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/ 9 September 2008
The planet’s wild creatures face a new threat – from yuppies, empty nesters, singletons and one-parent families.Yuppie lifestyles are as much a threat to wildlife as over-population, writes Tim Radford.
Deep Impact — the Nasa mission that notched a hole in a comet called Tempel 1 on Monday — was a stunning exercise in human cooperation, celestial sharpshooting and cosmic curiosity.
The human race is living beyond its means. A report backed by 1 360 scientists from 95 countries — some of them world leaders in their fields — last week warned that the almost two-thirds of the natural machinery that supports life on Earth is being degraded by human pressure. The study contains what its authors call ”a stark warning” for the entire world.
Some say meat is murder, while others dismiss a meal without animal products as rabbit food. Now a leading United States nutritionist has given both sides something to chew on with a claim that parents who refuse to feed children meat are acting unethically. She says a lack of meat during the critical first few years of life could cause permanent damage.
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/ 17 December 2004
You’d know that face anywhere? Then thank your right fusiform gyrus. Scientists have identified the bits of the brain that can tell British Prime Minister Tony Blair from James Bond, or whether Margaret Thatcher has borrowed Marilyn Monroe’s hairstyle. The study helps explain that nagging feeling that you know a face, but cannot place it.
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/ 15 October 2004
Scientists in California have found a way to ”turn off’’ a gene that makes cancerous cells lethal. They eliminated aggressive, incurable liver tumours in laboratory mice in four weeks, they report in an advance paper in Nature this week. Cancer affects one person in three, and kills one in five. But above all, cancer is a DNA disease.
Hailstones the size of tennis balls are knocking people out in Japan. Shortly afterwards it is snowing in India. But that is only the beginning. But The Day After Tomorrow, a climate change movie released in mid-May, has been winning praise from both the research establishment and the environment movement.
Humans have done so much damage to the atmosphere that even if they stop burning all fossil fuels immediately, they risk leaving an impoverished Earth for their descendants, an eminent scientist said this week. Professor James Lovelock, who detected the build-up of ozone- destroying CFCs and formulated the Gaia theory, told a conference in Britain this week: ”We have not yet awakened to the seriousness of global warming.”
It resembles a stairway to heaven. In fact, it is a series of steps in the death of a distant star. Using the Hubble space telescope, astronomers in Europe have peered across 2 300 light years of space to examine the strange structure of HD44179, sometimes called the Red Rectangle. It is similar to the sun, but far older, and now in its death throes.
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/ 26 February 2004
United States voters will go to the polls in November using electronic voting machines that cannot be verified, a computer scientist warned last week. David Dill of Stanford University said that 1 600 technologists and 53 elected officials had now joined his crusade for a ”paper trail”, so that electronic voting machines could be checked.