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FOREX Trading

The Foreign Exchange is the largest exchange market in the world. With the prospect of quick, hefty profits and the explosion of Internet technology and availability, FOREX trading has dramatically grown in popularity among investors of all types. But trading in this market isn’t easy. As with any other securities exchange, the successful trader must not only be knowledgeable and savvy with regard to the currencies being traded but also the venue in which he or she is operating.

FOREX trading is a very specialized form of day trading. (Day traders invest by buying and selling securities, or opening and closing their market positions, on the same or within a few days.) Because of the high margins available in the FOREX, investors can control large amounts of currency with relatively small outlays of actual cash. Although this leverage creates the potential for enormous profits, it can also open the door to huge losses. The would-be FOREX trader must therefore remain wary that, just as with any other type of investment, taking a financial beating is always possible.

The FOREX market provides a variety of unique and attractive investing opportunities. Study the articles of this section carefully, as well as other information and tools for the FOREX market. Safeguard yourself by becoming familiar with various risk management concepts. You'll need an account and trading platform with a reputable broker in order to begin trading. One such firm, known as AVAFX, offers full service, customizable, and commission-free trading and support based on your experience and desired activity level. They give you full control over your account, even leverage and spread amounts.

You're also encouraged to take advantage of some of the many FOREX practice platforms available on the Web. One of the best, eToro, provides an amazingly simple and fun way for you to "get your feet wet" in the market without actually risking your money. Excellent graphics enable you to see and understand exactly what's happening while your market "position" is open, and they even offer prizes for the day's most successful traders. Online help and a Community Forum are also included. When you feel comfortable and experienced enough, you can make the jump to one of their real trading accounts (unfortunately, if you live in the USA, only the practice account is available to you).

Yalicoo, a simulation-only trading platform, is another great learning tool. It allows you to join real-time trading "games," again without risking real money. Their virtual platform hosts daily, weekly, and monthly competitions, with the most successful traders earning actual cash prizes. Learn from experienced players, and get expert analysis of winning strategies.

Educate yourself thoroughly before taking advantage of this investment vehicle; knowledge and prudence will give you your best chance of success in this, or any other, exchange market.

Can baking soda curb global warming?

Some scientists have proposed compressing carbon dioxide and sticking it in underground caves as a way to cut down on greenhouse gases. Joe David Jones wants to make baking soda out of it.

Jones, the founder and CEO of Skyonic, has come up with an industrial process called SkyMine that captures 90 percent of the carbon dioxide coming out of smoke stacks and mixes it with sodium hydroxide to make sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda. The energy required for the reaction to turn the chemicals into baking soda comes from the waste heat from the factory.

"It is cleaner than food-grade (baking soda)," he said.

The system also removes 97 percent of the heavy metals, as well as most of the sulfur and nitrogen compounds, Jones said.

Luminant, a utility formerly known as TXU, installed a pilot version of the system at its Big Brown Steam Electric Station in Fairfield, Texas, last year. Skyonic, meanwhile, hopes to install a system that will consume the greenhouse gas output of a large--500 megawatts or so--power plant around 2009. Skyonic is currently designing one of these large systems.

"It has been working pretty well. It does present a potential solution to emissions," said a representative for Luminant. "But right now there is still a lot of work to be done."

If the concept works on a grand scale, it could help change some of the pernicious economics and daunting engineering challenges surrounding carbon capture and sequestration.

Carbon capture likely will be required to curb global warming, according to many scientists and companies that are currently experimenting with ways to effectively bury or fix greenhouse gases as they come out of smokestacks. Coal accounted for 26 percent of energy consumed in 2004 worldwide, according to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, and will grow to 28 percent by 2030. Coal also accounted for 39 percent of carbon dioxide in 2004 (behind oil) but is expected to pass oil for the No. 1 spot in 2010.

What about replacing every incandescent bulb in America with compact fluorescents? The benefits are eradicated by the carbon dioxide emitted by two coal-fired plants over a year, according to Ed Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030, a nonprofit that encourages builders, suppliers, and architects to move toward making carbon-neutral buildings by 2030.

Unfortunately, a lot of the proposed solutions for sequestration involve large amounts of capital and risk. If you bury carbon dioxide underground, it could always leak out. Other ideas include pumping it into underground saline aquifers or porous rock formations.

Because it's a solid, storing baking soda is simply easier, and it allows greenhouse gas emitters to store a lot of carbon in one place. The stuff piles up: A 500-megawatt power plant will produce approximately 338,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. Multiply that weight by 1.9 and you get the number of tons of baking soda that the plant will produce. Still, it can be sold, stored in containers, used for landfill or buried in abandoned mines.

"If you can use the waste heat, it strikes me as a potentially feasible approach," said Alex Farrell, an assistant professor in the energy and resources group at the University of California at Berkeley. "I'm not willing to throw any of the ideas out yet."

On top of that, the byproducts of the different reactions--chlorine, baking soda, hydrogen (a byproduct from making the sodium hydroxide that gets mixed with the carbon dioxide), and chlorine--can be sold to industrial users. In all likelihood, the chlorine and hydrogen will have a higher market value than the baking soda, but baking soda does have its buyers. It is often used as an industrial abrasive. Besides, baking soda today gets mined--an expensive process. Skyonic's byproduct would obviate the need to dig holes in the ground.

Other start-ups are trying to develop salable products out of carbon dioxide. Greenfuel Technologies wants to capture carbon dioxide and feed it to algae farms. Greenfuel then sells the algae to biodiesel manufacturers.

Making biodiesel from algae, though, remains in the experimental stage. Similarly, Novomer wants to turn carbon dioxide into plastics, while a few other start-ups are coming up with liquid fuels derived from the gas.

These approaches, however, result in byproducts that are more experimental than cranking out baking soda. Greenfuel, for instance, has been forced to delay a prototype in Arizona.

There's another benefit to Skyonic's system, Jones said. Because the system captures metals and acid gases, it can replace the $400 million scrubbers that power plants currently have to install. Skyonic's system will probably cost about the same amount as a scrubber. Although the capital budget will be equal, power plant owners will get a salable byproduct and avoid carbon taxes, which may be imposed in the future.

Jones, a chemical engineer, came up with the idea for the company while watching TV with his sons. The Discovery Channel had a show about traveling to Mars, and experts offered up their ideas for getting rid of carbon dioxide. Jones told his sons that the experts had it wrong. Creating sodium bicarbonate would probably be the best solution.

He then went to his PC and began to research the subject on Google. He didn't find a lot of answers, but one posting referred to a 1973 textbook Jones remembered. He'd bought it for a class at the University of Texas. In fact, it was on the shelf right behind him.

He opened it up to the relevant page and there was the passage he wanted, underlined years earlier by Jones himself.

If only they'd learn to put the lid down...

CANBERRA (Reuters) - The line for the toilet is about to get longer.

Fed up with the mess created by kitty litter and inspired by the cat "Mr Jinks" in the Hollywood film "Meet the Fockers," an Australian woman has invented a toilet training system for cats called the "Litter-Kwitter."

Mother-of-two Jo Lapidge is flushed with success after teaching her family's Burmese cat, Doogal, to use the toilet.

"Doogal has fallen in, but he hasn't fallen in by accident, he has done it playing with the water," Lapidge told Reuters.

The Litter-Kwitter (http://litterkwitter.com.au/) is a three-step process, starting with a red toilet seat-shaped disc filled with cat litter and sitting on the floor next to the toilet, like a normal tray. Next the red disc is placed on the toilet so the cat can get used to jumping up onto the seat.

Then the red disc is replaced with an amber disc with a small hole. When the cat is accustomed to the water below, the amber disc is replaced with a green disc which has a larger hole.

The aim is that fastidious felines should eventually be able to use a normal toilet seat.

"Because the water covers the smell, it makes the burying or covering up instinct redundant ... To fully train Doogal it took about eight weeks," said Lapidge, adding that she hopes to start manufacturing the Litter-Kwitter soon.

But, unlike Mr Jinks, teaching cats to flush could be a little harder.

Hot Rod

All it takes is one surprise hit, especially one that seemingly comes from nowhere, and suddenly studios will do whatever they can to try and duplicate the same phenomenon. Independent films seem to baffle these studios, because no matter how many times they try and duplicate The Blair Witch Project, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Napoleon Dynamite or whatever the next indi-hit may be, the amount of success is never equivalent to the original. I wouldn’t say that Hot Rod is a bad film, or even that I didn’t laugh, but there were just as many moments I felt like I was watching a bad Napoleon Dynamite imitation. The awkwardly strange protagonist and bizarre setting makes it uncomfortably similar, but it isn’t exactly a spoof, whereas a dance sequence in the woods is an obvious play on Footloose. This odd mix of humor is more inconsistent than one might like, but occasionally it works.

Following in many other footsteps of comedy, Hot Rod also keeps a long-standing tradition of stupid characters. Before Napoleon Dynamite there was Zoolander, and before that Dumb and Dumber. Even Laurel and Hardy amused us with stupidity. In Hot Rod Andy Samberg (Saturday Night Live) is Rod Kimble, a stuntman living in his mother’s house and attempting small and unsuccessful stunts. He is ridiculed by everyone except his step-brother and his friends, but somehow he attracts the attention of his childhood neighbor (Isla Fisher) who joins his crew. When Rod’s abuse step-father (Ian McShane) is expected to die without a heart transplant, Rod decides to raise the money for the operation with one big jump.

Despite everyone’s skepticism Rod starts training for the big jump, hoping that his efforts will impress his latest crew member, but his hopes are put off by the lawyer boyfriend (Will Arnett) from television’s Arrested Development). This hurdle is nothing compared to Rod’s difficult trek earning the money for the large stunt as a hired stunt-man. Even though there are far more nonsensical sequences than necessary ones, the journey is far more entertaining than the predictable resolution.

The DVD is filled with extra features likely to entertain fans of the irreverent comedy, including plenty of deleted and extended scenes, and an outtakes reel which is just alternate takes rather than outtakes. Many of them are lines left out of the film for a reason. Also included is the footage comparison between the footloose spoof and the actual scene from the 1980s dance classic, which essentially becomes a plug for another movie. The audio commentary includes director Akiva Schaffer along with actors Andy Smaberg and Jorma Taccone, which is a surprisingly great combination. There is also a making-of featurette and a few other bells and whistles.

'Pig-Ball' Soccer Match Staged in Russia

MOSCOW - In this game, everyone stinks and hogging the ball is to be expected.

Ten squealing, wriggling piglets pushed �� and licked �� a soccer ball around a small caged pen Sunday in what organizers said was Russia's first-ever "pig-ball" championships.

The event, staged as part of an agricultural exhibition on Moscow's outskirts, is set up like soccer, with two teams of five piglets. Instead of goals, the teams try to move the ball into painted, half-circles located at the pen's corners. To move things along, the ball is slathered in mashed carrots.

Whether there's any athletic skill involved �� aside from aggressive licking �� is an open question.

"Why pigs?" asked Nariner Bagmanyan, one of the event's organizers. "It's more interesting and you know, this kind of thing doesn't happen anywhere."