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I have just purchased a QH mare who is due to foal the first part of March. As this is our first foal, what if any supplements would you recommend for the mare at this point in her pregnancy. I am an OB-Gyn Nurse Practitioner and know how important adequate quality intake is for both. Thanks, DH, Texas

Dear DH,

Since the average length of pregnancy in the mare is 338 – 343 days or about 11 months, your mare is heading into her last trimester. Up to now, she has done just fine on the same nutritional program you would use for any horse: a complete and balanced diet fed at a rate of 1 – 2% of her body weight daily based on high-quality forage. Of course, fresh water and loose salt is always available. But during the last four months of gestation the foal grows rapidly, requiring the mare’s diet to change in three key areas: energy, protein and vitamins/minerals.

A pregnant mare’s energy requirements gradually increase after the seventh month of gestation, so you should gradually begin to supply her with more calories. Of course, if she’s already overweight, then this step may not be necessary. Aim to keep her in good flesh but not too heavy (between a 5 and a 6 on the Henneke Body Condition Scoring scale, where 1 = emaciated and 9 = obese). It may be tempting to just add an extra scoop of grain to her ration, but fat or beet pulp are safer sources of calories.

Adult horses in maintenance as well as mares in early gestation only need an 8% crude protein diet. But during the last trimester when the foal is building lots of tissue, that level will need to be upped to 10 – 12%. Instead of simply increasing the amount of grain in the diet, which can lead to problems, begin swapping out flakes of grass hay for flakes of alfalfa hay, which are higher in protein.

Feeding alfalfa hay also provides the additional calcium that mares need in late gestation. Other minerals of interest include selenium–especially if you are in a selenium-deficient area of the country–and copper, which may have a protective effect against developmental orthopedic diseases such as osteochondritis dissecans or OCD. Also, make sure your mare gets plenty of Vitamins A and E particularly if she does not have access to fresh grass. A multi-vitamin/mineral supplement  made especially for mares may be a good choice now.

One final bit of advice: during the last trimester the foal takes up quite of bit of room in the mare’s abdomen. Just when she should be eating more there’s no room for food! Try to feed smaller meals more frequently so she takes in the nutrition she needs without becoming uncomfortable. Now just work with your veterinarian to make sure your mare’s other health needs are met (deworming, vaccination, hoof and dental care) then provide careful monitoring until the Big Day!

I’ve been hearing more and more about the value of adding fruits and vegetables to my dog’s diet. I know that certain ingredients can be harmful, but I’m not sure what to stay away from, and what’s beneficial. Can you tell me what fruits and veggies are appropriate to add to my dog’s diet, and at what amount? ML, Connecticut

Dear ML,

You’re right on both counts: that fruits and vegetables have health benefits to pets but that not every fruit and vegetable is safe to feed your pet. For example, garlic, onions and grapes have all been shown to be toxic to dogs. On the other hand, vegetables such as carrots, peas and pumpkin are wonderful additions to dry dog food diet as are fruits like apples, blueberries and bananas. Not only are they packed with vitamins and minerals, they also contain fiber, antioxidants and other beneficial agents.

If you wish to introduce fruits and vegetables to your dog, do so gradually and in moderation. Add just one to two new items each week and avoid unbalancing the diet by limiting fruits and veggies to 10 – 20 % of the total diet. Another suggestion is to lightly cook the vegetables, which helps release certain nutrients. Finally, visit www.aspca.org/pet-care/poison-control/ to make sure everything you’re offering to your dog is safe.

SmartPak is a firm believer in the health benefits of fruits and vegetables to dogs, and has included a wide variety of both in its supplements as well as its food. SmartCanine Vite is a nutritional supplement that contains a tasty blend of fruits and vegetables along with vitamins, minerals, amino acids, essential fatty acids and digestive support. It’s designed to complement heavily processed commercial kibble.

Either way you choose to add fruits and vegetables to your dog’s diet—by home cooking them yourself or through the product mentioned above—you’ll be providing him with a healthier diet that also tastes great!

Following the Audi Q5 hybrid will be the new Audi A8 hybrid, to be presented at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show in March. The announcement of the new A8 hybrid was made at the Detroit auto show by Audi America president Johan de Nysschen, and is part of Audi’s ambitious target of selling one million models in the year 2010.

The same man famous for describing the Chevrolet Volt as a stupid car, has confirmed that Audi intends on saying no to those technologies which don’t represent real progress, and will therefore only focus on “full hybrid” cars, and not “mild hybrids” as in the case of the Mercedes S-Class or BMW 7-Series, for example. It seems the US is fast catching on to Europe’s focus on the environment, and it’s interesting to see the Q5 as the first Audi hybrid choice.

Is Tiger Woods the new face of sugar daddies? When you think of a sugar daddy you immediately conjure up an image of an unattractive old rich guy preying on women a third of his age. But there is some evidence, apart from Tiger, that there is now a new breed of younger, successful sugar daddies out there.

According to MutualArrangements.com, which bills itself as the “World’s Premier Sugar Daddy Website Online” the sugar daddy of today is younger, more attractive and closer in age to his sugar baby. In fact, 28.4% of all of the sugar daddies on Mutual Arrangements are under age 40 – and nearly half – 47.2% are under age 45!

There has been a shift in recent years towards a person earning wealth at a younger age than those of previous generations. There are now a plethora of men in their thirties and forties with plenty of financial resources, all having a desire to care for a woman, or women.

Ready to become a sugar daddy yourself and take care of some pretty young thing? Then head on over to Mutual Arrangements – they have the girls, you have the cash. It’s a match made in heaven.

photo credit: MutualArrangements.com

Related posts:

1. How to Find Your Neighborhood Cougar
2. How Much Sugar is in That?
3. Is Your Bachelor Pad Ready for the Ladies?

What Japanese toy maker Megahouse is offering here is truly disgusting: A toy kit that you can use to form edible insects made of juice and other liquids. The so-called GUMMI-X [JP] is geared towards teenage boys, but it has the potential to seriously freak out certain adults, too.

Users will be able to create a total of four exotic insects and such that they can put into their meals. Choose between the stag beetle, the Japanese rhinoceros beetle, the especially disgusting pill bug and the Procambarus clarkii, a freshwater crayfish. Other animals, a frog for example, are sold separately.

Users can follow instructions that come with the GUMMI-X to pour liquids (for example cola or hot chocolate) into casting molds, wait a while for the gummy “insects” to stiffen and, ultimately, eat them.

This stag beetle, for example, is made primarily of coffee:

This is how a lunch box with one of our friends in it looks like:

The GUMMI-X will hit Japanese stores on February 1. The starter kit will cost around $40. Two extension kits (with two more casting molds each) will be available at the same time (price: $18 each).

Ask the Japan Trend Shop or Rinkya if you want to get the GUMMI-X but live outside Japan.

Via Maikomi Jounal [JP]

Hat tip to Akky

Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]

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The newest hybrid rolls out in town, this time from Volkswagen’s end. The car was unveiled at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. Known as the New Compact Coupe, this concept hybrid boasts of a fuel consumption of 45mpg with an extremely low CO2 emission (98g/km). It also packs a TSI engine powered by a 20kW electric motor and a seven speed gearbox with direct shift. The car can zip up to a top speed of 141mph. it requires as little as 8.6 seconds to cross the 62mph mark. Volkswagen has embraced the concept of hybrid technology and is eagerly awaiting the release of their first hybrid this year, a 4X4 SUV. The car nestles a four-cylinder TSI petrol engine with intercooling, turbocharging and direct injection. This generates 110kW if power at the cost of and engine displacement of 1.4 liters. Besides all this, the car also generates kinetic energy every time you step on your brakes and saves this energy in the lithium ion battery. Volkswagen is sure taking the hybrid theory seriously!

[TheGreenCarWebsite]

The FT points to a new peak oil (or “peak demand”) fund operated by some guys called Beetle Capital Partners, who predict we are about to enter a period of “creative destruction in which new policies and new entrepreneurs will radically transform the vast complex of energy-related industries” – Peak oil demand funds.

“The world is now headed towards economic conditions that will entail not only cyclical but structural change: a damaged financial sector, an overstretched consumer base, rising energy prices, and shortages of food, water and other natural resources so severe that they could heighten global and regional tensions. These factors, combined with new external ones like carbon pricing, all point to one thing: a crisis of confidence in growth.”

According to recent data revealed by the Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC), British motorcycle manufacturer Triumph continued to gain market share in the United States, becoming one of the fastest growing motorcycle manufacturers in country and one of only two marques (alongside BMW Motorrad) that did not lose market share for the past five years.

Sales of Triumph motorcycles in the United States increased by 5.49 percent in December 2009 over the same period in 2008, while most manufacturers… (read more)

A column in the English-launguage version of Global Times is being read as China’s official response to Paul Krugman, who has called out the country’s ostensibly destructive mercantilist policies.

The column, written by someone named Liu Ge starts off with a bit of a shot at Krugman:

Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics in 2008, is one of the US’ few star economists, known for brashly speaking out on many topics.

Whether his reputation will last has yet to be seen, but his New York Times opinion column gives him a powerful platform to speak from.

On the last day of 2009, he used his column to harshly criticize China’s economic policies and call for the US to be more confrontational.

Then he gets into the crux of the matter:

Krugman wrote in his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, “It’s only in retrospect that the political and economic environment of my youth stands revealed as a paradise lost, an exceptional episode in our nation’s history.”

The paradise referred by Krugman is the period from the end of World War II to the 1970s, also the time when he was growing up. His nostalgia is touching, but shouldn’t affect our policy judgements.

It’s true that during this time the US economy grew rapidly, wage levels rose sharply and the gap between the rich and the poor was signifi cantly reduced.

However, at that time billions of people worldwide had still not joined the wave of globalization. With globalization, the US has been forced into a very different kind of economy.
 
A general manufacturing industry can no longer survive there. When the US found that modern service sectors such as high-tech, communications and finance could not guarantee full employment, it was no longer possible to return to this earlier paradise.

Paul Krugman is like a doctor facing a patient with extensive cancer. He can diagnose the cause of what plagues the US, but he cannot provide a genuine cure.

So who is correct here?

Well, we really can’t blame China for doing everything it can to rev its growth, through all manner of pro-manufacturing policies, including its maintenance of a permanently cheap yuan. The government there, presumably, has little ability to curb its growth at all.

But, to some extent, we also think Krugman is correct, not so much in slamming the Chinese, but in the fact that the current currency regime, whereby the dollar is king, and thus perpetually overvalued isn’t helpful to the global economy.

Read more at The Global Times — >

(via The World Bank blog and Free Exchange)

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Krugman’s China Hit-Job Is More Blame-The-Victim Nonsense
• 2010 Will Be The Year Of China — And Not In A Good Way
• China’s Mercantilist Policies Are Screwing Us Out Of 1.4 Million U.S. Jobs

You can select the song Bon Jovi will perform at the 2010 Grammy later this month! The legendary band has been booked to sing at the 52nd Annual Grammy Awards, which takes place in Los Angeles on Jan. 31. Bon Jovi is up for a Grammy in the Best Pop Performance category for their track ”We Weren’t Born to Follow.” The ”Nice Day” hitmakers have teamed up with CBS to give their fans an opportunity to select the song they will perform through a online poll.

Viewers can log on to www.cbs.com/grammys and vote for one out of six hit Bon Jovi songs: “Always,” “Bed Of Roses,” “Have A Nice Day,” “It’s My Life,” “Livin’ On A Prayer” and “Wanted Dead Or Alive.”

Bon Jovi has sold more than 120 million albums worldwide.

In a recent attempt to cut down expenditures of the teams lining up for the 2010 IndyCar Series, the North American championship officials decided to reduce the pre-season testing to only one session prior to the season opener in Sao Paolo, in mid March.

The teams will only have the chance to test their 2010 challengers on the Barber Motorsports Park road course, in a testing event scheduled for February 24 to 25. Therefore, there will be no more oval testing in the pre-season from now on, ma… (read more)

Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:

Like something out of an old Clint Eastwood movie (where the cowboy left for dead is somehow resurrected), San Diego’s Adventrx Pharmaceuticals (AMEX: ANX) announced last week that it raised $19 million and filed a new drug application.

Shares of the biotech, which had no pulse a year ago, sprang to life. Adventrx stock that had been trading around 26 cents a share zoomed to 39 cents on the news, before falling back to 28 cents in extraordinarily heavy trading of nearly 85 million shares. Trading in Adventrx continues to be heavy, and I’ve been contacted by several shareholders who want more details about Adventrx, or who are urging me to write more. Yesterday, Adventrx closed at 47 cents a share, yet one recent e-mail enthusiastically predicts, “This one goes to $2.” A gamblers’ mentality surrounds Adventrx these days, and should serve as a warning to investors.

Nevertheless, the comeback at Adventrx has been remarkable. Brian Culley, who describes himself as the biotech’s “principal executive officer,” recounted the story for me recently, saying that a year ago Adventrx was destined for bankruptcy. He’ll no doubt revisit the story again in a presentation he’s set to give this afternoon at the OneMedForum Finance Conference in San Francisco.

Adventrx specializes in developing improved formulations of existing cancer treatments that address side-effects and other limitations associated with their safety and use. But Culley told me during a telephone interview, “The company ran into two pretty troubling matters.”  One stemmed from a decision in mid-2008 to discontinue the late-stage clinical trial of a “co-factor” drug that was intended to enhance the activity and reduce the toxicity of a widely used chemotherapy for metastatic colorectal cancer. “They got equivocal data, and it basically failed,” Culley says. “That set the company on a pretty poor trajectory.” The other matter, Culley says, was that Adventrx was “hemorrhaging cash while running headlong into pretty hard economic times.”

By last March, Adventrx had laid off all but a handful of employees and announced plans to “substantially end” its drug development and business operations. A few weeks later, the company was down to just two employees—Culley, a vice president who had previously headed business development, and lawyer Patrick Kernan, who assumed the duties of chief financial officer as well as Adventrx general counsel.

Culley says the two Adventrx survivors turned to …Next Page »

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Auto rickshaws powered by solar power and zooming about on Indian streets are not a far fetched dream. Auto rickshaws are a symbol of Indian transport and having them go green is indeed a laudable effort. Known as Soleckshaws, these human electric hybrid rickshaws come to the rescue of the Delhi 2010 Commenwealth Games that will be held this October and can carry 2 passengers at a speed of 9 mph for 25 miles on a single charge. When drained, the empty cells will be replaced with charged up cells at dedicated stations. The electric modification will also help curb the spread of tuberculosis among rickshaw pullers who are stricken by this disease due to hard work and malnutrition.

A hub in partnership with the Indian government involving IIM Ahmedabad, UK Carbon Trust and British Petroleum’s Alternative Energy Group is working towards the designing of the solar powered rickshaw. The shortcoming is the significant engine damage caused due to the starting and stopping of the motor in crowded areas like Chandni Chowk. However, these little solar powered three wheelers are sure to come to the rescue of the Delhi government during the oncoming games.

[Wired]

Parece que o Salão de Detroit está rendendo, durante a apresentação da terceira geração do Focus a Ford informou que o modelo se tornará um veículo globalizado, tendo o mesmo desenho e plataforma em todos os mercados onde for comercializado. Agora, mesmo do outro lado do Atlântico, uma fonte da própria Ford presente no evento revelou ao site inglês Autocar que além dele, o Ford Mondeo, sedan médio-grande de luxo da marca, também se tornará um veículo global.

O modelo vendido na Europa ganhará um face-lift ainda esse ano por lá, mais já em 2014 a Ford apresentará sua nova geração. Segundo essa fonte o sedan será fabricado na China, em uma das fábricas na Europa e em uma das fabricas da América do Norte, provavelmente no México.

Ainda segundo essa fonte, além de se tornar um veículo global o modelo chega para substituir o Ford Fusion, outro sedan médio-grande de luxo da marca voltado para os mercados latinos e norte-americanos. Então conclui-se que teremos o Ford Mondeo novamente no mercado brasileiro até 2015, já que o Fusion acabou de ganhar um face-lift e o novo Mondeo só chegará em 2014.

Lembrando que o Mondeo será o 4º veiculo da marca a se tornar um veículo global. Além do Fiesta europeu e da terceira geração do Focus, a próxima geração do Ka também será globalizado e será inclusive fabricado no Brasil.

Fonte: Autocar

Exatamente, o CEO da Nissan para as Américas, Carlos Tavares, anunciou durante o Salão de Detroit que a Nissan irá vender dois veículos de baixo custo nos EUA. O modelo utilizará a mesma plataforma que o compacto brasileiro irá utilizar, a plataforma V, e será fabricado no México.

No total, dessa plataforma sairão três novos veículos, o substituto do Micra na Europa, o novo compacto da marca aqui no Brasil e um novo veiculo no mercado norte-americano que deverá ser um sedan e ficará abaixo do Versa (Tiida sedan) ou substituindo o mesmo, sendo que ou o veiculo desenvolvido para o Mercosul ou o substituto do Micra na Europa acompanha esse último nos EUA. Na verdade pode até se tratar do mesmo veículo que será vendido aqui no Brasil, mais com detalhes diferenciados para o mercado norte-americano, como o acabamento.

Por lá o carrinho custará menos que US$ 10 mil e para isso vários itens de conforto serão vendidos como opcionais como já acontece com o Nissan Versa. A meta é atingir modelos como Mini Cooper e o Ford Fiesta, que entrará na briga em breve, com a versão hatch e o Hyundai Accent com o sedan.

Fonte: Auto Diário

Watch out guys, Susan Boyle has “discovered” Botox and she’s armed with the power of makeup.

Spinster-turned-talent show sensation Susan Boyle, 48, says she’s lost weight, got her teeth whitened and discovered the wonders of Botox since shooting to the top of the Billboard charts with the release of her debut album, I Dreamed A Dream, last year. While SuBo still considers herself an “ugly duckling,” she’s learned to take more pride in her appearance, she tells Italy’s Grazia.

“I have a new hairdresser and I have discovered Botox, as well as getting my teeth whitened. I’ve lost weight for my own self esteem. It’s all been very important. I was never able to buy myself shoes or nice dresses or go to the hairdresser,” she says. “I have the closet of a star. Before I had to save and recycle clothes – for example, the outfit I wore on Britain’s Got Talent I had bought for my brother’s wedding.”

When asked if she would like to have a boyfriend, Susan replied: “That would be nice. To be honest, I have had a few offers but at the moment I am just so busy. For the time being, I have my cat Pebbles to keep me company, he is the most reliable companion.”