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David Ferrer says he is ready to face the toughest challenge in world tennis - going up against Rafael Nadal on the claycourts of Roland Garros at the French Open.

The player they call "The Bulldozer" because of his relentless and attritional style has played 19 times against his fellow Spaniard and he has lost 15 of them.

Oddly for two such claycourt stalwarts, only once previously have they met at Roland Garros and that was in 2005 when Nadal made his debut in Paris and won comfortably 7-5, 6-2, 6-0 before going on to win his first Grand Slam title.

In fact the only time that Ferrer, who at 30 is four years older than Nadal, has beat him on clay was in their very first meeting in Stuttgart in 2004 and even that took three tough sets to get the job done.

The hard facts make grim reading for the hopes of Ferrer ahead of Friday's semi-final.

Nadal's straight sets victory over another Spaniard, Nicolas Almagro, in the quarter-finals brought up his 50th win at Roland Garros against just the one defeat - to Swede Robin Soderling in the 2009 fourth round.

On top of that, Nadal has added motivation this year as a win on Sunday would make him the first man to win seven French Open titles, snapping a tie with Swedish legend Bjorn Borg.

It would also be his 11th Grand Slam title, putting him level with Borg and Rod Laver.

Ferrer, through to his first semi-final here, insists that defeat for him is not inevitable.

"Yes, Rafa is always difficult to play. Even more so on clay," he said.

"But as I said and I will say again - I will try and play a beautiful match, my best tennis. I have great ambitions, and I'm quite certain this is going to be a very physical match."

The two have met twice on clay in the buildup to Paris, in Rome and Barcelona, with Nadal winning both in straight sets, but Ferrer came agonisingly close to taking the first set in the Italian capital before ceding in a tie-break. He then lost the second set 6-0.

That, he says, is the problem against Nadal - he never, ever lets up.

"In Rome it was different, because I had opportunities to win a set, but he played extremely well," he said.

"I think you can win a set against Rafa, but there is a difference between winning a set and winning a match.

"Winning a match against Rafa is almost impossible. He is in such good shape."

Nadal, who has yet to drop a set this year at Roland Garros, is full of praise for his Davis Cup partner and close friend.

"His game bothers everybody because he's one of the best players in the world on every surface, on clay especially," he said.

"He's a complete player. It's very difficult to play against him, because his movements are probably the best of the world, and he's able to hit the ball very early a lot of the times.

"It will be a very tough match."

Friday's other semi-final is a repeat of last year with top seed Novak Djokovic going up against third seed Roger Federer.

Neither player has ever beaten Nadal at Roland Garros.

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"You can't really change much in one day. I think I would like to be president for a longer time. I wouldn't spend as much money for weapons of mass destruction but instead for education and art," Contactmusic quoted her as saying when asked what she would do if she was President of the United States for one day.

Although she has achieved worldwide success, Madonna's ambition and drive has not diminished over the years.

The 53-year-old singer attributes her success to her thirst for reinvention and never taking ''anything for granted".

"It's harder to stay famous than become famous. I don't think there's a rule for that (staying successful). You have to really love what you're doing. "You have to feed your soul with ideas and you're not allowed to stop growing as a human. That's what helps to create art. When it comes to my work I don't take anything for granted," she added.

Sofia: A strong 5.8-magnitude quake rocked Bulgaria shortly after 3:00 am (0000 GMT) on Tuesday, Bulgaria's Seismological Institute said.

"The magnitude measured so far was 5.8 on the Richter scale with the epicentre near Sofia, between the towns of Pernik and Radomir," a spokeswoman at the institute told AFP.

"We have been registering many aftershocks since then," she added.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or damages but the jolt was felt very strongly on the top floors of buildings in Sofia.

Residents of tall apartment buildings in Sofia said objects crashed to the ground during the tremor which lasted several minutes and was immediately followed by at least one aftershock.

"Everything was shaking like crazy. I ran out shouting... I won't go back home today," teenager Maria told AFP outside her apartment building in a western Sofia neighbourhood.

People, who were still sitting outside in their pyjamas over an hour after the first jolt, said they felt a new tremor around 4:30 am (0130 GMT).

The seismological institute measured it at 4.2 - 4.3 on the Richter scale, it said.

Civil defence chief Nikolay Nikolov said his service received many reports of toppled chimneys and cracked walls and even broken windows in the region of Pernik, some 30 kilometers (20 miles) southwest of Sofia.

There were no reports of interruptions of electricity or communications.

The quake comes on the heels of Sunday's 6.0-magnitude earthquake around the northern Italian city of Ferrara that killed six people and reduced homes and historic buildings to rubble.

In August 2009, a 5.0 magnitude earthquake hit the Black Sea between Bulgaria and Romania to the southeast of the Kaliakra Cape. No serious damage was reported.

Niagara Falls: A man survived a plunge of at least 180 feet (55 meters) over Niagara Falls in an apparent suicide attempt on Monday - only the third person known to have lived after going over the falls without a safety device.

Niagara Parks Police said witnesses reported seeing the man climb over a railing up to 30 feet (9 meters) out over the Horseshoe Falls at 10:20 a.m. local time and "deliberately jump" into the Niagara River. Seriously injured, he surfaced in the lower Niagara River basin near the Journey Behind the Falls observation platform and managed to make it to shore on his own.

"He waded ashore," said Platoon Chief Dan Orescanin of the Niagara Falls, Ontario, Fire Department. "He must have gotten swept into an eddy, floated over there and was able to get out on his own.

"That's another stroke of luck," said Mr Orescanin. "If he was in the main current, he would have been swept down river."

Mr Orescanin said the man was conscious and talking at first but got quiet. He appeared to have chest injuries, including broken ribs and a collapsed lung, Orescanin said.

The man was airlifted to Hamilton General Hospital with what police initially said were life-threatening injuries. Hospital spokeswoman Agnes Bongers said later that the man was critically injured but was expected to survive.

Authorities did not release the man's name.

Horseshoe Falls, on the Canadian side of the river, is the tallest of the three main falls, higher than the American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls.

The man, believed to be in his 30s or 40s, was rescued about two hours later after fire department rescuers rappelled down the steep and rocky gorge and pulled him in a basket back up the cliff.

"It was very difficult. Between the shale and the boulders, and everything is wet and slick. It's slimy," Mr Orescanin said.

About seven rescuers struggled to carry the basket up to a point where it could be lifted with ropes suspended from an aerial truck.

"We had to basically hand-carry him back up, a foot at a time, up the rope," Orescanin said.

The rescue came weeks before daredevil Nik Wallenda plans to walk over Niagara Falls on a tightrope after convincing United States and Canadian officials to grant an exception to laws prohibiting stunting.

Although several daredevils have survived trips over the falls in barrels or other contraptions, beginning with Annie Edison Taylor in 1901, few have survived unprotected. In 1960, 7-year-old Roger Woodward was swept over the falls wearing a life jacket and survived.

Authorities don't believe Monday's plunge, on a warm and sunny Victoria Day holiday in Canada, was a stunt.

"Based on witness statements and surveillance video, it doesn't appear in any way, shape, or form that this was anything other than a suicide attempt," Niagara Parks Police Sgt. Chris Gallagher told WIVB in Buffalo.

More than 6 million cubic feet (0.17 million cubic meters) of water go over the brink of the falls every minute during peak daytime tourist hours, according to the Niagara Parks Commission.

The last person to go over the Falls unaided and survive was a 30-year-old Canadian man in March 2009. In October 2003, Kirk Jones, an out-of-work auto parts salesman from Michigan survived his plunge over the falls.

After getting the call on Monday, rescuers didn't immediately know whether the man at the bottom of the gorge had gone over the brink or entered the water at the base.

"When we heard that he had gone over the falls we were shocked," Mr  Orescanin said.

Changing pillow covers every week, rubbing and polishing every corner till it was spotlessly dust-free, wearing masks while travel and a host of other things were a part of homemaker Swati Bodhe’s routine for her son Aarav’s (name changed) protection against asthma attack. 

Her six-year-old son who was suffering from childhood asthma was prone to asthma attacks quite often. Swati couldn’t fathom the reason till a detailed history taking by her doctor revealed that preservatives in junk food and soft drinks consumed by her son were to blame. 

Asthma experts say most people depend heavily on medication and do not follow simple easy to do things and techniques to ensure protection against asthma. 

“Fifty per cent of asthma attacks are triggered by dust mite allergies which are avoidable to great extent. Just keeping house dust free, ensuring no fungus on damp walls, keeping bed sheets and pillow covers in sunlight once a week to kill dust mites, good ventilation can help in protecting against asthma attacks,’’ said Dr Vijay Warad, allergist and pediatric pulmonologist. Following a healthy lifestyle by eating right foods and exercising regularly is equally important in asthma control, say doctors. 

“Innumerable studies across the world have proved correlation between junk food and rising asthma. Frequent consumption of junk food leads to lowering of basic immunity levels among kids, which, in turn, makes sensitivity to various allergies sharper. Besides that junk food, soft drinks contain preservatives that can be allergents,’’ said Dr Sundeep Salvi, director, Chest Research Foundation (CRF). Besides good food, ensuring no deficiency of vital nutrients such as Vitamin D and Vitamin C can help in better asthma control. 

Pediatrician Dr Barnali Bhattacharya said while asthma is genetically-linked ailment, there were a few measures one could take to ensure protection against asthma. 

“It is a known fact that women, who abstain from smoking during pregnancy, do exclusive breastfeeding for at least 6 months give their children better chances of protection against asthma,’’
she said.

Our solar system, which is four and a half billion years old, may have formed over a shorter period of time than we previously thought, an international team of researchers has revealed.

The team include researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and universities and laboratories in the US and Japan.

Establishing chronologies of past events or determining ages of objects require having clocks that tick at different paces, according to how far back one looks. 

Nuclear clocks, used for dating, are based on the rate of decay of an atomic nucleus expressed by a half-life, the time it takes for half of a number of nuclei to decay, a property of each nuclear species.

Radiocarbon dating for example, invented in Chicago in the late 1940s and refined ever since, can date artefacts back to prehistoric times because the half-life of radiocarbon (carbon-14) is a few thousand years.

The evaluation of ages of the history of earth or of the solar system requires extremely “slow-paced” 

chronometers consisting of nuclear clocks with much longer half-lives.

The activity of one of these clocks, known as nucleus samarium-146 (146Sm), was examined by Michael Paul, the Kalman and Malke Cooper Professor of Nuclear Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as researchers from the University of Notre Dame and the Argonne National Laboratory in the US and from two Japanese universities.

146Sm belongs to a family of nuclear species that were “live” in our sun and its solar system when they were born. Events thereafter, and within a few hundred million years, are dated by the amount of 146Sm that was left in various mineral archives until its eventual “extinction.”

146Sm has become the main tool for establishing the time evolution of the solar system over its first few hundred million years. This by itself owes to a delicate geochemical property of the element samarium, a rare element in nature. It is a sensitive probe for the separation, or differentiation, of the silicate portion of earth and of other planetary bodies.

The main result of the work of the international scientists is a new determination of the half-life of 146Sm, previously adapted as 103 million years, to a much shorter value of 68 million years. 

The shorter half-life value, like a clock ticking faster, has the effect of shrinking the assessed chronology of events in the early solar system and in planetary differentiation into a shorter time span.

The new time scale, interestingly, is now consistent with a recent and precise dating made on a lunar rock and is in better agreement with the dating obtained with other chronometers.

The measurement of the half-life of 146Sm, performed over several years by the collaborators, involved the use of the ATLAS particle accelerator at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.

Details of the finding appeared in recent article in the journal Science.

Lifting less weight more times is just as good at building muscle as doing it with heavy weights, says a new finding.

"We found that loads that were quite heavy and comparatively light were equally effective at inducing muscle growth and promoting strength," says Cam Mitchell, the study's co-author and a doctoral candidate in kinesiology at McMaster's University in Ontario, Canada. 

The research suggests that the key to muscle gain is working to the point of fatigue and challenges the widely held belief that training with heavy weights is best for muscle growth, the Journal of Applied Physiology reports.

"Many older adults can have joint problems which would prevent them training with heavy loads," says Mitchell. "This study shows that they have the option of training with lighter and less intimidating loads and can still receive the benefits."

For the study, a series of experiments were conducted on healthy and young male volunteers to measure how their leg muscles reacted to different forms of resistance training over a period of 10 weeks, according to a McMaster's statement.

The researchers first determined the maximum weight each subject could lift one time in a knee extension. Each subject was assigned to a different training program for each leg.

In all, three different programmes were used in combinations that required the volunteers to complete sets of as many repetitions as possible with their assigned loads -- typically eight to 12 times per set at the heaviest weights and 25-30 times at the lowest weights.

The moon is set to get a lot bigger and brighter than average this weekend as it officially becomes full on Saturday (May 5) at 11:35 pm EDT.

And since this month’s full moon coincides with the moon’s perigee — its closest approach to Earth — it will also be the year’s biggest.

The moon will swing in 221,802 miles (356,955 kilometres) from our planet, offering skywatchers a spectacular view of an extra-big, extra-bright moon, nicknamed a supermoon, the Discovery News reported.

According to meteorologist Joe Rao, besides moon’s perigee coinciding with full moon this month, this perigee will be the nearest to Earth of any this year, as the distance of the moon’s close approach differs by about 3 percent. 

This occurs because the moon’s orbit is not perfectly circular.

This month’s full moon is due to be nearly 16 percent brighter than average. Conversely, later this year on November 28, the full moon will coincide with apogee, the moon’s farthest approach, offering a especially small and dim full moon.

Though the rare appearance of this month’s full moon may be surprising to some, there’s no reason for alarm, scientists cautioned. 

The slight distance variation is not enough to cause any earthquakes or extreme tidal effects, experts asserted.

However, the normal tides around the world will be mostly high and low. At perigee, the moon will exert about 42% more tidal force than it will during its next apogee two weeks later, Rao added.

The last supermoon appeared in March 2011.