over a decadeof research and creative thinking on how to perform geneticmanipulations in maize that will have the effect of increasing thenumber of its seeds - which most of us call kernels.
Plant growth anddevelopment depend on structures called meristems - reservoirs inplants that consist of the plant version of stem cells. When promptedby genetic signals, cells in the meristem develop into the plant'sorgans - leaves and flowers, for instance. Jackson's team has takenan interest in how quantitative variation in the pathways thatregulate plant stem cells contribute to a plant's growth and yield.
"Our simplehypothesis was that an increase in the size of the inflorescencemeristem - the stem-cell reservoir that gives rise to flowers andultimately, after pollination, seeds - will provide more physicalspace for the development of the structures that mature intokernels."
Dr. Peter Bommert, aformer postdoctoral fellow in the Jackson lab, performed ananalytical technique on several maize variants that revealed whatscientists call quantitative trait loci (QTLs): places along thechromosomes that "map" to specific complex traits such asyield. The analysis pointed to a gene that Jackson has beeninterested in since 2001, when he was first to clone it: a maize genecalled FASCIATED EAR2 (FEA2).
Not long after cloningthe gene, Jackson had a group of gifted Long Island high schoolstudents, part of a program called Partners for the Future, performan analysis of literally thousands of maize ears. Their task was tometiculously count the number of rows of kernels on each ear. It waspart of a research project that won the youths honors in the IntelScience competition. Jackson, meantime, gained important data thatnow has come to full fruition.
The lab's currentresearch has now shown that by producing a weaker-than-normal versionof the FEA2 gene - one whose protein is mutated but still partlyfunctional -- it is possible, as Jackson postulated, to increasemeristem size, and in so doing, get a maize plant to produce earswith more rows and more kernels.
How many more? In twodifferent crops of maize variants that the Jackson team grew in twolocations with weakened versions of FEA2, the average ear had 18 to20 rows and up to 289 kernels - as compared with wild-type versionsof the same varieties, with 14 to 16 rows and 256 kernels. Comparedwith the latter figure, the successful FEA2 mutants had a kernelyield increase of some 13%.
"We were excitedto note this increase was accomplished without reducing the length ofthe ears or causing fasciation - a deformation that tends to flattenthe ears," Jackson says. Both of those characteristics, whichcan sharply lower yield, are prominent when FEA2 is completelymissing, as the team's experiments also demonstrated.
Teosinte, the humblewild weed that Mesoamericans began to modify about 7000 years ago,beginning a process that resulted in the domestication of maize,makes only 2 rows of kernels; elite modern varieties of the plant canproduce as many as 20.
A next step in theresearch is to cross-breed the "weak" FEA2 gene variant, orallele, associated with higher kernel yield with the best maize linesused in today's food crops to ask if it will produce a higher-yieldplant.
"Quantitativevariation in maize kernel row number is controlled by the FASCIATEDEAR2 locus" appears online in Nature Genetics on February 3,2013. The authors are: Peter Bommert, Namiko Satoh Nagasawa and DavidJackson. The paper can be viewed here

Zuckerberg and Brin Join Forces to Extend Life

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This is now happening mainly because it is becoming plausible. Recent work has blown open the problem sufficiently that pathways arenow worth investigating. I would not be surprised to discover thatthe solution even turns out to be easy. Keep that thought.
The ultimate human lifespan will not be earthly immortality but itcan be centuries for individuals who prepare themselves. Recent workhas already shown us that telomeres can be rebuilt and that impliesrestoration to one's prime is a viable proposition.
When I started this blog, interest was still modest, but has sincerapidly expanded. Researchers are beginning to believe.
Zuckerberg, Brinjoin forces to extend life
by Staff Writers
San Francisco(AFP) Feb 20, 2013
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Zuckerberg_Brin_join_forces_to_extend_life_999.html

Famed founders ofInternet rivals Google and Facebook joined forces on Wednesday toback big-money prizes for research aimed at extending human life.

Sergey Brin and MarkZuckerberg, along with their spouses, joined Russian venturecapitalist Yuri Milner to award 11 scientists $3 million each tolaunch the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
"Priscilla and Iare honored to be part of this," Zuckerberg said.
"We believe theBreakthrough Prize in Life Sciences has the potential to provide aplatform for other models of philanthropy, so people everywhere havean opportunity at a better future."
Art Levinson, whochairs boards at mobile device powerhouse Apple and biotechnologystar Genentech, will head the non-profit foundation created tosupport breakthrough research.
Levinson said hebelieves the prize will spotlight outstanding minds in medicine andhopes it will help enhance medical innovation.
Zuckerberg, Milner,and Brin's wife Anne Wojcicki will be on the foundation's board ofdirectors. They have agreed that going forward, five annualBreakthrough prizes of $3 million each will be awarded.
"We are thrilledto support scientists who think big, take risks and have made asignificant impact on our lives," said Wojcicki, co-founder ofstartup 23andMe, which provides personal DNA testing services.
"These scientistsshould be household names and heroes in society."
Brin remarked that"curing a disease should be worth more than a touchdown" inan apparent reference to riches heaped on professional athletes suchas those who play US football.
This year'sBreakthrough Prize winners, many of whom targeted cancer in theirresearch, agreed to serve on a committee to select future honorees.
"Solving theenormous complexity of human diseases calls for a much bigger effortcompared to fundamental physics and therefore requires multiplesponsors to reward outstanding achievements," Milner said of theSilicon Valley heavyweights teaming up to back the award.

Knights of Malta Confronts 900 Years

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 This is a delightful echo of history but also a sound idea that needs to be honored and seriously considered. It is obvious in the modern world that an invitation to actually join this order or any such like order is an invitation to conduct philanthropy. Yet it is also true that philanthropy is almost a recently popular idea amount the newly enriched of the present world.
Engaging the state in providing honors for this clearly beneficialbehavior is extremely attractive and should be encouraged andpoliced. Medieval honors are out of time and place but in a cashpoor system it was a currency that worked. A renewal of honors isclearly beneficial in this time and place in order to reward andstrongly encourage generosity.
And bye the bye, there is no surer way to gain status with money thanto be able to give it away. Hiding it in off shore bank accountsdoes not cut it.

Ancient order ofthe Knights of Malta confronts modern world as it marks 900 years
By NicoleWinfield
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/ancient-order-knights-malta-confronts-modern-world-marks-161604160.html

Prince and GrandMaster of the Knights of Malta — bounds into the sitting room ofhis magnificent Renaissance palazzo sweaty and somewhat disheveled,and asks an aide if he should take off his sweater to bephotographed.
Garrulous and self-effacing, Festing embodies some of the paradoxes of a fabled Catholic religious order that dates from the medieval Crusades: Steeped in European nobility and mystique, the order's mission is humility and charity — running hospitals, ambulance services and old folks' homes around the globe. It has many trappings of a country, printing its own stamps, coins, license plates and passports, and yet — a stateless state — it rules over no territory.
The Sovereign MilitaryOrder of Malta's world headquarters, down the block from the SpanishSteps and with an Hermes boutique on the corner, features receptionrooms draped in oil portraits of grand masters past and a gem of achapel where King Juan Carlos of Spain was baptized by the futurePope Pius XII. On the ground floor, it runs a health clinic that,while private, provides free services for anyone who can't pay.
"It is, I suppose, a series of contradictions," Festing told The Associated Press ahead of the order's 900th birthday this week. "I'm on the inside of it, so it doesn't seem to be contradictory to me, but maybe it is."
And as the SovereignMilitary and Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem of Rhodes andof Malta, as the group is officially called, celebrates theanniversary on Feb. 9 with a procession through St. Peter's Square, aMass in the basilica and an audience with Pope Benedict XVI, theancient order is confronting some very modern-day issues.
Once drawn exclusivelyfrom Europe's nobility, the order is trying to shed its image as apurely rich man's club while still tapping the world's wealthy tofund its charitable work. And though its military past is well behindit, the order is waging real legal battles to fend off what it saysare impostors seeking to piggyback on its name to con people out ofmoney.
Festing, a 63-year-old Briton and former Sotheby's auctioneer, is expansive about the unusual attributes of his organization of 13,500 Knights and Dames who make promises to be good Christians and fund the order's humanitarian work.
"On the one hand it's a sovereign entity. On the other hand it's a religious order. On the other hand it's a humanitarian organization. It's a complicated mixture of things," he says in an interview in the gold silk brocaded state drawing room between meetings with parting Vatican nuncios and visiting ministers, diplomatic receptions and silent prayer.
The order traces its history to the 11th century with the establishment of an infirmary in Jerusalem that cared for people of all faiths making pilgrimages to the Holy Land. It is the last of the great lay chivalrous military orders like the Knights Templars that combined religious fervour with fierce military might to protect and expand Christendom from Islam's advance during the Crusades.
In February 1113, Pope Paschal II issued a papal bull recognizing the order as independent from bishops or secular authorities. That "birth certificate," as Festing calls it, is the legal basis for asserting the order's sovereignty and the reason for Saturday's anniversary celebrations at the Vatican.Festing himself is a "Professed Knight" — the highest rank of members who take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. The poverty vow seems a bit relative in this context: Knights on the order's governing council have their own private apartments inside the palace, complete with a valet and driver for cars that carry either diplomatic plates or the order's own SMOM plates. Wine from the order's own vineyards is often served.
Pope Benedict XVI isamong the professed knights, though he's an exception since professedknights aren't ordained priests and traditionally descend from nobleblood.
Festing, whose family traces their ancestry to 14th- and 16th-century knights, was elected grand master in 2008. It's a title he holds for life and is equivalent to the rank of cardinal, though he can't vote in a conclave to elect a pope.
Currently there areabout 60 professed knights and Festing hopes to increase theirnumbers as he seeks to expand the rank-and-file base to a youngergeneration of equally Catholic but not necessarily noble classesaround the globe.
"It's not exactlyout of date, but you can't maintain that in the 21st century,"he says. "In general terms, in the old countries of Europe, wemaintain the nobiliary requirement to an extent. But only to anextent. But in places like Australia, Central America, North America,Southeast Asia, it's all done on a different basis."
Members are still expected to chip in when natural disasters strike or wars erupt. Contributions in the tens of thousands of dollars are not unusual. Members also volunteer, bringing the sick to the shrine at Lourdes or pitching in at a one of the order's clinics, like the maternity hospital it runs in Bethlehem just a few steps from Jesus' traditional birthplace, where most of the patients are Muslim.
Even though it's aCatholic aid group — whose origins date from the Crusades — theorder works in several Muslim countries, including Pakistan andSyria. "We do not hide that we are Christian, but we do notproselytize. That is impossible," said the order's healthminister, Albrecht von Boeselager.
One perk of membershipin the top ranks, reserved for men only, is the fabulous uniform:bright-red military-style jacket, with sword, spurs and epaulettesfor official duties, a dark cloak with a white, eight-pointed MalteseCross on the front for religious services.
All told, 98,000members, employees and volunteers work in aid projects in 120countries; the overall annual operating budget can run to euro 200million, Festing says.
"We certainly don't want to be, and in fact we're not a sort of rich man's club," Festing insists. "To a sort of an extent you could say, 'Well maybe they are, slightly.' But that's not the basis of it. Otherwise I wouldn't have gotten in."
That elite reputation, however, combined with the order's neutral and apolitical relief work, has earned it a level of prestige that few organizations can match. Governments, the European Union and U.N. agencies finance the order's humanitarian operations; it has observer status at the United Nations and diplomatic relations with 104 countries — many in the developing world where such ties can help smooth the delivery of aid.
But the prestige hascome with a price: Copycat orders have sprung up claiming to be theKnights of Malta or an offshoot that may or may not legitimatelytrace its origins to the group. These "false orders" preyon people eager to contribute to a Catholic charity thinking it'ssanctioned by the Holy See.
The con jobs aresometimes so good that even the Vatican has been fooled. In October,the Vatican issued a public reminder that it recognizes only twoancient equestrian orders — the Order of Malta and the EquestrianOrder of the Holy See Sepulcher of Jerusalem — after a grouppurporting to be the knights obtained approval to host a ceremonywithin the Vatican walls, Festing said.
"It was entirelyinnocent," on the part of the Vatican, said Festing. "Butit wasn't actually us. It was somebody else."

China Rent a Boyfriend

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What is most delightful about theChinese experience is that it can be compared to our experience since1960.  Recall that our society was alsoprofoundly organized along traditional lines up to then.  It was never satisfactory but it was how itwas.  The same is also true elsewhere aroundthe world.
Most of it has to do with birthcontrol actually freeing women from biological necessity for the decade oftheir twenties.  This is a huge global sociological experiment that is sometimes disturbing, but also sometimes surprising and mostly welcome.
Thus in a pressing sexist societywe have this delightful solution. Definitely a wonderful source of comedy and farce.
China Rent a Boyfriend

http://newsterm.blogspot.ca/2013/02/china-rent-boyfriend.html
China rent a boyfriend, Chinarent a boyfriend is a new fad that is sweeping the country. Since many girlswill be going home to see their families for Chinese New Year celebrations,many are renting "boyfriends" just to get their nosy families offtheir backs. On Feb. 6, The Telegraph UK reported that 300 men are listed "for rent" on the shopping site TaoBao. The price is about $48 a day -- and a bit more if an "appropriate kiss" is required -- you know, to really convince the fam.

"It can be a particularly miserable experience for girls who don’t bringhome a boyfriend, leading to endless questions about why they’re not dating andwhere their life’s going. In this sexist society, ladies over 27 who aren’thitched are labelled 'leftover women,'" reports TheTelegraph.....examiner.

The China"rent a boyfriend" idea could pay off well. At this point, it isunclear how many girls/women are shopping for pseudo-boyfriends for theholidays. However, they will all have to be careful now -- and be ready foreven more questions -- since "news" of this new thing has gone viral.

There are many cultures that would not go for something like this at all.However, China tends to try things -- all kinds of things. Some of said things catch on and some don't (like that fake braces fad from December). Renting a boyfriend probably wouldn't fly in The States, would it?

In China,renting a boyfriend might not be that bad of an idea. Family questions can berelentless.