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Computer Taught To Recognize Attractiveness In Women "Beauty," goes the old saying, "is in the eye of the beholder." But does the beholder have to be human? (Credit: iStockphoto) ScienceDaily (Apr. 5, 2008) — "Beauty," goes the old saying, "is in the eye of the beholder." But does the beholder have to be human? Not necessarily, say scientists at Tel Aviv University. Amit Kagian, an M.Sc. graduate from the TAU School of Computer Sciences, has successfully "taught" a computer how to interpret attractiveness in women. But there's a more serious dimension to this issue that reaches beyond mere vanity. The...

SAN FRANCISCO, (AP) -- A San Francisco jury has found former cyclist Tammy Thomas guilty of lying to a grand jury about her steroids use. The first person in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative investigation to go to trial, Thomas was convicted Friday of three counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice. The jury acquitted her of two counts of perjury.

Former cycling champion Tammy Thomas seemed to be in the midst of shaving her face when an Olympic drug tester paid her an unannounced visit in 2002, according to testimony Wednesday in her trial on perjury charges. Tom McVay, a tester for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, told a jury in U.S. District Court in San Francisco that on March 14, 2002, he was assigned to locate Thomas at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, east of San Diego, and collect a urine sample for a steroid test. The visit was memorable, McVay said, because of Thomas' appearance when she...

Caught up in the BALCO steroids scandal, an elite athlete adamantly denies using banned drugs, then mounts an aggressive defense to a perjury indictment. It sounds like the case of former Giants slugger Barry Bonds, accused of lying under oath to the federal grand jury that investigated Burlingame's Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative steroid ring in 2003.Instead, starting today in federal court in San Francisco, a lesser-known American sports champion - Tammy Thomas, a onetime star of bicycle track racing - goes on trial, charged with perjury and obstruction of justice. Her case is of interest because it amounts to a...

Soon the tentacles of the BALCO doping case had reached into professional baseball and football, into Olympic track and field, into championship boxing, into the very consciousness of the American sports fan. There was grand-jury testimony and U.S. Anti-Doping Agency sanctions and congressional hearings with pumped-up athletes stuffed into designer suits talking about designer steroids. And now the trail has led to a three-story beige building in the cornfields of central Illinois, to a nutritional supplement company called Proviant Technologies and what investigators believe is the true genius behind the whole operation. To a 39-year-old organic chemist who signed off...