Rumors are flying, speeds are increasing and an Andretti is trying to get back to Victory Lane. Yes, it's starting to feel like the good old days in Indy.

"I've been feeling that resurgence ever since I came back over in 2009 and the momentum around the Indy 500 is just increasing," said Dario Franchitti, the defending race winner who is trying to become the fourth member of the four-time winners club. "It's growing in stature again."

This year's race will be historic for other reasons.

For the first time since 1987, two three-time Indianapolis 500 winners -- Franchitti and Helio Castroneves -- are expected to be in the starting field. For the first time since 1991, excluding the years of the open-wheel split, Roger Penske and Chip Ganassi are arriving at the 2.5-mile oval without a win.

For a change, nobody's talking about whether race organizers can fill the traditional 33-car field. They're talking about whether any late additions could knock one of the 33 on the current entry list out of the starting field.

"I think it's going to be exciting," said Michael Andretti, the former driver whose team has won three of this season's first four races. "Some teams have not been so competitive in years past. But the racing this year has been at the top level and it has to be great for the fans. It's as good as it's ever been."

Who would expect anything else with a field this talented?

Canadian James Hinchcliffe, one of five Andretti drivers trying to qualify next weekend, has won half of the first four races. Defending points champ Ryan Hunter-Reay, one of Hinchcliffe's teammates, won at Alabama but hasn't been on the podium anywhere else. The current leader is 36-year-old Takuma Sato, the first Japanese driver to win an IndyCar race and the driver who crashed on the final lap last May as he tried to pass Franchitti for the lead.

"You go for the win, you know," Sato said. "Anybody in that position would have done it."

Meanwhile, the old guard Castroneves, Franchitti and Tony Kanaan all have their own issues to contend with.

Franchitti, who owns four series titles three with Target Chip Ganassi is trying to fight his way back into contention for the championship. When practice opens Saturday, he'll be 15th in the points. Castroneves has only two wins in his last 37 races, while Kanaan hasn't reached Victory Lane since Iowa in 2010, a span of 41 straight races.

"Every year, I believe it's the year," Kanaan said Thursday while promoting the series' next race at Belle Isle Park in metro Detroit. "Honestly, I've enjoyed going to Indy because of the way the crowd made me feel. I know I haven't won there, but they make me feel wanted and welcome and they make me feel like a winner."

But qualifying weekend could have an old-time flair to it, too.

Most expect speeds to increase significantly in the second year of this engine-chassis combination. Last year, Ryan Briscoe took the pole with a four-lap average of 226.484 mph. This year, with the right conditions, that number could jump significantly.

"I think the pole speed will be close to 230, if not 230," Andretti said.

Off the track, there's just as much being discussed.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence signed a legislative bill this week that will give track officials $100 million in public financing to upgrade the facility. Potential projects already being discussed include updating the seats, renovating the road course and adding lights at a speedway that has never had night racing.

Of course, it wouldn't be Indy if there wasn't endless speculation about who may find a late ride before the second and final day of qualifying ends on May 19. One name sure to surface, now that he has passed his rookie test, is Kurt Busch even though the 2004 Sprint Cup champion made it clear he's not ready to try "The Double" this May.

" I think the proper thing is to go out and experience this car at another oval track and get into a race and experience what the buffeting is and the movement of the car when all the downforce changes," Busch said after posting a fast lap of 218.21 mph on Thursday.

All of it has given Indy an injection of excitement to opening day at the track.

"I think this race has an aura about it every year because it's such a unique event," Hinchcliffe said. "Our team will try to improve and other teams will try to improve as well, but none of that really matters till you roll the car out on opening day."

The state Gambia Radio Television Services announced late Friday that Imam Baba Leigh was released by the National Intelligence Agency.

The outspoken Imam was taken away by plainclothes officers on December 3, 2012. Media reports linked his arrest with comments he made in August 2012 in which he described the executions of nine people carried out by the government as "un-Islamic."

President Yahya Jammeh's government faced mounting pressure from the international community as the Muslim cleric was regarded a prisoner of conscience by many human rights organizations. The United States and British governments called on Gambian authorities to release him.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Shrinking the size of kids' plates and bowls and encouraging them to eat more frequently throughout the day might help them eat less and keep off extra weight, new research suggests.

In one study, researchers found first graders served themselves smaller portions when using miniaturized dishware - and ate less food when they had less on their plate.

Another review of past research found kids and teens who ate most often during the day were 22 percent less likely to be overweight than those who ate the fewest meals and snacks.

Jennifer Fisher, who worked on the dish-size study, said it was preliminary but could still inform parent choices.

"For now, certainly it seems like something parents can easily incorporate into their daily lives without a lot of work and effort," Fisher, from Temple University in Philadelphia, told Reuters Health.

She and her colleagues studied 42 elementary school kids who were given the chance to serve themselves lunch. On four days the kids used child-sized plates and bowls; on another four they used adult-sized dishware, which was twice as large.

First graders served themselves an average of 300 to 500 calories worth of the lunch entre - pasta or chicken nuggets - each day.

When they used adult dishware, the kids took an average of 90 more calories of food, the researchers found. And kids who ended up with more food on their plates also tended to eat more, Fisher's team wrote Monday in Pediatrics.

"It doesn't appear that simply because you might have large dishware at home, your child is going to overeat," said Fisher - because it depends on who's doing the serving and how much is served.

But, she added, "If more food appears on the plate, they're going to eat more."

"The results are very interesting and confirm our expectations that the impact of plate size on adults in the laboratory also apply to children," Dr. Thomas Robinson, a childhood obesity researcher at Stanford University in California, told Reuters Health in an email.

"This study provides very important preliminary evidence that using smaller dishware may help reduce children's energy intakes."

For their own analysis, researchers from Harokopio University in Athens, Greece, looked at 11 studies, mostly conducted in the Mediterranean, that compared eating frequency and weight in close to 19,000 kids and teens.

The overall pattern showed that youth who ate most often - typically at least four or five times per day - were least likely to be overweight or obese. However when they looked closer, the researchers found that link only held up in boys.

Robinson, who was not involved in the new research, said it's hard to tell which came first in those studies: eating frequency or extra weight.

The results "do not look very convincing one way or another," he said. "It is also hard to come up with a convincing reason why boys and girls would be different."

The researchers said their findings don't prove that a given child will lose weight by eating more often. But schools, for example, may be able to make a difference by integrating smaller, more frequent meals into the day.

"Instead of providing three big meals per day, it would be better (for parents) to have their children eating smaller meals and more snacks throughout the day," co-author Mary Yannakoulia told Reuters Health in an email.

However, she added, parents still need to pay attention to the quality of those snacks.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 17 percent of kids and teens in the U.S. are obese - a proportion that has almost tripled since 1980.

"We know that it's so complex that there's absolutely not one cause or solution," Fisher said.

A third study also published this week in Pediatrics found teens who spent more time focused on the TV were heavier than their peers. However, time spent playing video games or on the computer was not tied to weight.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/jsoh2P Pediatrics, online April 8, 2013.

That's why the fall-winter 2013-14 show saw the Belgian designer explore his usual menswear-womenswear tailoring via the frivolity of ballroom dancing, feathers and the dancing two-some Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

Wednesday's show was proof again of Van Noten's mastery when it comes to the art of clashing styles.

"I started from the menswear pants, and then the opposite is ballroom dancing ... big feathers," he said backstage at Paris' grand Hotel de Ville. "Fashion is so serious, so the hints of the Fred and Ginger story were fun."

Who better to represent the Van Noten universe, where men's and women's styles merge together, than one of the most iconic and inseparable male-female couple in Hollywood history?

Ostrich feathers in midnight blue, faded gray and tea rose billowed like 1930s boas with large vivid embroideries, vintage fur alongside men's baggy pants, club stripes and Prince of Wales check.

Some of the feathered fringing floated past wistfully, only to be reined in by the humorous juxtaposition of a menswear cut.

One fantastic look said it all: a sumptuous navy feathered skirt (Ginger), and a large tuxedo shirt (Fred.)

In Van Noten's world, like in Hollywood, there's no man without the woman, no Ginger without Fred.

___

Thomas Adamson can be followed at http://Twitter.com/ThomasAdamsonAP

He just might not have another bout.

The oldest boxer to win a major title, the 48-year-old Hopkins said he could retire a champion if he's no longer inspired and the right bout doesn't materialize.

"If I'm not motivated, and the competition is not there, if it's a meaningless fight, it's time to roll, man," Hopkins said by phone Sunday.

Hopkins scored a 12-round unanimous decision over Tavoris Cloud to claim the IBF light heavyweight championship Saturday night. Hopkins became the oldest boxer to win a major title, extending the record he set by beating Jean Pascal for the WBC light heavyweight title on May 21, 2011.

Hanging up the gloves is not Hopkins' first choice. He wants to keep fighting if the right opponent and network home can be found.

Hopkins won't return to a Philadelphia gym and train for a fight just to fight.

"I just want to sit down and see what's out there that's meaningful and if it's worth the mental training, the mental stress, the things I know how to do to win," Hopkins said.

He's coming off his most convincing victory in years in the 175-pound title fight against the 31-year-old Cloud. Hopkins connected on 169 of 417 punches and opened a cut over Cloud's left eye.

He stayed Sunday in New York and celebrated with a slice of cheesecake, a well-earned treat for a straight-edge fighter who abstains from alcohol, late nights, and sweets. He's crafted a lifestyle that's allowed him to fight as he pushes 50.

Winning at his age already makes him a novelty in a sport where so many fighters are finished in their 30s. He's always been adamant at going out on his own terms and building on the legacy that already includes a dazzling 20 straight middleweight title defenses.

"I don't want to be a circus act," Hopkins said. "I'm a very proud man. They say fighters get old in the ring. No, fighters get old in the gym when no one's honest enough to tell them they're old."

Hopkins also ran into promoter Don King in the hotel Sunday morning. Cloud had been considered the last prospect in King's stable. King and Hopkins have long had an acrimonious relationship; Hopkins boasted last week of finishing off King once and for all. But King told Hopkins he was proud of him in their brief chat. Hopkins said he appreciated the gesture.

So, if not retirement, what's next? Hopkins said before the fight he'd like to face WBO light heavyweight champ Nathan Cleverly. But Cleverly has contractual commitments ahead that could make that fight an impossibility. Hopkins will keep looking for one more big fight on HBO or Showtime. If not, it's off he'll go as the oldest champ to quit on top.

"I have some history-making moments in me. Not a lot," he said, "but there are more.

____

Follow Dan Gelston at Twitter.com/APGelston

In its response to Miami's motion that was filed two weeks ago asking for the case to be brought to an immediate end, the NCAA's investigative arm said it would remove some of Wright's testimony "in an abundance of caution" according to the person, who spoke with AP on condition of anonymity because neither the association nor the Hurricanes authorized the move to be revealed publicly.

It's a victory for Miami, though the size of that victory will only be known as the case continues. It's also unclear if the NCAA will drop all of Wright's testimony, or just a portion.

In its motion, which was based in part on what the school said was ill-gotten testimony from Wright, Miami asked the NCAA's Committee on Infractions the group that would actually hear the case, not the investigators who shaped the case to bring the long saga to an end.

As of now, the case is still scheduled to be heard by the Committee on Infractions starting June 14.

Miami argued that some of the questions Wright was asked in a February 2012 interview with NCAA investigators were based on answers given in depositions that were conducted as part of a bankruptcy case by the attorney for former Hurricanes booster Nevin Shapiro, whose claims of providing impermissible benefits to Miami athletes, recruits and coaches for nearly a decade are the root of the scandal.

Those depositions were conducted under subpoena power, a tool the NCAA does not have. The NCAA has said it removed information gleaned in those depositions from the notice of allegations against Miami, though the Hurricanes argued that process did not go far enough.

"In an abundance of caution, the enforcement staff will suppress (Wright's) transcript as well as strike through any allegations relying solely on the information the student-athlete reported," read a portion of the NCAA's response.

Miami cited six allegations that Wright helped investigators substantiate in a February 2012 interview.

Wright, according to Miami's motion, acknowledged getting extra benefits "only after (now-retired NCAA investigator Rich) Johanningmeier asked him specific questions regarding the benefits" that the former quarterback received from Shapiro, a convicted felon serving a 20-year term in federal prison for masterminding a $930 million Ponzi scheme.

And the NCAA, Miami contended, only knew about those benefits like a trip to a Snoop Dogg concert at Detroit in 2005 and an overnight trip to the Bahamas because of the deposition that Shapiro attorney Maria Elena Perez conducted of former Miami equipment-room staffer and Shapiro confidant Sean Allen in December 2011.

That was one of the depositions Perez conducted while receiving payment from the NCAA for the work performed.

The AP previously learned that Wright, a Miami quarterback from 2004 through 2007, was alleged by the NCAA to have received "VIP access and beverage service" from Shapiro at Miami nightclubs between 2002 and 2009. Wright also allegedly was entertained at Shapiro's home, received invitations to bowling-alley outings from the former booster, and dined with him at a Benihana restaurant.

Wright, also according to the notice of allegations against Miami, received at least $1,824 in impermissible benefits "in an effort to secure signing with Axcess Sports," an agency Shapiro was aligned with.

Wright finished his four Miami seasons with 38 touchdown passes and 31 interceptions.

Miami has already missed three postseason football games because of the scandal, and school officials have said repeatedly that self-imposed sanctions like those and a scholarship reduction mean the Hurricanes have been penalized enough.

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - Using voice to send text messages while driving is just as dangerous as texting with fingers, with driver response times significantly delayed no matter which method was used, a study released on Tuesday showed.

The study by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University was the first to compare voice-to-text and traditional texting on a handheld device in an actual driving environment.

"In each case, drivers took about twice as long to react as they did when they weren't texting," Christine Yager, who headed the study, told Reuters. "Eye contact to the roadway also decreased, no matter which texting method was used."

The research involved 43 participants driving along a test track without any electronic devices present. The same participants then drove while texting and again while using a speech-to-text device.

Yager said speech-to-text actually took longer than traditional texting, due to the need to correct errors in the electronic transcription.

"You're still using your mind to try to think of what you're trying to say, and that by proxy causes some driving impairment, and that decreases your response time," Yager said.

The biggest concern is that the driver felt safer while using voice-to-text applications instead of traditional texting, even though driving performance was equally affected, she said.

This may lead to a false belief that texting while driving using spoken commands is safe when in reality it is not, Yager said.

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association says 6.1 billion text messages per day were sent in the United States in 2012. Some 35 percent of drivers admit to reading a text or email while driving in any given month, while 26 percent admitted to typing one, according to data from AAA, a national drivers' organization.

"Every day, new technologies come out, and it is important to educate the public that even these seemingly new distractions are still distractions, and it will help people be safer when they get into the vehicle," Yager said.

(Reporting by Jim Forsyth; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)

are capable of eruptions dwarfing anything ever seen in recorded history, expelling thousands of times more magma and ash than even a Mount St. Helens or Pinatubo. A supervolcanic eruption could wreak as much havoc as the impact of a mile-wide asteroid,by blotting out the sun with ash, reflecting its rays and cooling the Earth a phenomenon called a "volcanic winter." Adozen or so supervolcanoes exist today, .

The largest supervolcano eruption of the past 2.5 million years wason the Indonesian island of Sumatra about 75,000 years ago. Researchers say Toba spewed out a staggering 700 cubic miles (2,800 cubic kilometers) of magma, equivalent in mass to more than 19 million Empire State Buildings. By comparison, the infamous blast from the volcanic Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883, one of the , released about 3 cubic miles (12 cubic km) of magma.

About the same time the eruption took place, the number of modern humans apparently dropped cataclysmically, as shown by genetic research. People today evolved from the few thousand survivors of whatever befell humans in Africa at the time. The giant plume of ash from Toba stretched from the South China Sea to the Arabian Sea, and in the past investigators proposed the resulting volcanic winter might have caused this die-off. []

However, recently scientists have suggested that Toba did not sway the course of human history as much as previously thought. For instance,and dating from after the eruption hinted that people coped fairly well with any effects of the eruption.

Now researchers have found that the evidence shows Toba didn't actually cause a volcanic winter in East Africa where humans dwelled.

"We have been able to show that the largest volcanic eruption of the last two million years did not significantly alter the climate of East Africa," said researcher Christine Lane, a geologist at the University of Oxford.

Ash in Africa

Lane and her colleagues examined ash from Toba recovered from mud extracted from two sites at the bottom of Lake Malawi, the second largest lake in the East African Rift Valley.

"We first started looking for the Toba ash a few years back, but it's a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack, so it took a while," Lane told OurAmazingPlanet. "Between myself and my co-author Ben Chorn, we systematically processed every centimeter of sediment between 24 to 46 meters [78 to 150 feet] depth in the central basin core. The layer is so small that if we leave any gaps in our search, we could miss it completely."

Their analysis discovered that a thin layer of ash in this sediment about 90 feet (27 m) below the lake floor was from the last of the Toba eruptions, known as Youngest Toba Tuff.

"Thedispersed huge volumes of ash across much of the Indian Ocean, Indian Peninsula and South China Sea," Lane said. "We have discovered the layer of volcanic ash was carried about twice the distance as previously thought, over more than 7,000 kilometers [4,350 miles]."

The amount of ash found in the Malawi sediment core (a cylindrical log of sediment drilled from the ground), was more than the scientists expected to find.

"I was surprised to find so much ash in the Lake Malawi record," Lane added. "The ash is very tiny, composed of shards of volcanic glass smaller than the diameter of a human hair. Nevertheless, in a lot of records I have worked on previously, even within just a few hundreds of miles of an eruption center, we sometimes only find less than 100 shards of glass within a gram of sediment. In Malawi, we have thousands of shards of glass per gram, which really shows how voluminous the Youngest Toba Tuff was."

Quick recovery

If the area had seen dramatic cooling because of all the ash spewed into the atmosphere, living matter near the lake surface would likely have died off, significantly altering the composition of the lake's mud. However, when the researchers investigated algae and other organic matter from the layer that contained the ash from Toba, they saw no evidence of a significant temperature drop in East Africa. Apparently, "the environment very quickly recovered from any atmospheric disturbance that may have occurred," Lane said.

But these results, detailed online April 29 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, don't mean that .

"It is important to realize that every volcanic eruption is different and the Youngest Toba Tuff provides only one example," Lane said. "The impact of an eruption depends not just on the amount of ash erupted, but also the composition and volume of aerosols, how high in the atmosphere the ash is injected and the meteorological conditions at the time."

As for what might explain the near-extinction humanity apparently once experienced, perhaps another kind of catastrophe, such as disease, hit the species. It may also be possible that such a disaster never happened in the first place genetic research suggests modern humans descend from a single population of a few thousand survivors of a calamity, but another possible explanation is that modern humans descend from a few groups that left Africa at different times.

Future research will analyze what effects Toba may or may not have had on other lakes in East Africa.

"Whilst from this we can hypothesize that the global climatic impact was not as dramatic as some have suggested, we will need to find similarly high-resolution records of past climate from other regions that also contain Youngest Toba Tuff in order to definitively test this," Lane said.

Follow OurAmazingPlanet, and .Original article at .

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - U.S. investment in superfast 4G infrastructure helped Ericsson's main network equipment business grow in the first quarter, supporting hopes the market for mobile equipment is expanding again after a lean 2012.

The Sweden-based group's networks unit, which accounts for more than half of total sales, has been under pressure and last year saw sales drop 12 percent because of the economic downturn and competition from China.

But the fourth quarter showed signs of an improvement which has carried through into this year.

Headline results at the world's biggest mobile equipment maker undershot expectations due to heavy - but unprofitable -network rollout activity, restructuring costs and delays to building high-capacity 4G networks in Latin America.

But sales in the network unit grew for a second straight three-month period and Ericsson stuck to its forecast that low-margin business there would gradually disappear through this year, boosting profitability.

"I would still be a buyer of the share going into the second-half margin improvement," said Alexandre Peterc, analyst at brokerage Exane BNP Paribas.

North America, where operators are ahead of the curve in 4G investment and where arch Chinese rival Huawei is excluded over security concerns, drove 7 percent currency-adjusted sales growth for the network unit.

Ericsson's shares are up 17 percent this year, outperforming the Stockholm blue chip index's 5 percent increase on the back of expectations investments in super-fast, high- capacity 4G services will boost profits.

Sales in North America of older-style systems based on legacy technology known as CDMA continued to decline, while sales of older equipment also declined in China, where Ericsson has a limited presence in 3G and where 4G has yet to be launched.

QUITE SEVERE

"We had yet another quarter of growth and that includes the CDMA decline, which was quite severe," CEO Hans Vestberg said. "We had high business activity ... geared to meeting the increased data and video (traffic) in the networks."

The market for mobile equipment shrank around 7 percent in 2012, but some analysts see a return to growth this year. Forecasts have ranged from a bullish 13 percent by Infonetics Research to just 2.3 percent by Gartner.

Ericsson's continued growth in networks contrasted with rival Nokia Siemens Networks, which saw sales down 5 percent in the first quarter.

Alcatel Lucent reports on Friday.

Operating profit excluding joint ventures and one-offs fell to 2.1 billion crowns from 2.8 billion a year ago, lagging a mean forecast of 3.0 billion in a Reuters poll.

Its shares were down 0.5 percent at 1025 GMT.

Sales grew 2 percent to 52 billion crowns against a forecast 53.5 billion. Global services - the group's second-biggest unit - came in below expectations, which Ericsson said was due to a delay in the roll-out of 4G networks in Latin America.

That unit's operating margin was half that of a year earlier, while a high level of loss-making network rollouts weighed on the company's overall gross margin, which was also hit by restructuring charges as the company slims down its networks unit.

The gross margin was 32 percent in the quarter against a forecast of 32.2 percent, but Ericsson said margin pressure should ease later this year. ($1 = 6.6191 Swedish crowns)

(Additional reporting by Johannes Hellstrom; Editing by Alistair Scrutton and David Holmes)