With the release of the latest version, Wordpress comes with new built-in features to manage its own tags, both for tag lists and tag clouds. In this quick review, we’ll see how to include in your postings pages all the necessary PHP stuff in order to show every posting with its related tag list, if defined by the user at the time of writing. The feature is available as template tag, to be used within the Loop, just a simple PHP code snippet you can include in your template’s index.php file, after the posting lines (or in a position suitable for you):

This works perfectly, and you don’t need to have a plugin to manage a tag list (like the nice Ultimate Tag Warrior). You can see this code at work here, at the bottom of this posting itself.

If you like, you can change the way tag list is echoed on the page by simply change the argument of the “the_tags()” function. To obtain an unordered list of tags for an article use this:

In a next quick tutorial we’ll see how to generate a tag cloud, that is a list of tag with a different character size for every tag in the list, based on its relative abundance within the global tag list of the blog.

Swiss AIDS experts launch a interesting and perhaps a risky statement: according to the experts, some people with HIV who meet strict conditions and are under treatment can safely have unprotected sex with non-infected partners.

The proposal astonished AIDS researchers in Europe and North America who have long argued that safe sex with a condom is the single most effective way of preventing the spread of the disease — apart from abstinence.

"Not only is (the Swiss proposal) dangerous, it’s misleading and it is not considering the implications of the biological facts involved with HIV transmission", said Jay Levy, director of the Laboratory for Tumor and AIDS Virus Research at the University of California in San Francisco.

The Swiss National AIDS Commission said patients who can satisfy strict conditions, including successful antiretroviral treatment to suppress the virus and who do not have any other sexually transmitted diseases, do not pose a danger to others. The proposal was published this week in the Bulletin of Swiss Medicine.

The Swiss scientists took as their starting point a 1999 study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which showed that transmission depends strongly on the viral load in the blood.

The other studies had also found that patients on regular AIDS treatment did not pass on the virus, and that HIV could not be detected in their genital fluids.

"Let’s be clear, the decision has to remain with the HIV-negative partner", said Pietro Vernazza, head of infectious diseases at the cantonal hospital of St. Gallen in Switzerland and an author of the report. The studies cited by the Swiss commission did not themselves definitively conclude whether people with HIV and on antiretroviral treatment could safely have unprotected sex without passing on the virus. The World Health Organization said Switzerland would be the first country in the world to try this approach.

"There is still some concern that you can never guarantee that somebody will not be infectious, and the evidence I have to say is not conclusive", said Charlie Gilks, director of AIDS treatment and prevention at WHO. "We are not going to be changing in any way our very clear recommendations that people on treatment continue to practice safer sex, including protected sex with a condom, in any relationship", he added.

In any case, of the 2 million people worldwide now receiving HIV treatment, only a very small number receive medical care comparable to that in Switzerland, Gilks said.

Reshade is an online service which allow user to resample an image with a very low quality loss. Online use is free, but there is also a stand-alone version available for use on offline computers for USD 149,00.

The intended purpose of reshade is to upsize/zoom images without degrading their quality. It was meant to overcome the problems with other algorithms available (including the ones in Photoshop) that create blurry enlargements. The algorithm was implemented to work well for small upsizes of about 2 times the original, but eventually it turned out to do a good job for any resizing factor.

See more details about reshade.com in the about section on the official website.

If you’d like to know more you can view a comparison of reshading with bicubic interpolation (best method from Photoshop CS3). Or if you are interested you can read about how the algorithm works. The freshest information can be found on the reshade blog.

doTemplate is a new free online web template generator. Creating your own template is fairly simple: first pick a template that suits your purposes from the public library, next customize it by changing colors, tweaking the fonts, and so on, with a great deal of flexibility. doTemplate can be used for XHTML, CSS and tableless web layouts, a great tool for web design professionals.

Warning, couch potatoes: resting on your laurels may be hazardous to your health, not to mention make you old before your time.

“A sedentary lifestyle increases the propensity to aging-related disease and premature death,” researchers at King’s College London report today in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. “Inactivity may diminish life expectancy not only by predisposing to aging-related diseases but also because it may influence the aging process itself.”

Researcher Lynn Cherkas and colleagues reached their conclusions by examining the genetic material extracted from blood samples of some 2,400 twins. They specifically studied the length of telomeres (repeated DNA sequences) on the ends of chromosomes in leukocytes (white blood cells); the protective caps are believed to be markers of biological aging, because they shrink over time.

Their findings: the telomeres of subjects who exercised the most (an average of 199 minutes weekly) were longer than those of volunteers who worked out the least (a mere 16 minutes or less a week). The discrepancy was enough, researchers wrote, to suggest that the exercise mavens were on average as much as a decade biologically younger than the slackers.

“Such a relationship between leukocyte telomere length and physical activity level remained significant after adjustment for body mass index, smoking, socioeconomic status and physical activity at work,” the authors report. “The mean difference in leukocyte telomere length between the most active and least active subjects was 200 nucleotides (chemical structural units of DNA and RNA), which means that the most active subjects had telomeres the same length as sedentary individuals up to 10 years younger, on average.”

The scientists speculate that stress, inflammation and oxidative stress (cell damage caused by oxygen exposure) may be responsible for shortened telomeres in physically inactive people. Exercise is among the factors found to help alleviate stress. Previous research has linked regular workouts to lower rates of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, high blood pressure, obesity and osteoporosis.

The researchers note that their findings support U.S. guidelines calling for individuals to exercise moderately for 30 minutes at least five days a week. “Our results. . . show that adults who partake in regular physical activity are biologically younger than sedentary individuals,” they say. “This conclusion provides a powerful message that could be used by clinicians to promote the potential anti-aging effect of regular exercise.”

Social Wallpapering is a community effort to classify, rank and distribute high resolution, high quality images to be used as computer wallpaper. A huge collection is yet available, with a practical division in galleries for standard display, widescreen monitor, dual display, all catalogued under different categories, such as “anime”