This week, the scope of the due date has been narrowed even further.

According to an E! News report, Middleton spoke with the press in Glasgow, telling them that “mid-July” is when the baby is expected. “It’s around mid-July, but apparently babies have their own agenda,” the Duchess is quoted as saying.

The Duke and Duchess were in Glasgow this week as part of a two-day tour of Scotland. The couple met with Prince Charles today at Dumfries House in Ayrshire, Scotland, where they were scheduled to participate in the opening of a new Outdoor Center.

The Telegraph reports that the British government responded to the FoI request with a detailed plan on how Britain would emerge from any kind of apocalyptic event, whether it be zombies or Mayan doomsday prophecies. The government says that the Cabinet Office would lead efforts to “return England to its pre-attack glory.”

As for the Ministry of Defense, the agency said it would only provide military support to the civil authorities during an outbreak of the undead. The agency said, however, that it “holds no information” on the matter of how the Cabinet Office would coordinate military forces in beating back a zombie plague.

Might I suggest that the British government catch up on some solid zombie killing guides as seen in such films as Dawn of the Dead, Evil Dead and Shaun of the Dead.

Omalizumab currently has a U.K. marketing authorization as an add-on therapy for persistent allergic asthma in adults and children. It works by blocking immunoglobulin E antibodies from attaching to allergens.

NICE stated that new evidence, including new mortality data, that has be come available influenced its decision. It also took into account the dosing schedule for the drug, and the effect that had on its cost effectiveness. These factors and other “uncertainties in the evidence and analysis presented,” influenced NICE to withhold a recommendation for omalizumab. The health-related quality of life benefits of the drug are not currently considered quantifiable, and were not part of the economic modeling used by NICE.

“The Committee is aware that severe, persistent allergic asthma can have a detrimental effect on a person’s life and that omalizumab is an effective therapy for children, adolescents and adults with severe persistent allergic asthma,” said Sir Andrew Dillon, chief executive of NICE. “But new evidence that has become available since our original appraisal of omalizumab in 2007 indicates that it is not as clinically or cost-effective as was first thought. The Committee explored ways to identify a subgroup of people for whom omalizumab might provide a cost effective treatment, including using favorable assumptions in the modeling. In addition, the Committee recognized that there could be additional health-related benefits for patients and carers as a result of using omalizumab. However, there was no quantifiable data relating to these benefits. Unfortunately, the Committee was unable to continue to recommend omalizumab for use in the NHS. The next step is for the manufacturer and other consultees to respond to the Committee’s concerns.”

The team of researchers working on the Bloodhound haven’t actually created the car just yet. They’re currently experimenting with the engine to make sure that the rocket-powered car is actually viable. The power required to hit 1,000 MPH on land would completely destroy most engines, but these guys seem to have done it.

In the below video, you can see the results of the first engine test. According to International Science Times, the engine reached 30,000 horsepower during its 10 second run. By the end of their experiments, they expect the engine to reach 80,000 horsepower and 27,500 pounds of thrust.

For comparison, the current record holder for world’s fastest street legal car – the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport – has a horsepower of only 1,200. In a 10-second test, the Bloodhound’s engine has already surpassed the Bugatii’s engine by almost 30 times over. The Bloodhound will be a sight to behold once it reaches the 80,000 HP threshold.

Of course, this first test was closely controlled and monitored by a team of professionals. Once the engine is strapped to a car, anything could happen. Regardless, it’s still amazing that a car’s engine has been able to obtain this kind of power. It will be interesting to see what happens when they perform the first field test.

British Airways thinks they can and they’re going to invade your privacy to do it. They will equip all of their flight attendants with iPads and task them to search for frequent flyers on Google as part of a new program called “Know Me.” These attendants will then collect all the information they can on said frequent flyers alongside with pictures so they can identify you and greet you by name.

As you probably guessed, the move has a lot of people criticizing British Airways. In their defense, it seems that they do have genuinely good intentions with the initiative. The company’s head of customer analysis, Jo Boswell, told betanews that they’re “trying to recreate the feeling of recognition you get in a favorite restaurant when you’re welcomed there, but in our case it will be delivered by thousands of staff to millions of customers.”

I can totally get behind BA providing a more personal service. It’s a nice gesture and it will go a long way to make what could be a miserable plane ride at least tolerable. My problem is that they are using Google to look up information and pictures of the passenger. Do they think that every name is unique and that people don’t look alike?

Here’s a better idea for British Airways. They should offer frequent fliers the option to upload personal information (name, likes, dislikes) and a picture to some kind of database. The flight attendants could then use this as an extra perk that they could offer to frequent fliers. I’m sure some people, no matter how often they fly, don’t want to get chummy with flight attendants.

Meet Florance Colgate, an 18 year old from Deal, Kent in England, who has been named the most beautiful woman in Britain following a contest by ITV’s Lorraine program. The contest wanted to find the most beautiful face without make-up. At the behest of her family, friends, and chip shop customer, she entered. Florence beat out 8,000 other customers for this honor and will have her face on billboards all over the country, and she will get to go to a modeling agency in London .

When asked about some beauty tips, this is what she had to say: “My advice is for people to make sure they keep their skin really clean, drink lots of water and eat a healthy diet.” She added, “eat a lot of fruit.”

The ancient Greeks have a formula for beauty that they concocted over 2,000 years ago. It has as much to do with math as it does symetry. Florence’s face is almost perfectly symmetrical. Carmen Lefèvre, from the University of St Andrews said beauty is strongly linked to symmetry. ‘Florence has all the classic signs of beauty,’ she added. ‘She has large eyes, high cheekbones, full lips and a fair complexion. Symmetry appears to be a very important cue to attractiveness.

According to eHow, this is how you measure your face using the method invented by the Greeks to see if it is perfect:

1. Take a snapshot of your face with a digital camera, and save the photo on your computer.
2. Use a graphics program (such as Adobe Photoshop) to calculate measurements with the help of the program’s measurement tool. To calculate more accurate measurements, use the zoom tool to magnify during the measurement process.
3. Calculate the length and the width of the face. Divide the length by the width. According to the Golden Ratio, the ideal result for an attractive face would be 1.6, as Greeks believed a beautiful face is 1.6 times longer than its width.
4. Measure these distances with the help of the graphics program. These measurements are a subset of the measurements described in Steps 1 and 2.
a. Top of head to chin
b. Top of head to pupil
c. Pupil to nose tip
d. Pupil to lip
e. Width of nose
f. Outside distance between eyes
g. Width of head
h. Hairline to pupil
i. Nose tip to chin
j. Lips to chin
k. Length of lips
l. Nose tip to lips

5. Complete these equations using the calculations from Step 4.
1. a divided by g
2. b divided by d
3. i divided by j
4. i divided by c
5. e divided by l
6. f divided by h
7. k divided by e

6. Compute the calculations in Step 5. Every face is structured differently and will have different measurements, so there will be no similarity in the final set of results. According to the Greek Ratio, a face that has 8 values approximately equal to 1.6 can be described as a perfect–and beautiful–face.

Here is a story that Good Morning America did. I know it is hard to not hate on her because she is s beautiful, but she does seem really nice and humble. I know if it was me, I’d be like “BAM! In your Face, SUCKA.” But apparently is she not just perfect looking but is also a better person than me!

The study looked at 484 million tweets by more than 9.8 million users over a period of 31 months. The study covers the timeframe from July of 2009 to January of this year. Over the course of the last two years the UK has faced three major events: the budget cuts announcement from October 2010, the royal wedding of Prince William in Aprill 2011, and the riots in August 2011.

From the study abstract:

Our findings, besides corroborating our choice of method for the detection of public mood, also present intriguing patterns that can be explained in terms of events and social changes. On the one hand, the time series we obtain show that periodic events such as Christmas and Halloween evoke similar mood patterns every year. On the other hand, we see that a significant increase in negative mood indicators coincide with the announcement of the cuts to public spending by the government, and that this effect is still lasting. We also detect events such as the riots of summer 2011, as well as a possible calming effect coinciding with the run up to the royal wedding.

The study captured standard public mood measurements, such as sadness peaking on Halloween and Joy peaking on Christmas. However, the study captured something I find interesting about the mood of the British public around the time of the riots last year. In the month leading up to the riots, anger can be seen spiking heavily, and the riots are followed by a cathartic lowering of anger. The odd part is that fear during the riots did not have nearly as significant a rise as did anger. Fear did match anger, though, when the budget cuts were announced in October 2010. This suggests to me that the British public fears poverty more than London or Manchester being on fire, but I, like the authors of the study, leave such interpretations to social scientists.

The study was presented at the Workshop on Social Media Applications in News and Entertainment being held in Lyon, France. The workshop is co-located with the World Wide Web 2012 conference. The authors of the study are Thomas Lansdall-Welfare, Vasileios Lampos, and Nello Cristianini.

According to the Guardian, in January they remained the second largest online newspaper in the UK, with daily users rising 22.31% to 3,592,387. The Guardian News & Media website network as a whole, that includes MediaGuardian, recorded 63,171,662 monthly online users. UK’s Independent took a big hit in the same month, losing 17.09% viewership to 13,126,707. Daily unique users dropped by 20.52% to 602,856.

Mail Online was also the most popular online newspaper in the world, for the second month in a row, according to comScore data, with 51.7 million unique users in January, ahead of The New York Times’ 47.9 million. News International’s Sun website continued to exhibit growth with 1,471,788 daily users and 24,055,155 monthly users, with increases of 9.9% and 8.69% respectively. The UK Telegraph was up 14% in usership to 2,458,826 for the month, with 48,292,476 total hits in 2011.

One might wonder how the Mail Online, which reads like a lower-middle brow tabloid became more popular than The New York Times on the web. After quick inspection, at least to me, most things on the site are clickable. Meaning, OF COURSE I want to know about Jennifer Aniston’s new obsession with laser therapy. What does that even mean? For her mind? After scrolling down a bit, it is clear that I want to read almost everything I’m seeing, which wouldn’t demand much concentration. And there are a lot of nice colors too. Very contrasty. But none of this mail is really “news,” for that matter. The opinions are fairly vague, there’s not much to see by the way of politics, and the stories are all acceptably offensive, meaning, I don’t see a reader actually getting angry and being put off by the content. The page seems detached to anything really, which is likely why it’s so popular. I like how this guy just grew out of his blueness:

Reuters is reporting that Glenn Mangham, a 26-year-old British student, said that he hacked Facebook from his parent’s house last year. The hack was apparently so severe that Facebook thought that they were dealing with “major industrial espionage.”

“This was the most extensive and flagrant incidence of social media hacking to be brought before British courts,” Alison Saunders, London’s Chief Prosecutor, said. “Fortunately, this did not involve any personal user data being compromised.”

Facebook took notice of the hack in April of last year and called the FBI to track the source. Once confirming the source of the hack, British police raided the home of Mangham in June.

This apparently was caused by Mangham wanting to help Facebook improve their security. He had reportedly once been hired by Yahoo to improve their security. The explanation was tossed out by the prosecution. They said that the hack couldn’t be anything but malicious.

What may have been a major factor in the case is that Facebook had reportedly spent $200,000 in dealing with the hack.

The judge made a point to use Mangham as an example to other would-be hackers by saying that these kind of attacks have “real consequences” and could be “utterly disastrous” for Web sites like Facebook.

The lesson to be learned in all of this is that you shouldn’t hack a Web site unless you’re hired by them to improve their security. Don’t just hack a Web site hoping to get a job with their security team. You’re more than likely going to end up in prison.

He says that he is innocent but will resign to “avoid distraction” according to the BBC.

Business Minister Ed Davey will replace him, but those in government hope he returns soon.

Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer said that there was enough evidence to bring criminal charges against both Mr. Huhne and Ms. Pryce.

“The essence of the charges is that between March and May 2003, Mr Huhne, having allegedly committed a speeding offence, falsely informed the investigating authorities that Ms Pryce had been the driver of the vehicle in question, and she falsely accepted that she was the driver,” he said.

Both are due to appear in court on February 16.

In a statement, Huhne said that he was innocent of the charge and intends to fight the charges in court. He said that he resigned to avoid distraction to both his duties as energy secretary and his upcoming trial. He will continue to serve his constituents in Eastleigh though.

Prime Minister David Cameron said that Huhne made the right choice in stepping down.

“I want to thank him for the very good work that he has done in government, both in helping to bring the coalition government together and as secretary of state for energy and climate change,” Cameron said.

Hunhe is entitled to a severance payment of £17,207. A prime minister spokesperson said that it was up to Hunhe in regards to the funds.

Of course, the Twitter reaction has varied from support for Huhne to the snark that Twitter is known and loved for.