Deutsche Welle – Tuesday marks Safer Internet Day, created to encourage safer and more responsible use of online technology. A spokesman for the EU’s cyber security body told Deutsche Welle how you can best protect yourself online. Read Interview
BBC – Scientists have been able to reach into the mind of a brain-damaged man and communicate with his thoughts. The research, carried out in the UK and Belgium, involved a new brain scanning method. Read Article
BBC – Can war be fought by lots of well-behaved machines, making it “safer for humans”? That is the seductive vision, and hope, of those manufacturing and researching the future of military robotics. With 8,000 robots already in use, they believe they can bring about a military revolution. Read article
ScienceDaily — A new vaccine to prevent the deadly malaria infection has shown promise to protect the most vulnerable patients — young children — against the disease, according to an international team of researchers led by the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) and the Malaria Research and Training Center at the University of Bamako in Mali, West Africa. Read Article
Ed. – It is not stated what the adjuvant ’system’ consists of – something that people deserve to know.
Reuters – Unthinkable a year ago and still officially beyond the pale, the idea of a political role for Taliban leaders in Afghanistan is creeping onto the agenda as war-weary governments seek to bring an end to an unpopular war. Read article
News.com – BRITISH authorities today warned drug users that heroin in London was highly likely to be contaminated with anthrax, after a first confirmed case there and following nine deaths in Scotland. “While public health investigations are ongoing, it must be assumed that all heroin in London carries the risk of anthrax contamination,” said Dr. Brian McCloskey, who is director of the Health Protection Agency (HPA) in London. Read Article
Ed. – Questions to ponder: Can the heroin be contaminated with Anthrax via a simple route ie unclean preparation? Who has access to anthrax to deliberately put it into the heroin? Where do the drugs come from?
ScienceDaily — Scientists at the University of Liverpool have discovered that treating the immune system of patients with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CPRS) leads to a significant reduction in pain. CRPS is an unexplained chronic pain condition that usually develops after an injury or trauma to a limb, and continues after the injury has healed. CPRS I — formerly called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy — can arise after any type of injury. Read Article
Epoch Times – BAE, the second biggest defence contractor in the world, agreed on February 5th to pay out nearly £300 million to the US and the UK after admitting guilt in a long-standing corruption scandal. The British company said it would plead guilty to charges of false accounting and misleading statements made to both the US and the UK at the same time. Read article
Xinhua — (Feb 5, 2010) U.S. health officials have asked parents to get their children under 10 years of age fully vaccinated against the A/H1N1 flu virus as another wave of strike might be coming soon. Hawaii state health department said on Tuesday that, in Hawaii and a number of other states, there are many children who have not received their second dose, and that there are still many children who have not been vaccinated against the A/H1N1 at all. Read article
PressTV – While swine flu is still circulating around the world, no major activity has been detected in the US for the past four weeks, health officials report. Latest figures revealed that some 80 million Americans, including the 11,000 fatal cases, have been infected with swine flu. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials reported that the virus has claimed the lives of nine more children in the past week. Read article
Xinhua – Ruling party candidate Laura Chinchilla declared victory Sunday night in Costa Rica’s presidential election, after her main rivals, Otton Solis and Otto Guevara, conceded defeat and congratulated her as the country’s first female president in history. Chinchilla won 46.8 percent of the vote from 67.9 percent of the votes counted by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. Under the country’s constitution, a candidate is required to gain at least 40 percent of the popular votes to win outright. Read article
Daily Mail – The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report – that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years. And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland. In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today. Read Article
Wired – The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch. As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” Read Article
Ed. – People are starving in the world – there are millions homeless – and heaps of natural disasters – health – worthy causes – and the American military is going to spend money on something that is well-nigh impossible?
Telegraph – Jack Straw has hit back at claims that he ignored legal advice that the Iraq war would be unlawful without further United Nations backing. He insisted he gave serious attention to a warning from his former senior legal adviser, Sir Michael Wood, that the conflict would be a ”crime of aggression” unless Britain achieved another UN Security Council resolution. Read article
PhysOrg – The biggest causes of deforestation in tropical countries are population growth in cities and agricultural exports, a finding that should shape decisions on preventing forest loss, experts said. A common theory is that pressure on forests can be eased by reducing the population in rural areas, or discouraging rural people from clearing land for fuel or food for their own use. The study, led by Ruth DeFries of New York’s Columbia University, looked at satellite data for forest loss in 41 countries from 2000 to 2005 and matched this against a host of other factors. Two much bigger causes accelerated forest loss, they found. Read Article
RSF – Reporters Without Borders condemns the start of another mass trial of government opponents before a Tehran revolutionary court for their role in protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed reelection, including the major demonstrations on 27 December. All of the 16 defendants in the latest trial, which began on 30 January, are accused of being “mohareb” (enemies of God) and “corrupt on earth” – charges that carry the death penalty – and of activities against national security. They include Omid Montazeri, a young reporter for various newspapers, who was arrested on 28 December because of journalistic activities that have included giving interviews for news media based abroad. Read Article
RSF – Reporters Without Borders is very concerned about the fate of the Umuseso, one of Rwanda’s leading independent weeklies, which could be closed down as a result of case brought by the public prosecutor’s office accusing it of libel and invasion of privacy for reporting that a government minister was having an extra-marital affair with the mayor of Kigali. … “We urge the judge to keep a cool head and to issue a fair verdict that respects press freedom,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The court must first establish whether the defendants are guilty of libel and if they are, there are much more appropriate punishments than jailing them and closing their newspaper for good.” Read Article
The Independent – Out of America: Millions of tons of immortal cells – all grown from a single tissue sample taken from Henrietta Lacks before her death from cancer in 1951 – are used by researchers around the world, amid a debate about ethics, race and the rights of donors and their families. She was a poor black tobacco worker, the descendant of slaves. She is buried in an unmarked grave in a clearing, just outside the little town in rural Virginia where she grew up, now all but razed from the face of the earth.Read Article
PHOENIX — The picture of Bob and Janice Numkena’s wedding day is old and faded, but Bob’s memory of the day is clear. From the beginning, they worked as a team. They didn’t have a choice. “I worked the day shift and my wife worked the night shift,” Bob Numkena said, as he sat in his Tempe living room. They worked for the same company and raised two daughters, achieving the American dream. Another picture of the family shows them smiling while on vacation. But it doesn’t show the real life, day-in and day-out struggle that has been their reality. Read Article
Reuters – Opposition leader Viktor Yanukovich claimed victory in Ukraine’s presidential elections on Sunday and told his bitter rival Yulia Tymoshenko to resign as prime minister, but she refused to concede and declared she was ahead. Read article
New Scientist – WE HACK the climate at our peril. Volcanoes spewed so much sulphate into the atmosphere 94 million years ago that the oceans were starved of oxygen and 27 per cent of marine genera went extinct. Geoengineering our climate could inflict a similar fate on some lakes. So claims Matthew Hurtgen at Northwestern University in Chicago, who with his colleagues measured sulphur isotopes in sediments on the floor of the Western Interior Seaway. The WIS was a vast body of water that divided the continent of North America down the middle at the time. The team also developed a model to simulate the impact of volcanoes on ocean chemistry. Before oceanic oxygen levels tumbled, something caused a big change in atmospheric sulphate levels. “That something was probably volcanoes,” says Hurtgen. He says their sulphate emissions triggered vast phytoplankton blooms and much of the ocean’s oxygen was gobbled up as these died and decomposed. According to the team’s model, oceanic sulphate was extremely low prior to the eruptions Read Article
The West Australian – A strict low-fat diet, vitamin D and a healthy lifestyle can stop the progression of multiple sclerosis, according to new book by Perth-based medical specialist George Jelinek who himself has the disease affecting an increasing number of people throughout the world. ‘Overcoming Multiple Sclersois’ brings hope to those with the neurological condition as Professor Jelinek – an Emergency Medicine specialist at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and medical academic at the University of Western Australia – challenges the long-held belief that diagnosis with MS signals an inevitable slide into relapse and disability.Read Article
ScienceDaily — Fewer African Americans than Caucasians develop multiple sclerosis (MS), statistics show, but their disease progresses more rapidly, and they don’t respond as well to therapies, a new study by neurology researchers at the University at Buffalo has found. Read article
One India – At least 123 innocent civilians were killed in 12 US drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas in January alone. The deaths were caused because ten out of 12 deadly missile strikes missed their targets causing heavy casualty. The remaining two successful drone strikes killed three al-Qaeda leaders, wanted by the Americans, The News reports. Read article
BBC – Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has asked the country’s nuclear chief to begin enriching uranium to 20%. The move comes amid a worsening stand-off over a Western offer for Iran to swap enriched uranium for nuclear fuel. Read article
WP Cumulus Flash tag cloud by Roy Tanck requires Flash Player 9 or better.