The world’s most powerful leaders got down to talks at the Group of Eight (G8) summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, on Thursday on aid to Africa and climate change, but the summit was brutally overshadowed by a series of explosions that hit London.
Influenza has good PR for a disease that inflicts a six-figure death toll each year and, from time to time, leaps out to become a mass killer that claims even more lives than Aids. Flu is typecast as a bad case of the snuffles — high fever, wheezing and coughing, a few days in bed and a couple more days convalescing, and everything starts to get back to normal. But this is not the diagnosis for all.
Those who say eclipses herald history-shaping events will find support for their superstition when, on Friday, the sun will be briefly plunged into darkness on the day of Pope John Paul II’s funeral. Astronomers, though, say the eclipse is simply part of a ballet in celestial physics between the sun, Earth and moon.
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/ 18 February 2005
Stunned astronomers on Friday described the greatest cosmic explosion monitored to date — a star burst from the other side of the galaxy that was briefly brighter than the full moon and swamped satellites and telescopes. The high-radiation flash caused no harm to Earth but would have literally fried the planet had it occurred within a few light years of home.
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/ 16 November 2004
Europe’s first mission to the moon, the unmanned exploratory probe <i>Smart-1</i>, has been safely placed in lunar orbit after a voyage of more than 13 months, the European Space Agency announced on Tuesday. <i>Smart-1</i>, a tiny test-bed of revolutionary technology, was successfully captured by the moon’s gravity on Monday.
Scientists working in top-security labs say they have recreated pathogens from the 1918 flu pandemic, the greatest plague of the 20th century, in a bid to find out why this strain was so extraordinarily lethal. The United States team took two key genes from the 1918 virus and slotted them into human flu viruses to which lab mice were known to be immune.
The enduring mystery surrounding the demise of Napoleon Bonaparte has just been given another twist. The official verdict, supported by an autopsy, was that l’Empereur died of stomach cancer on May 5, 1821, at the age of 51, while in exile on Britain’s South Atlantic island colony of St Helena.
The charisma of Nelson Mandela and the cheque book of Bill Gates joined forces at the International Aids Conference in Bangkok on Thursday to lay assault on tuberculosis (TB). Mandela branded TB a silent slayer in the HIV/Aids pandemic, while Gates’s charity unveiled a ,7-million grant.
Don’t forget about TB, says Mandela
Cheap digital technology is revolutionising the way news is gathered, disseminated and perceived — and in doing so, it is stoking a controversy. Over the past weeks, the world has reeled to the pictures of United States troops abusing Iraqi prisoners and the beheading of US contract worker Nicholas Berg.
Blazing across the heavens during the next month or so will be two fiery stars — the first comets of the millennium that are expected to be visible with the naked eye. Then, in June, Earth, Venus and the sun will all be directly aligned, staging a cosmic eclipse that no human alive today has seen.