Jeff Goldblum and Brian Stokes Mitchell are set to play Rachel's two dads on "Glee."
By Randee Dawn
The identity of?Rachel Berry's biological mom on "Glee" has been the subject of an ongoing storyline, but until now Berry's adoptive gay dads Hiram and LeRoy Berry have been glimpsed just fleetingly.
But as TVLine now reports, those gay dads have finally been cast in full speaking parts, and will now be played by Jeff Goldblum and Broadway veteran Brian Stokes Mitchell.
It's an interesting change of "Glee" canon; the photo of Rachel with her dads made it pretty clear that they were played by a different set of actors.
Perhaps more important, they've both got musical backgrounds. Mitchell has a number of stage productions under his belt, including "Kiss Me Kate," which earned him a 2000 Tony Award. He's also done television, playing roles on "Frasier" and "Ugly Betty." Meanwhile, Goldblum is better known for his acting -- most recently he had a regular role on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" -- but according to TVLine he's an "accomplished jazz pianist" (he even tickled the ivories a bit on "Criminal Intent") and debuted on Broadway in 1971.
Goldblum and Mitchell will appear on the series' Valentine's Day episode, Feb. 14 on Fox. And yes, says TVLine, they're gonna sing.
Will you tune in to catch either actor on "Glee"? Tell us on our Facebook page.
Expanding your social circle can be quite difficult once you?re all grown up, but if you?re in the market for newfound friends, meetups over meals can provide a nice distraction should the conversation lull. That?s where the app Grubwithus, for iPhone and iPod Touch, comes in.
Started in 2010, Grubwithus is currently available in nine cities ? including Chicago, San Francisco and New York ? with more launches coming soon. The site arranges meals with dining establishments throughout your city and opens up the meal to anyone in the Grubwithus network. If you sign up in-app, you?ll need to create a dedicated account or connect with Facebook, but if you register at grubwithus.com, you can connect with Google or Twitter, too.
You?ll be able to see currently scheduled meals on the Grub page, along with who has already RSVPed and information if the event is for a specific cause. The earlier you reserve your spot, the cheaper your meal will be ? what you?ll be eating is available on the event?s Menu button ? so brave souls open to all company can save some cash while they socialize. Meal payment is done through the Grubwithus app, so there?s no sticky check-splitting needed for later on. Be sure to read the Grubwithus meal etiquette, available in account tab, so you know what?s kosher on your first time out.
The Grubwithus app is easy to use, but if I have one gripe it?s that its features are limited. For instance, the website offers profile customization and the ability to request your own Grubwithus event; neither is available in the app.
Definitely give Grubwithus a look if it?s available in your city. But be sure you can commit to a meal if you snag a seat ? tickets are transferable, but cannot be canceled.
LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) ? Courteney Cox will get a whole lot of love from ABC for Valentine's Day.
The third season of Cox's comedy "Cougar Town" will premiere on February 14 at 8:30 p.m. -- in place of the network's ill-fated cross-dressing comedy "Work It."
Though "Cougar Town" had not yet received a season-premiere date as of late last week, the series' executive producer, Bill Lawrence, hinted at the scheduling move Friday night, tweeting, "Hoping CT's premiere date will be announced Tuesday. Fingers crossed..."
"Work It" lasted just two episodes before ABC pulled the plug. Gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender groups ripped it before it even aired, saying it would hurt transgender people.
On the "Cougar Town" premiere -- dubbed "Ain't Love Strange" -- Cox's character, Jules, becomes angered when her neighbor Grayson, working under an ulterior motive, calls her "predictable," while Ellie (Christa Miller) worries that her son Stan could be developing into a "devil child."
(Reporting By Bob Tourtellotte)
Corrects to TheWrap.com in dateline; story unchanged.
U of A researcher says good wingmen will fib for a friendPublic release date: 16-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jamie Hanlon jamie.hanlon@ualberta.ca 780-492-9214 University of Alberta
Alberta School of Business professor Jennifer Argo says a good friend will lie to help a pal save face in a social situation
It could be called the wingman theory or the Barney Stinson principle (after the character played by Neil Patrick Harris on hit TV show How I Met Your Mother). A University of Alberta researcher says that like Barney, who spends much of his time trying to find his single friend a mate people are generally willing to help a friend protect or enhance his reputation or help him otherwise save face in a social situation.
Along with colleagues from the University of Calgary and UBC, Jennifer Argo, an Alberta School of Business professor, explored the circumstances under which people would be willing to tell a lie to manage another person's social image. The study found that, like Barney, the wingman is primed to step in with strategic identity support.
"This is an instance when you don't have the opportunity to make yourself look good, so somebody else does it for you," says Argo. "But you're better off to hang out with your friends (in these situations) because your friends will look out for you."
A friend in need? The fib's the deed
Argo studied the likelihood of people helping out a friend who to his chagrin paid more for a car than did another person for the same vehicle. Regardless of the size of the price discrepancy, she says, friends are willing to come to the rescue. She notes that in the case of a large discrepancy, even strangers may be willing to help a person save face as a random act of kindness.
"People put themselves in the shoes of the other person and say 'I would want someone to lie on my behalf so I wouldn't look bad,'" she says.
Argo notes that the key here is for the person needing help to be physically present during the conversation between the friend and the third party. Otherwise, she notes, the only time they might be willing to fib on behalf of the absent friend is in the case of a large price discrepancy.
"It comes down to what kind of relationship you have with the person in need. I think it is truly defined by the level of your friendship," Argo says. "If it's the best friend, I think most people would lie, even at the risk of possibly being found out."
Good intentions & the wingman's lament
She says the wingman theory could apply to almost any situation in which there is a discrepancy that could negatively impact the social perception or impression of the friend, such as when a friend has bought a knock-off surreptitiously. She says the application works equally when applied to business settings, in which a friend may embellish a recommendation to help a pal get a job. It may also apply at a party, where embroidering the truth could get a pal a first date with a potential partner.
"Based on the findings, it would seem reasonable to expect that people who understand their friends should be willing to step in as a wingman in a number of different contexts if their friends are in need," Argo says.
However, Argo muses on the potential implications of telling a little white lie for a friend, something her study did not explore. She says even though the favourably-positioned falsehood has no cost to the receiver, it may potentially place the friendly fibber's integrity in question with the person for whom the fib was originally told, especially if the lie was unsolicited. She says this would be an intriguing follow-up to this study.
"It does say something about that person, too. Because (as my friend), if you're lying, and I know it, it might make me question or cause me to doubt how much you lie to me and others," she says.
###
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
U of A researcher says good wingmen will fib for a friendPublic release date: 16-Jan-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jamie Hanlon jamie.hanlon@ualberta.ca 780-492-9214 University of Alberta
Alberta School of Business professor Jennifer Argo says a good friend will lie to help a pal save face in a social situation
It could be called the wingman theory or the Barney Stinson principle (after the character played by Neil Patrick Harris on hit TV show How I Met Your Mother). A University of Alberta researcher says that like Barney, who spends much of his time trying to find his single friend a mate people are generally willing to help a friend protect or enhance his reputation or help him otherwise save face in a social situation.
Along with colleagues from the University of Calgary and UBC, Jennifer Argo, an Alberta School of Business professor, explored the circumstances under which people would be willing to tell a lie to manage another person's social image. The study found that, like Barney, the wingman is primed to step in with strategic identity support.
"This is an instance when you don't have the opportunity to make yourself look good, so somebody else does it for you," says Argo. "But you're better off to hang out with your friends (in these situations) because your friends will look out for you."
A friend in need? The fib's the deed
Argo studied the likelihood of people helping out a friend who to his chagrin paid more for a car than did another person for the same vehicle. Regardless of the size of the price discrepancy, she says, friends are willing to come to the rescue. She notes that in the case of a large discrepancy, even strangers may be willing to help a person save face as a random act of kindness.
"People put themselves in the shoes of the other person and say 'I would want someone to lie on my behalf so I wouldn't look bad,'" she says.
Argo notes that the key here is for the person needing help to be physically present during the conversation between the friend and the third party. Otherwise, she notes, the only time they might be willing to fib on behalf of the absent friend is in the case of a large price discrepancy.
"It comes down to what kind of relationship you have with the person in need. I think it is truly defined by the level of your friendship," Argo says. "If it's the best friend, I think most people would lie, even at the risk of possibly being found out."
Good intentions & the wingman's lament
She says the wingman theory could apply to almost any situation in which there is a discrepancy that could negatively impact the social perception or impression of the friend, such as when a friend has bought a knock-off surreptitiously. She says the application works equally when applied to business settings, in which a friend may embellish a recommendation to help a pal get a job. It may also apply at a party, where embroidering the truth could get a pal a first date with a potential partner.
"Based on the findings, it would seem reasonable to expect that people who understand their friends should be willing to step in as a wingman in a number of different contexts if their friends are in need," Argo says.
However, Argo muses on the potential implications of telling a little white lie for a friend, something her study did not explore. She says even though the favourably-positioned falsehood has no cost to the receiver, it may potentially place the friendly fibber's integrity in question with the person for whom the fib was originally told, especially if the lie was unsolicited. She says this would be an intriguing follow-up to this study.
"It does say something about that person, too. Because (as my friend), if you're lying, and I know it, it might make me question or cause me to doubt how much you lie to me and others," she says.
###
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
By watching evolution in progress, scientists reveal key developments in the evolution of complex life and put evolutionary theories to the test
By Sarah Fecht
?|
January 16, 2012?|
Image: William Ratcliff
The transition from single-celled to multicellular organisms was one of the most significant developments in the history of life on Earth. Without it, all living things would still be microscopic and simple; there would be no such thing as a plant or a brain or a human. How exactly multicellularity arose is still a mystery, but a new study, published January 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that it may have been quicker and easier than many scientists expected.
"This is a significant paper that addresses one of the most fundamental questions in evolutionary and developmental biology," says Rick Grosberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Davis, who was not involved with the research.
Since evolution acts on individual cells, it pays off for a cell to be selfish. By hogging resources and hindering neighbors, a cell can increase the odds that more of its own genes get passed into the next generation. This logic is one of the reasons it has been challenging to imagine how multicellularity arose; it requires the subjugation of self-interest in favor of the group?s survival.
"Traditional theories make this out to be a difficult transition because you have to somehow turn off selection on the individual cells and turn it on for the collective," says Carl Simpson, a paleobiologist at the Museum f?r Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany, who also was not involved in the research. "The big result here is that these transitions can be super easy."
Led by Will Ratcliff, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis, the researchers used a simple but elegant technique to artificially select for multicellularity in yeast. They dumped unicellular yeast into a tube of liquid food and waited a few minutes for the cells to settle. Then they extracted the lowest fraction of the liquid and allowed whatever cells it contained to form the next generation. Because the cells had to cluster together in order to sink to the bottom and survive, the artificial selection made it more advantageous for yeast to cooperate than to be solitary.
After just 60 generations, all of the surviving yeast populations had formed snowflake-shaped multicellular clusters. "Hence we know that simple conditions are sufficient to select for multicellularity," says biologist Michael Travisano, Ratcliff?s advisor.
But at what point do the yeast become something more than a cluster of cells? When do they begin behaving as one organism?
In a true multicellular organism, such as a rabbit, evolution acts upon the rabbit and not upon each of the billions of cells that build it. So the researchers set out to determine whether artificial selection would act upon the snowflake yeast as if they too were multicellular organisms. To test it, one batch of the multicellular yeast was allowed only five minutes to settle in a tube (representing a strong selection pressure), while another batch was given 25 minutes (a weaker selection pressure). After 35 generations, the yeast that were exposed to stronger selection evolved to have larger cluster sizes, while those in the weak selection group actually shrank in size. This indicated that each cluster of cells was evolving as one organism.
In addition, time-lapse photography [video below] revealed that, in order to reproduce, the multicellular yeast divides itself into branches that develop into the multicellular form as well. The daughter clusters did not create their own offspring until they had reached a similar size as their parents. The presence of this juvenile stage shows that the snowflake yeast had adopted a multicellular way of life, Ratcliff says.
?
The researchers also found evidence of rudimentary division of labor, which is an essential characteristic for more complex multicellular life forms. In a human, for example, some cells may differentiate into blood cells, others may differentiate into immune cells, but only select egg or sperm cells help form the next generation.
Today’s LogicBUY Deal is the 73″ Mitsubishi WD-73C11 1080p 3D DLP Home Cinema TV for $929.99. $2099.99 – $1170 off = $929.99 with free shipping.? This is the lowest price, by over $250, found by LogicBUY. This deal expires January 17, 2012 or sooner. Check the above link for more details on this deal, and [...]
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tin7OzBSlJYJ0hf4Bdhe-ubSL27P5qTMfOImNMm8mh0K-RcdolI_3xrjCsN9kp1EQ30PpISsh30iRYQW_gJTi7Rov6CmAt2gsdYtSNkPo=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 16-Jan-2012
Share ] 