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/ 14 October 2005
Rising sea levels, desertification and shrinking freshwater supplies will create up to 50 -million environmental refugees by the end of the decade, experts warned this week. Janos Bogardi, director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University in Bonn, said creeping environmental deterioration already displaced up to 10 -million people a year.
Two climate change sceptics, who believe the dangers of global warming are overstated, have put their money where their mouth is and bet 000 that the planet will cool over the next decade. The Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev have agreed the wager with a British climate expert, James Annan.
A British bus company is testing a new secret weapon that it hopes will help forward its push to cut its polluting emissions — sheep urine. The company, Stagecoach, has fitted a bus in the southern English city of Winchester with a tank containing the animal waste, which is sprayed into exhaust fumes to reduce emissions of harmful nitrous oxides.
A third killer earthquake may be lurking beneath the Indian Ocean, seismologists say. Last Monday’s quake was caused by an increased geological stress set up by the giant earthquake in December, and they fear the process will repeat itself. Phil Cummins, a seismologist, said: "There is a chance that the next segment further to the south-east could rupture sooner than we expected. But we can’t predict the time."
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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/ 8 February 2005
Here is the truth about global warming: it is an anti-capitalist agenda, a Machiavellian political plot and a convenient rumour started by bungling Japanese pineapple farmers. It is a front for paranoia about immigration, an incitement to civil war, and the reason that the world’s attention was distracted from the risk of a tsunami. Welcome to Britain’s first meeting of climate-change sceptics.
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/ 13 September 2004
Nobody has ever seen a mysterious, sub-atomic fragment that permeates the atmosphere and explains how everything is the way it is. They call it the ”God particle”. Some say it doesn’t exist but, in the ultimate leap of faith, physicists across the world are preparing to build one of the most ambitious and expensive science experiments the world has ever seen to try to find it.
Call it the ultimate wireless network. From the ends of your fingers to the tips of your toes, the human body is a moving, throbbing collection of tubes and tunnels, filled with salty water and all capable of transmitting the lifeblood of the 21st century: information. And now the computer software giant Microsoft has been granted exclusive rights to this ability of the body to act as a computer network.
Fifty-eight years later, using recently discovered large-scale Japanese maps, sophisticated computer models and new radiation measurements, scientists have completed a painstaking reconstruction of events in Hiroshima.
The oldest and most distant planet yet discovered has been found 5 600 light years from Earth. It is 800 times bigger than our own planet. The discovery could force astronomers to rethink theories of how planets are made.