James Randerson
Guest Author
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/ 20 July 2007

Down a lion, feel satisfied

Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla. Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by Western scientists.

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/ 12 March 2007

Early alert for lung cancer

Scientists have developed a test for the early diagnosis of lung cancer. They hope that analysis of the genes that are switched on and off in cells lining the airways leading to the lungs can be used to diagnose patients sooner and make treatments more effective.

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/ 8 January 2007

2056: A high-tech utopia?

A limitless supply of spare organs, hard evidence of aliens and a machine that puts you in the mind of an animal. These are some of the predictions made about the world of 2056 by a batch of the planet’s most prominent scientists, including psycho­logist Steven Pinker, philosopher Dan Dennett and astronomer Sir Martin Rees.

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/ 11 December 2006

World’s richest 1% own 40% of wealth

The richest 1% of adults in the world own 40% of the planet’s wealth, according to the largest study yet of wealth distribution. The report also finds that those in financial services and the internet sectors predominate among the super-rich. Europe, the United States and some Asia Pacific nations account for most of the extremely wealthy.

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/ 1 December 2006

Study: Ecstasy damage is immediate

People who use Ecstasy for the first time could suffer impaired memory and harm to their brains, a new study of the dance drug’s effects reveals. Even low doses can cause changes to the brain, according to the first study to compare users before and after they took the drug for the first time. It found blood flow to parts of the brain was reduced and that users struggled in memory tests.

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/ 24 November 2006

Inter-galactic golf stunt

It was conceived as the ultimate tribute to human ingenuity and international cooperation — an orbiting space lab that would play host to some of the most talented and highly trained individuals on the planet, doing cutting-edge science. But 20 years and more than -billion later the International Space Station has been reduced to recouping some of its extravagant costs with a commercial stunt.

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/ 14 July 2006

Inflatable spacecraft launched

Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas property magnate and space entrepreneur, moved a step closer to his dream of opening an orbiting space hotel on Thursday. At around lunchtime he confirmed that a test vehicle launched on Wednesday from Yasny in Russia had reached its target orbit 547km up with a 64° inclination to the equator.

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/ 29 May 2006

Papers show Einstein’s shaky maths

To many he is the greatest scientist who ever lived, but a unique collection of Albert Einstein’s letters and papers has revealed a history of struggle and failure made worse by an apparently shaky grasp of maths. An archive, shows how after securing unprecedented celebrity status with his general theory of relativity in 1916, Einstein suffered years of frustration as he failed to top that with ”a grand theory of everything”.