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These days, we’re inundated with overly-airbrushed female musicians supported only by their underwires and overproduction. While many lesser-known artists are slowly being recognized by larger audiences, we’d still like to see many more female musicians in the spotlight who have raw talent — with whatever instrument it may be. Here are 15 incredibly sexy female musicians — that don’t suck.

Jenny Lewis

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Jenny Lewis is the primary vocalist of the indie rock band Rilo Kiley, and is one hot ginger. She’s since released two solo albums, and dabbles in indie folk, rock and alternative country. Her vocals ooze raw emotion, and her songwriting is tops, too. It doesn’t hurt that she wears cute little numbers up on stage, either.

Sara Bareilles

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Singer-songwriter and noted pianist Sara Bareilles gained mainstream popularity in 2007 with her hit single, Love Song, and we haven’t been able to keep our eyes, or ears, off of her since. This sultry beauty dabbles in pop, pop rock, and soul. A nice plus that you’ll see a lot with the girls on this list — her voice is amazingly versatile and flawless live.

Amy Lee

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Amy Lee not only catches the public eye for fronting the rock band Evanescence, but for her stunning looks as well. She often sports corsets and fishnets on stage, but she’s the classiest broad you’ll ever see wearing them. She’s a classically trained pianist, and can also play the harp, organ and guitar. Besides all that, her vocal range is unbelievable — without the help of Autotune.

Sarah Brightman

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The word opera doesn’t conjure an alluring image to many in this day and age, but Sarah Brightman definitely changes that for all who experience her music. A British crossover soprano, Brightman is known best for her role as Christine Daae in the original The Phantom of the Opera, a part that was written for her voice. She has a staggering 160 Gold and Platinum awards in 34 countries and a three-octave voice of an angel — with looks to match.

Neko Case

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Neko Case, singer-songwriter extraordinaire, is best known for her solo work and contributing work with Canadian indie rock group The New Pornographers. With looks to kill and a voice to match, she’s nabbed a Grammy nomination and remains a champion among women in rock music with a style distinctly her own.

Emilie Simon

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Emilie Simon is a beautiful singer-songwriter from France. She brings electronic and experimental influences to the table — along with a light, whispy voice and sexy accompanying accent. Though her musical journey only started in 2003, she has since moved to New York City to take on the rest of the world and shows no sign of stopping any time soon.

KT Tunstall

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KT Tunstall, a singer-songwriter and guitarist from Scotland, shot into the mainstream after her stellar performance on the British music television show Later… with Jools Holland. She’s since picked up a Grammy nomination and BRIT Award — along with an engagement ring. We know she’s spoken for, but we can still look.

Hayley Williams

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An American singer and songwriter, Hayley Williams fronts the rock band Paramore — best known for singles Misery Business and Decode. The band truly shot into stardom when Decode was featured in Twilight, but Williams truly has a voice that carries it’s own. Hottness doesn’t hurt in the business either — she won Sexiest Female at the Shockwaves NME Awards 2009.

Cat Power

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Chan Marshall, AKA Cat Power, is a singer-songwriter known for her amazing, breathy voice, minimalist style, and home-grown beauty. In 2007 she became the first female solo act to win the Shortlist Music Prize when her album, The Greatest, was voted album of the year.

Rachael Yamagata

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Japanese-American beauty Rachael Yamagata is a singer-songwriter that has seen great success in her 32 years. Her music is considered blues rock and alternative — and it’s has been featured in shows like Nip/Tuck, Grey’s Anatomy, and How I Met Your Mother. Her looks are classic, and she has a twin, but to our disappointment we found out it’s a guy.

Feist

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Leslie Feist, who performs under the name Feist, is a Canadian singer-songwriter known for her solo work, but is also a member of the indie rock group Broken Social Scene. She dabbles in anti-folk and baroque pop — and gained a reputation for putting out some catchy beats. We’d like this Grammy-nominated musician to get feisty with us.

Taylor Swift

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Taylor Swift was thrust into the spotlight earlier this year when Kanye West interrupted her at the VMAs while she was accepting her award for Best Female Video. Her voice is solid and her songs are highly autobiographical — that night she became the first country singer to ever win a VMA, and solidified her place in our hearts — and pants.

Emily Haines

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Emily Haines is best known for her role as vocalist for indie rock band Metric, but has maintained a strong solo career as Emily Haines & the Soft Skeleton. Compared to Metric, her solo work is more mellow and piano-based — which suits her haunting voice perfectly. Born in New Delhi, India and raised in Canada, this musician is worldly, talented, and hot.

Angel Deradoorian

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Twenty-two year-old multi-instrumentalist Angel Deradoorian is best known as bass player/vocals for Brooklyn-based experimental rock band Dirty Projectors. This Armenian stunner released her promising solo debut this past May, and proved her musical proficiency — whether it be with vocals, on bass flute or guitar.

Ingrid Michaelson

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Cute-as-a-button Ingrid Michaelson is an American singer-songwriter best known for her single The Way I Am, which was featured in Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs, and the Fall 2007 Old Navy commercial campaign — all of which gave her huge exposure. She picked up piano at age four and hasn’t stopped performing since. We’d like to see her do another duet with Sara Bareilles, actually.

In response to the high demand for HD video conferencing in the Asia Pacific region, Sony announced that it is introducing its latest generation HD visual communication system, the PCS-XG55. Part of the IPELA family from Sony’s current HD PCS series systems lineup, the PCS-XG55 HD incorporates the functions and features of Sony’s existing high-end, PCS-XG80, developing an enhanced video communications platform that is flexible for the education, healthcare, government and corporate environments.

According to Frost & Sullivan, Asia Pacific is expected to contribute $1.7 billion to the video conferencing market, which is poised to grow into a $4.7 billion-dollar industry by 2014 worldwide. In India alone, the video conferencing market is growing 23 percent year-on-year due to the growing demand from the government sector, which leans towards more affordable and lower bandwidth-compatible systems. As a result, India is becoming the fourth largest market for video conferencing equipment.

“Despite the softening of the market elsewhere, there is great demand in the Asia Pacific region for HD video conferencing,” said Yoshikazu Hirano, General Manager, Business & Professional Products Asia Pacific (BPPA). “Currently, HD deployment in video conferencing has not matured and this presents a lucrative market opportunity for Sony. In response, we are making our PCS-XG55 available in March to provide customers a high-quality HD video conferencing experience.”

Although the video conferencing industry is filled with SD endpoints, Sony expects to see a marked improvement in the HD visual communication system in the very near future, with estimated revenues projected to increase by more than four times in 2010 from 2007.

To ride the changing trend, Sony’s PCS-XG55 is designed to be both HD and SD compatible. This enables enterprises’ to tailor their business needs with affordable price and lower investment in bandwidth compared to the high-bandwidth requirements for high-end (maximum 1080p) HD visual communication systems.

However, the true experience of customers’ equipped with a HD video conferencing system (minimum 720p) will be largely affected by peers, who send poor quality video signals and low-resolution pictures from low-end endpoints.

Sony IPELA PCS-XG55 HD visual communication system will be competitively priced and available for shipping in March 2010 in the Asia-Pacific region, and possibly other markets too.

Filed under: Podcasts, Hybrid, China, Cadillac, Ford, GM, Toyota, Volvo, Geely

For this week between holidays, Reilly Brennan from AOL Autos stops by our clubhouse to join Chris, Sam, and Dan for Episode #159 of the Autoblog Podcast. While it’s a question-centric podcast this week, we touch on a few news items before hitting a bunch of your emails. An in-depth chat about the Ford Mustang’s new 5.0-liter V8 starts us off, before we turn to an equally pithy chat about Toyota’s hybrid braking system concerns, and we briefly consider what Volvo’s pending sale to Geely might mean. From there on out, it’s listener-interaction central, and we break the two-hour barrier this week as a holiday treat(?) for everyone.

As ever, for exceptional quality ‘casts, our colleagues at Joystiq and Engadget do fine work. Let us know what you think of our podcast by dropping us an email at Podcast at Autoblog dot com, reviewing the show in iTunes, filling out our survey, or even leaving us a voicemail on our Google Voice line 734-288-8POD (734-288-8763). Thanks for listening!

Continue reading Autoblog Podcast #159 – Reilly Brennan from AOL Autos comes by the podcast clubhouse

Autoblog Podcast #159 – Reilly Brennan from AOL Autos comes by the podcast clubhouse originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 16:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Leo de varias fuentes los problemas que se reportan en ciertas zonas en donde el Mini E está siendo ensayado, en condiciones de conducción real. Particularmente, con respecto al intenso frío de ciertas zonas del norte de EEUU, Canadá o Europa, parece que las baterías del Mini E no aguantan la carga y se quedan estancadas con autonomías muy por debajo de lo anunciado.

Esto no es nada nuevo, porque era unos de los varios puntos negros que todavía tiene que mejorar el coche eléctrico: la falta de autonomía en épocas de intenso frío. Como el Mini E cuenta con la nueva generación de baterías de litio, y no con la anterior generación de níquel que sufrían muchos problemas similares, se puede llegar a la conclusión de que o específicamente el Mini se está convirtiendo en un FAIL o que todavía tiene que mejorar y en mucho. Me inclino hacia lo último, porque para eso son estas pruebas.

No olvidemos que “la vida real”, con el uso de calefacción dentro del coche y los diversos contratiempos que vayan surgiendo en el camino, no es lo mismo que los stands impolutos y los bonitos folletos de los salones del automóvil, en donde la teoría es muy bonita, pero la práctica no lo es tanto.

Vía | GM Volt

Frugality has been on everyone’s minds these days, and cooking at home is one of the best ways to save money and nourish yourself and your home at the same time. From good yet inexpensive cuts of meat to good ideas for using up the last bits of your ingredients, here’s a look back at some of our discussions and tips on saving money in the kitchen.

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A few of you may already know that Team Fortress 2 didn’t always look like Toy Story más violence, but for the unawares: it did. So, proof! A certain Curits Lassam, friend to all, found an old PC Gamer preview from the year two-thousand that described the game in its old, Counter-Strike-like art style. Yuck.

It’s safe to say I wouldn’t have spent nearly as much time sniping those red dogs if the game looked realistic. There’s a certain charm to mayhem and carnage when it looks like Buzz Lightyear.

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Did you buy a present via your iPhone this holiday season? eBay (EBAY) says the chances you did increased greatly this year, citing a 3x increase in items purchased via smartphones during the holiday season.

For the year, the company said, buyers and sellers did around $500 million worth of transactions using their phones.

I would also assume that Amazon saw a similar trend, particularly since it rolled out well-received shopping apps for both Research in Motion’s BlackBerry (RIMM) and Apple’s iPhone (AAPL) this year.

But note that for whatever reason, Amazon doesn’t mention mobile in its annual “let us tell you how awesome are holiday sales were, without actually attaching any real numbers to these claims” release.

[Image credit: ktylerconk]

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It’s cold in the east at the moment. Not just cold, but windy, numb your face type cold. In their latest editorial, GQ Japan shows us their stylish coat picks for the month. Traditional coat options such as heavy wools, long coats, and belted styles in varying dark colors become front and center for the winter.

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Source: Mode

Munich Re Calls for Climate Action: German reinsurer Munich Re warned today that a lack of big earthquakes and hurricanes this year should not lead to complacency about climate change. — Financial Times

Concerns About Hong Kong Water Security: A series of droughts in China has raised concerns that Hong Kong’s water supply is threatened by […]

Medical research is finally starting to catch up with millions of Americans who have been taking vitamins and supplements for years. But people who swear by their pills to stay fit and sharp may not like the evidence that’s starting to accumulate.

The latest comes from a federally funded study of ginkgo biloba, a supplement widely used to improve memory and other cognitive functions. More than 3,000 people between the ages of 72 and 96 were randomly assigned to take a placebo or 120 mg of ginkgo twice a day. None of the patients had dementia when the study began, and they were followed for a median of just over six years.

Those who took ginkgo fared no better than those who took placebo on a battery of tests that examined memory, language, attention and other measures of cognitive function. The results are published in this week’s JAMA; an earlier analysis of the same study also found that ginkgo didn’t reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.

As this New York Times column noted earlier this year, several big studies in the past few years have suggested that certain vitamins pills and other supplements don’t improve key health outcomes.

“I’m puzzled why the public in general ignores the results of well-done trials,” one doc who has studied this stuff told the NYT. “The public’s belief in the benefits of vitamins and nutrients is not supported by the available scientific data.”

Image: iStockphoto

SoundExchange, the collections group in charge of collecting and distributing money to musicians from a variety of different services (radio, satellite, webcasting, etc.), is technically a “spinoff” of the RIAA, but as many people who have dealt with SoundExchange will tell you, it’s still tied at the hip with the RIAA. In fact, I was recently talking with someone who told the story of “negotiating” with SoundExchange, and was surprised to discover at the meeting that there was an RIAA representative who did all the talking. The SoundExchange guy stayed quiet.

Why the government has granted exclusive rights to this industry group to collect and distribute money to musicians is troubling enough. But it’s made worse by the fact that if SoundExchange “can’t find” musicians to give the money to, it gets to keep the money. Thus, for years there’s been a struggle over the fact that SoundExchange seems to have incredible trouble finding musicians — including some huge rock stars, and that means that SoundExchange, officially a non-profit, is holding on to a ton of cash (currently somewhere around $200 million). There are also questions about how SoundExchange has violated the law that created it, in order to lobby for even more rights to collect money from radio stations.

Based on all this, we’ve always had trouble taking SoundExchange seriously, so consider us skeptical now that the organization claims that it’s going to be much more open and communicative and has launched a new website to help be more open. Only problem? The big list of artists that SoundExchange can’t find has gone missing. In the link above to P2Pnet, entertainment lawyer Fred Wilhelms goes through a variety of questions that SoundExchange hasn’t answered, and he asks what happened to that list (while also noting how the list almost never seemed to change):

The new website is a lot cleaner and easier to use, but there’s one thing the old site had that the new site doesn’t; the unregistered artist list.

As of now, there’s no way for anyone outside the organization to assist in the effort to locate artists that SoundExchange has been unable to register since 2006. Despite your glowing reports on how many artists SoundExchange has been finding, you and I both know that, before the list disappeared, no names had been removed from the published list in over seven months, and only a couple dozen in the last 18 months. I’ll take your subsequent assertion that the full and updated list will appear on the website at face value. Is there any schedule for that? Please don’t tell me “soon.” That’s a devalued coin in the SoundExchange treasury.

Wilhelms also notes that for all of SoundExchange’s claims to be “open” it’s also conveniently not explaining how it determines who gets paid:

There’s another thing that is missing from the new website which was repeatedly promised to me by John Simson and Neeta Ragoowansi; an explanation of how SoundExchange uses samples to determine which artists get what share of the royalty revenue when complete census data is not available. I was told two years ago that this information would be provided on the website, but I find that, not only is sampling not mentioned, SoundExchange continues to say things like “Get Paid When You Get Played.” That’s the header on the Featured Registered Artist page.

I have clients who have gotten a lot of play, but haven’t gotten paid, and they’ve been told it was because their plays were not in the sample playlists provided by the webcasters who play them. Perhaps you can explain why SoundExchange has decided not to mention sampling on the website. I come back to related problems later on in this letter, but I would like to know if SoundExchange is ever going to explain how it samples, or even that it relies on sampling at all.

This is a big issue. As we’ve seen over and over again, many of these collections societies use sampling and counting methods that greatly overvalue big stars (who need the money less) at the expense of up-and-coming artists. It’s like the poor get to pay the rich.

From there, Wilhelm’s letter goes on in great detail responding to claims from SoundExchange and debunking them one by one. SoundExchange claims that they’re now going to be much more open and respond to these types of questions. We’ll be interested to see what they have to say.

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In her calm, deliberate way, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell has always been in the business of changing worlds. Over a storied four-decade career, she has helped expand our understanding of the universe, caused people to rethink how Nobel Prizes are awarded, and used her stature to fight sexism in the world of science.

Burnell made her first scientific mark in 1968 as Jocelyn Bell, an unknown, 23-year-old doctoral student from Northern Ireland. After months of using the new radio telescope at the University of Cambridge, she came upon inexplicable, metronomically regular radio blips from isolated spots in the sky. Bell and her Ph.D. supervisor, Antony Hewish, concluded that the blips came from hitherto unknown objects, massive yet remarkably small. Because of their pulsed signals, these objects were dubbed pulsars. Soon after, pulsars were identified as rapidly spinning neutron stars, the remnants of supernova explosions; they weigh as much as the sun but are just a dozen miles wide. The discovery was so significant that the Nobel Committee recognized it with a share of the 1974 prize in physics—an honor that was presented to Hewish but not to the young woman who had made the initial observation, Jocelyn Bell. The snub made international news.

Time magazine hyped it as “A Nobel Scandal?” But Burnell was philosophical. “I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases,” she later said, “and I do not believe this is one of them…. I am not myself upset about it—after all, I am in good company, am I not?”

It wasn’t that long ago when Nokia and Apple started trading lawsuits over patent violations involving the iPhone and various Nokia technologies. Nokia first started it by claiming the iPhone was infringing on 10 Nokia patents. Apple’s countersuit claimed that Nokia was infringing on 13 patents pertaining to the iPhone. Things had been quiet on this front for a while — until Nokia filed another suit claiming that Apple is infringing on seven Nokia patents. This time Nokia is firing a big salvo across the bow of Apple as the claim states that it’s not just the iPhone using Nokia technology — it’s virtually every product Apple makes.

At issue is Nokia technology dealing with “user-interface design and camera, antenna and power-management technologies” that the Finnish company claims Apple is using “in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players and computers.” Ouch. Suddenly the patent infringement has grown quite a bit since this whole business started. Apple hasn’t responded yet, but the expected countersuit should be interesting to read.

Filed under: Motorsports, Videos

Last week, Formula One’s commercial overseer Bernie Ecclestone said he didn’t think USF1 was going to line up for the first race of 2010. To quote the man, “I think the people we expected to perform will and those that we thought wouldn’t, won’t.” It sounds like he never expected USF1 to be a team worth consideration.

Peter Windsor responded by essentially saying “Silly rabbit…” and about the same time a flood of content was added to the USF1 web site detailing the team’s progress. With a newly renovated HQ in Charlotte and a newly built European HQ in Aragon, Spain, not to mention making a new car, the team can be excused for being quiet. We only hope they make the right noises in Bahrain on March 1.

Follow the jump watch the USF1 vid, and check out its new site for news on plans for the latest American invasion of European motorsport. Hat tip to Carlo.

[Source: USF1]

Continue reading VIDEO: USF1 joins the Interwebz

VIDEO: USF1 joins the Interwebz originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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‘Sophisticated technology would not only
consign the paper ticket to history, but would also make redundant
touch-in-touch-out cards, such as the Oyster used in London. Instead
passengers would board buses and trains equipped with readers which
capable of monitoring their journey from the tags and charging them the
correct fare automatically.’

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‘One year has passed since the savage
Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip, but for the people there time might
as well have stood still. Since
Palestinians in Gaza buried their loved ones — more than 1,400
persons, almost 400 of them children — there has been little healing
and virtually no reconstruction.

According to international aid agencies, only 41 trucks of building supplies have been allowed into Gaza during the year.

Promises of billions made at a donors’
conference in Egypt last March attended by luminaries of the so-called
“international community” and the Middle East peace process industry
are unfulfilled, and the Israeli siege, supported by the US, the
European Union, Arab states, and tacitly by the Palestinian Authority
(PA) in Ramallah, continues.’

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