Milk and dairy is important in a healthy balanced diet, providing many nutrients essential for good health. Lucy Jones discusses the important role of milk and dairy plus there’s tips on how to boost your dairy intake. Fore more information regarding healthy dietary supplements visit tampabay.com.

Several celebrities ‘extreme’ diets suggest that milk and dairy should be avoided, however for many people cutting milk and dairy out is likely to do more harm than good as they play an important role within a healthy balanced diet. Milk and dairy foods are affordable, safe to consume daily, wholesome and a delicious source of essential nutrients, learn more about exipure healthy benefits.

Is it all about calcium?

Milk and dairy typically provide almost one third of our recommended calcium intakes but the nutrition provided by dairy products goes way beyond calcium alone. A single glass of semi-skimmed milk provides protein, phosphorus, potassium, iodine, riboflavin and pantothenic acid and a MASSIVE 72 per cent of our daily needs for vitamin B12. The main dietary source of B12 for vegetarians is dairy. For dentsit-related services, Smart1 Implant Abutments can be checked out!

Together, the nutrients in milk and dairy help to:

• Keep muscles, bones, nerves, teeth, skin and vision healthy
• Release energy from foods and reduce tiredness and fatigue
• Maintain healthy blood pressure
• Support normal growth and brain development
• And even support normal immune functioning

That’s pretty impressive for a humble glass of milk! The UK Eatwell Guide recommends that milk and dairy products and their alternatives, form part of a healthy balanced diet, and lower fat and lower sugar options should be chosen where possible. Check out the latest exipure reviews.

What about milk and dairy as we grow up?

Children grow rapidly in the first 5 years of life and have high energy needs. They only have small stomachs so need nutrient-dense foods to sustain them during growth. Whole milk and full fat dairy products provide useful energy, protein, vitamins and minerals to support growth and development. Milk also provides essential nutrients for growth and development and helps protect teeth against
dental caries.

Bones develop quickly in teenage years, with 40-60 per cent of peak bone mineral content being laid down in adolescence and 80-90 per cent of the skeleton being formed by the age of 18 years. A good diet in teenage years can increase bone mineral density which promotes healthy bones later in adult life, helping to prevent conditions like osteoporosis.

Hope you all had a wonderful Spring/Easter/Passover weekend. It was a beautiful one. I hosted a marvelous dinner party Sunday and made a wonderful pot roast that turned out quite scrumptious. I trust everyone had an equally pleasant time welcoming in the fine weather. If not, happy Spring! Learn more about tea burn benefits.

Spring is a wondrous time. It is, perhaps, my favorite season since it's not too hot, not too cold, but just right so to speak. It's so full of life and new beginnings as universally recognized by all peoples and faiths, its hard to feel blue...unless you mean that pastel Easter blue of course as seen above. The egg and rabbit are symbols of this green time for their association with birth and life. I only dyed eggs a few times in my youth but I have to give a round of applause to Jessica Jones and her Pantone Easter eggs, truly a designer's delight. And while our featured artist, Ryohei Hase, might have a more macabre and surrealistic interpretation of the other Easter symbol, the beauty of his works is unarguable. These are the best Exipure reviews.

Of course all that beautiful weather and green can only be appreciated if we venture outdoors which is what earns Cleanup Cleveland our website highlight. This site is the essence of one page perfection. It's streamlined, beautiful and has a consistent theme that turns what is essentially a web flier into a gorgeous piece of work. I love the paper cutout feel and the simple animated clouds in the header that give it just the right amount of movement and character. I especially like how it avoids the pitfalls many other one page sites fall victim to by keeping the amount of content reasonable, removing the need for complicated navigation and long load times as often occurs when sites are compressed to the one page aesthetic.

Lovely weather always makes me think of my own trips during lovely seasons. My favorite of which was my time in Greece. I've always had a bit of an obsession with ancient Greece and her myths. How fitting then that this week's video should be a touching story of new life (Spring theme remember!) and mythology. Enjoy this cute, catchy and capricious short animation. This is how Exipure works as a healthy supplement.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

This entire week is dedicated to today's inspiration: life after death. Whether Jesus' escaping death via resurrection or the Jews through some lamb's blood on their lintels, both Easter and Passover revolve around death and life. Such stories arise from the same inspiration as last week's theme apocalypse: legacy, on either the human or individual level for apocalypse and afterlife respectively. The idea that we could continue to exist postmortem, whether by phantasmal or other means, both appeals to and frightens us, making for some great creative fodder.

The work of Sam Wolfe Connelly is extremely evocative of this astral plane. The sensitive light touch of his works combined with a wonderful pastel palette has a deep emotional, and ghostly, effect. Add to this the surreal quality of many of his works and we have a strong contender for this week's stills spotlight. The fact that he is merely a year older than myself and uses more or less the same materials, graphite and digital, further interests and motivates me. I especially love his series of portraits through crystals (NSFW), crystals appearing to be a prevalent theme in his work and an admirable one at that for all the difficulty in their proper realization.

Regardless of how the idea of the undead makes us feel, the implications associated are universal: darkness. Never has a ghost been seen by the light of day and even their other undead brethren prefer the darkness of night. The site for the new "Under the Psycamore" album I is a beautiful example of how stunning such darkness can be. I love the simple graphical layout of the single page promotional site. The use of the beige elements for angle and texture is striking and the simplicity of the design allows for intuitive adaptability to all screen sizes. The site has clear cut goals and excels in their execution. My only nitpick would be the wide variation in font type and size which varies between being a nice effect all the way down to obscuring the copy.

But we must finish how we started: with the most famous example of life after death. Say what you will about Jesus, his story is surely a fascinating one. The following animated short captures the essence of the Bible while adapting it to the modern day and making it quite "hip." The studio behind the piece, CRCR, are quite a talented group and their strangely marvelous work and graphic website deserve praise. Enjoy and have a great holiday.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

There are few things more inspiring than a beginning, perhaps only an ending. Humanity's fascination with the end stretches back to the dawn of religion when the first creation and destruction myths were told. Yet we seem ever more possessed with the latter as intuitively we know all things end. One need only look at the yearly predictions of the end for proof. Such forecasts will invariably grow more prevalent with 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar, approaching (though their calendars ended fairy regularly making the doomsday connection meaningless). This obsession's roots can be expressed as a single question: what will remain of us after we're gone? From this single question endless amounts of work have poured forth, from best-selling novels to blockbuster films.

My personal interest in the post-apocalypse stems from the way it turns the tables. To us, our constructions seem indelible but most trances of humanity would be wiped off the Earth within a couple centuries if we weren't here to maintain them. A look at the haunting photography from post-fallout Chernobyl is a chilling reminder of this fact. But such devastation doesn't require a nuclear accident to occur. All that is needed is time and nature as the photography of Peter Lippmann beautifully illustrates in his series, Paradise Parking and Photo Finish.

Of course there was no era as obsessed with the end of world as the decades of the Cold War when both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. seemed a hair's breadth away from pushing the nuclear launch button. The aesthetic from that era speaks of hope for a technological future mingled with the fear that civilization wouldn't live long enough to see it. The website for Small Studio based in Australia captures this era wonderfully with a modern graphic twist that is to die for. I love the simple one page horizontal design. My only gripe is the reliance on large light boxes for additional information where I think a more elegant solution could have been integrated. As a side note, I feel that almost all of these one page sectional sites require some code to cause the window to lock onto each section so you don't end up between two when scrolling.

I was inspired to do an apocalyptic post after seeing the following short, RUIN by OddBall Animation. More is to come which has me very excited. I hope to see this made into something, anything, I can pay for. It's just that good! I love the setting especially. The overgrown skyscrapers sate my desire to see what an abandoned New York City would eventually become. The cinematography is gorgeous, resulting in one of the best chase sequences I've seen in years.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

Avast pirates seem to be the hot new thing. Between last month's Wired and Megaupload woes, it's impossible to escape these swashbuckling bandits of seas both wet and digital. Probably every illustrator has drawn a sexy pirate and now I'm no exception. She turned out pretty good but could use some ratio refinements and such. For the time I'm happy with it. I had hired a Illustration Agency to help with some art work.

Of course it's not happenstance that Pirates, in their classic crusty form and otherwise, remain such a popular subject for creatives worldwide. Something about their almost noble quest for freedom and booty overshadows their darker aspects. I remember growing up scared stiff of pirates with tales of Black Beard and the like. However, three Johnny Depp movies later I'm not so fearful.

But pirates aren't only relegated to their 18th century ships. The ideas they represent: independence, camaraderie, freedom and exploration with  a dash of questionable morality have reached into nearly every genre imaginable from sci-fi (Firefly) to non-fiction (The Social Network). Yet despite the dark overtones, a key aspect of any pirate story is the child-like longing the induce. The artwork of Peter Ferguson exemplifies this story-book view of pirates, and many other classic themes, gorgeously. His crisp sepia-toned works are equal parts Rockwell and fantasy.

Ferguson's pieces have an unavoidable story-book feel but their complexity defies such a simplification. His composition's are extremely nuanced to the point that the small images available on his website cannot possibly do justice to the work. Furthermore his sense of texture, perspective and color is impeccable. While his commercial work all has a very similar feel to it, it's nice to see his magazine, personal and sketchbook work to get a better feel for his versatility. It's hard not to think of turn-of-the-century commercial illustrations when going through his portfolio.

One can hardly go anywhere on the web without running into pirates. That hacker-geek culture would take up the monicker seems inevitable. Yet for all their digital raiding, internet pirates lack any sense of design (see 4Chan, Reddit and Pirate Bay, Anonymous being an exception). However some in the internet community, like Bones of Themble, took the theme of pirates and did some beautiful things.

The beautiful artwork aside, this site is clear and wonderfully laid out. The animated HTML5 header is very well done as well. Moreover the site is marvelously responsive, going to a still one-column layout on resize. Bravo.

But let's not forget the pirate's Scandinavian counterpart: the Viking. In tribute, please enjoy the following music video/rock battle/robot fight. A classic but still amazing.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

I share a sentiment common with most of you (I hope): I love food! There are so few similarly universal aspects of life and I've already covered a major one in my dreams post. It seems only fitting to focus on food this week as we wrap up a cuisine related project.

I never understood picky eaters. There are so many amazing things out there to taste and try. I always opt for the strangest, newest option whenever ordering off a menu and while what I get may disappoint, at least its a new experience.

While today's sketch started a metaphor for the hunger of my brain, I feel its suitably food related. It represents my craving for new information, often food related as I said above. I'm always exploring new recipes to cook and unique things to eat. In fact, I love cooking since it's an art form you can eat. I'm working from home today so this became an exercise in digital art sans my normal tools, namely my tablet. Tough sauce.

While food can make for a fascinating subject, it can also be a stunning medium as evidenced by the food photography of Ilian. While food art is something we've all played around with, either on the dinner plate or on a Halloween night, Ilian's work showcases a whole other level. He turns these organic canvases into sleek modern works of art.

Of course what's a fine meal if not accompanied by fine drink, specifically a complementary vintage. Switch Wine is a small wine bottler based in Australia with a gorgeously simple site. It follows the trend of scrolling sites with animated elements based on your position but I quite like their minimalist approach and the beautiful graphics that accompany each vibrant page.

Most people typically eat the best and strangest foods when they travel. There's something very special about trying new and exotic foods abroad; every meal is an adventure. This STA ad, one of an amazing series, encapsulates that great feeling of being presented with a beautiful dish in an out-of-the-way restaurant far from home and taking your first succulent bite. Yum. Savory. Now if you'll excuse me, it's lunch time.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

Some say our ability to recognize ourselves in our reflections is a defining human characteristic. From Narcissus to Snow White, our obsession with reflections has permeated our lives. You could say this is an extension of our vanity and consciousness. A close relative to reflection, symmetry, is in fact one of the most important aspects of any creative work. Either playing to or against it can create striking works from simple elements. We seem to prefer this sameness but asymmetry can be just as potent if not more so.

Deadlines loom and thus today's sketch is a quick one. More of a proof of concept rather than a full piece. Reflections have been integral to my work. It is by looking at a mirror that I learned much of the human face and anatomy. In fact, to this day when I draw a face from scratch it looks quite similar to its creator. I'm convinced it is this self-modeling that makes it easier for artists to make things that resemble themselves. For instance I've always found it easy to draw tall lanky men but difficult to draw female, elderly, or fat people without reference.

Christian Montenegro experiments with symmetry extensively in his vector work. I love how his work evokes the medieval portraiture of old while maintaining a modern graphic and comic feel. Many feel like details of some larger Bosche piece, a classical favorite of mine, seen through a modern illustrator's lens. In fact, many of his series deal with similarly classic themes such as the Seven Deadly Sins or Tarot Cards (seen below).

Of course there is no lack of symmetry in web design. Most pages rely on it in fact, with small exceptions made for logos and menus. But few do it with the precision or resplendence of the website for studio Soleil Noir's 2012 New Year's wishes.

The site is a mesmerizing cacophony of color and animation. Truly, I'd say this is less a website as it is an interactive power point presentation. However I have to commend it for its use of  brilliantly colored, overlapping and animated elements. Sadly it has the same failings of many of these ever-so-trending parallax scrolling sites: performance, navigation, purpose, and smoothness are all lacking.

If you stick solely to the navigation links on the right, each slide animates nicely. However as you scroll they begin to slow down. Thankfully the animations are not driven by the scroll itself like on so many other sites of this ilk but since they're all animated seemingly all the time, performance seems reduced (I find it ironic that one slide is titled "believe in flash" but the entire site is done in HTML5). Also, the lack of a clear purpose makes this an interesting art piece but little more. But this is fitting as the piece is meant solely to highlight what the company is looking forward to in the New Year, a visual resolution list of you will.

What spurred this interest with reflections, symmetry and mirrors this week you may ask? Well it was one well done, rainbow colored (this week's sub-theme apparently) video. Reminiscent of an OK Go music video for its lo-fi ingenuity, the music video for Off the Wall by Yuksek is disarmingly gorgeous. After feasting your eyes on its magnificence I'd suggest shutting down your computer and enjoying your reflection in the darkened reflection of your monitor. Not only will you disconnect for a bit but you'll get a feel for what your poor computer has to stare at all day. Enjoy!

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

On August 31, 1955, a small vehicle — just 15 inches (38 cm) long— became a major attraction at the General Motors Powerama auto show in Chicago. It was not a toy. It was the first solar-powered car in history, or more specifically, a futuristic miniature that attempted to establish the foundation for a future where vehicles are fueled by a clean, inexhaustible energy source: the sun. Do have a peek at this web-site to know about the best fleet tracking services that is available around the area.

A DECADE-LONG EVOLUTION

This first miniature model “solar car” was named Sunmobile and was the brainchild of William G. Cobb, a General Motors employee. It ran on 12 photovoltaic cells attached to its roof, producing the energy needed to power the little vehicle’s engine. The Sunmobile painted a futuristic picture of where the car industry could be headed, except that it was impossible to bring the concept to fruition because the maximum power that the solar panels could produce was not enough to run any of the automobiles of the era. It was the first of many prototypes, learn more about the benefits of Effuel.

The first real-size, sun-powered model came a few years later, in 1960. U.S. company, International Rectifier, converted a 1912 Baker Electric, into a solar-powered car that reached just over 12 mph (20km/h) with a duration of three hours.

The Bluebird, built by Ed Passeneri in 1977 is considered by some to be the first real solar vehicle. It had three wheels and could move by dint of the energy created by photovoltaic cells, without the use of a battery. In 1982, The Quiet Achiever became the first solar-powered car that could go for long distances. It covered 2,485 miles (4,000 km), traveling from the west coast of Australia to the east coast in less than 20 days.

The 1980s ushered in what is still today the primary use of solar-powered vehicles: racing. In 1985, the first official solar-powered vehicle race was held in Switzerland: the Tour de Sol. The best known race today is the World Solar Challenge, which was first held in 1987. It is now a biannual event, and for the most part its participants are university and corporate teams. The automobiles that participate are light vehicles covered in solar panels which was bought from solar system St. George — typically a single square — and they move on three wheels about the size of bicycle tires. Hence they are a far cry from a workable prototype for present day commercial automobiles.

TODAY’S SOLAR-POWERED AUTOMOBILES

Apart from the world of racing, photovoltaic cell technology is not currently prevalent in the automobile market. The primary obstacles are the prohibitive cost associated with rolling out the technology, the space constraints which cap the number of panels that can be placed on the car, the distance the car can travel, and the speed it can reach.

There are a number of solar-powered vehicle initiatives that have tried to open the door to the consumer. One of the most talked about is Lightyear One. With a distance capacity of 435 miles (700 kilometers), it uses photovoltaic cells that, according to its creators, can store 20 percent more energy than traditional ones, and they operate independently, even when some are covered by shade. With a €150,000 price tag, it is not a viable option for most people, but the idea that this technology and Squickmons CNC burn tables could be used by other manufacturers holds interesting promise.

It's hard to say two sentences about inspiration without mentioning dreams. The most interesting thing about dreams is that they are an entire world, separate from our waking one. Though the true nature of dreams is not fully understood, there are many theories running the gamut from the physiological to the spiritual in nature. I believe that dreams are by and large our way of digesting information. We have a voracious appetite when it comes to ideas and just as a burger must be taken apart by our bellies, so must the latest episode of 30 Rock by our head. However this process can be quite messy as many dreams are strange amalgamations of reality and surreal, the cerebral and primal.

The above is a detail from a larger piece I did a long time ago while traveling through Italy. It's a scene from one of the most vivid dreams I've ever had. The dream wasn't necessarily scary as it was tragic but it was so intense that I nearly cried after waking up. It would be nice to paint the entire piece but just doing this one part half-assed took long enough as it is.

My fascination with dreams goes back quite a ways and is partly how I justify my fairly atrocious sleeping habits. I even kept a dream journal at one point (a practice I highly suggest everyone try). This passion for the Sandman's empire greatly influenced my tastes, leading me to adopt surrealists like Dalí and Chagall as favorite artists early on. The work of one Jacek Yerka brings such work to mind. His combination of hyper-realism and surrealism is reminiscent of some Dalí works yet they possess a unique attention to detail that even Dalí forwent. In addition, the artist's meticulous layouts are quite captivating.

If that weren't enough, his tendency towards symmetry is yet another aspect of his work I love. Clearly his work would be right at home on an album cover...maybe a few decades ago. My only issue with his work is that despite the wide variety of scenes, they all share a very similar palette and sense of scale. Most use a combination of pastel yellows, greens and blues with slight variations. Likewise all focus on a singular subject or setting at medium length possibly with some landscape in the background.

Of course it is very difficult to get across any sensible idea using surreality and as such very difficult to create a website one could safely call "surreal." Jim Carrey's website comes to mind for its whimsical nature, a good reflection of the man himself, but Flash is the devil so we must search elsewhere as hard as it is to avoid in cases like this. It's actually quite hard to find "surreal" sites which is a real shame. I've always felt that a websites greatest potential is to become a window to another world so why not a dreamworld? Thankfully a few such sites exist and Dreispitzhalle is one of the few of those to do it well.

The layout of this site simply gorgeous, with its stunning black and white backgrounds cut into strange abstract patterns. This makes the page feel very kinetic, as if it's about start moving at any moment. I also love subtle touches like the smooth menu hover states and the amorphous animated logo and matching browser bar icon (nice touch!).

In contrast to its absence in web, dreams are almost inescapable in film. Indeed one of last year's biggest hits, Inception, was completely based around the concept. While the dreamworld is often used as a parallel setting, often the setting is never explicitly declared to be a dream but we somehow reflexively know it to be i.e. if the walls are melting. Dreams, like so many great inspiring things, are universal to the human experience allowing all to recognize and empathize. Some even claim to have shared dreams and there are even certain dreams common to all people (teeth falling out, naked in school, etc.), not to mention the entire science of dream reading. It's hard to know whats true or not when it comes to the unconscious world (third eyes, not so much). Yet maybe that's fitting since that's how that worlds works anyway. If the following video were true, it would all be a lot more straight forward. Sweet dreams.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

I can easily say music is the most inspiring thing in my day to day life. The first CD player I remember owning was a gold Sony Walkman. Now it's iPhone every day, morning and night, at the office or at home. It's what gets me through my art, code, errands and commute all alike. I've always felt the right song can make anything better which is why I love DJing at parties and the like.

The sketch this week came out of some doodles I was doing for a friend's concert poster. I went with a block-print look in the coloring and I feel it came out wonderfully. I'd like to spend more time on the lines and colors, especially of the character, since I made her nearly perfectly symmetrical to save time.

I love going to concerts and seeing people dressed to the nines as she is. But most of the time, music is my escape rather than my destination. That's why if you ever see me in the street, I'm always wearing my headphones and while I don't own a pair of Urban Ears, I greatly respect every aspect of the company's design. While I could easily highlight them for their strengths in stills, video and web, I think I'll just share their photography for now.

Besides the great choice of vibrant colors used in their products, I love how they've incorporated their products into these intricate, and bemusing, scenes that capture the customer's attention. Give their site a quick look and revel in the catchy hues and fun videos showcasing their headsets. They're very affordable and stylish, I'd love to give them a try sometime.

I've felt for awhile now that the music one listens to can be a quite a defining characteristic of a person. Assuming others use music as I do; to enter into their own world outside of their surroundings, it must reflect how they think in order to allow us to detach. If a person creates music, we can learn that much more about them. Clearly Dan Mall realizes this as personal description on his site changes from "pianist" to "designer" to "speaker" to "new dad" in sequence.

The site is filled with such marvelous little touches that go miles towards clearly differentiating him as not only a superb designer but also a superb individual. It's hard not to like the guy even though we're only "meeting" him through his own website. Take a look at his "About" section which includes funny little snippets like "Days without soda" and "I cut my own hair." On top of that, his portfolio, blog and more are all laid out beautifully, simultaneously respecting and pushing the gridded layout of his site. Walking this line between the order and organic can be quite difficult but he pulls it off marvelously.

Obviously music and video have been intricately linked since the birth of MTV. However the new era of digital distribution has redefined the musical handbook. Simply watch the documentary PressPausePlay previously showcased in the Voice if you don't believe me. There is a new era for both musicians and music video creators with an incredibly low barrier to entry. This is most clearly embodied by the rise to fame of OK Go thanks in large part to their ingenious viral music videos. I especially love the number of amazing animated music videos now being released on a seemingly daily basis. I was overjoyed to see a new such video from one of my favorite musicians, Gotye, who will actually be coming to NYC soon. The touching story of a girl growing up and leaving behind her childhood (in the form of a pack of cute buffalo creatures) accompanies his song "Bronte" perfectly.

Keep listening as I know I will and feel free to share your great new musical finds. Mine? Phantogram.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.