Thursday July 31, 2008

Seven reasons why people hate reason

New Scientist

From religious fundamentalism to pseudoscience, it seems that forces are attacking the Enlightenment world view – characterised by rational, scientific thinking – from all sides. The debate seems black and white: you’re either with reason, or you’re against it.

But is it so simple? In a series of special essays, our contributors look more carefully at some of the most provocative charges against reason. The results suggest that for all the Enlightenment has achieved, we still have a lot of work to do.
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Thursday July 31, 2008

A big fat lie - the nutrition expert who says diets actually cause weight gain

Sophie Morris
Independent

The weight-loss industry is swelling as quickly as our waistlines at the moment, which seems something of a paradox. If body conscious consumers are so happy to buy dieting products, why are we facing an obesity crisis? The truth is, no calorie-controlled diet works. If they did, dieting professionals could kiss goodbye to repeat business.

Even worse: restricting what you eat will make you fat. Worse still: yo-yo dieting can cause depression, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. Frequent dieters are 60 per cent more likely to die from heart disease than people who don't starve themselves.
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Thursday July 31, 2008

The Big Question: Is the 'war on drugs' really making the problem worse?

Michael Savage
Independent

Why are we asking this now?

Because if confirmation were needed that crackdowns on drug use in the UK were having little effect, it came in a report by the UK Drug Policy Commission (UKDPC), an independent group set up to examine the state of the nation's drug trade.

The report, published yesterday, paints a grim picture, suggesting that the billions of pounds spent on attempts to reduce the availability of drugs on the streets have been in vain.
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Thursday July 31, 2008

Capitalism Under Assault

Dee Hon
Adbusters

Not long ago, Roberto Mangabeira Unger was leading a life of academic stardom, working as a professor at Harvard Law School. The 60-year-old had first joined the faculty at age 24. By 29, he became one of the youngest tenured professors in the school’s history. His prominence expanded far beyond the field of law.

Unger wrote prodigiously, churning out an endless stream of ideas about philosophy, politics, economics and social theory. He was, and he remains, a committed, radical leftist; he embraces the very idea of radicalism as a central pillar of his political philosophy.
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Wednesday July 30, 2008

Search rival launched by former Google employees

Dan Nystedt
IDG News Service

A new search engine hopes to topple Google from its position as the most used search site.

Cuill (pronounced 'cool') has been created by Anna Patterson, a former Google employee, and her husband, Tom Costello, who researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM. Russell Power, who also worked at Google on search indexing, web rankings and spam detection, co-founded the company with the couple.
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Wednesday July 30, 2008

The Big Question: Have the Olympics led to an increase in human rights abuses in China?

Clifford Coonan
Independent

Why are we asking this now?

With only a week and a half to go until the Beijing Olympics, Amnesty International has issued a report saying the human rights situation in China has become progressively worse in the run-up to the Games. The report accuses China of backtracking on promises it made to guarantee human rights when it was bidding for the games back in 2001.
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Wednesday July 30, 2008

Curse of the DNA register

Nigel Morris
Independent

One million innocent Britons 'criminalised', says damning report

A generation of young Britons is being criminalised for life by the relentless expansion of the national DNA database, ministers are warned today.

Alarm and hostility over the massive scale of the collection of DNA has been uncovered by groundbreaking research funded by the Home Office among panels of members of the public.
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Tuesday July 29, 2008

iPod-size microscope could become lifesaving gadget

Paul Marks
NewScientist

Optical microscopes used to be bulky instruments. The lenses and lights normally needed to illuminate, magnify and focus an image take up a lot of space, and are fragile and expensive to boot.

Not any more. Researchers have squeezed a powerful microscope onto a single image-sensing chip and removed the need for lenses.

The cheap, portable device could be just what medics in the developing world need to diagnose diseases such as malaria, its inventors suggest.
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Tuesday July 29, 2008

Statins 'halve' the risk of dementia

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

Statins, which have saved millions of people from heart disease, may have an additional role in protecting the brain from dementia, researchers say.

The so-called "wonder drugs", taken by more than four million people in Britain to lower cholesterol, are estimated to prevent about 10,000 deaths a year. Now a study has shown they halve the rate of dementia in people at high risk.
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Saturday July 26, 2008

Barack Obama: Charm offensive wins over angry crowd ... of reporters

Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian

The mood among the US media pack that joined Barack Obama's tour on Monday was grumpy and rebellious. The 40-odd journalists boarding the campaign's Boeing 757, dubbed Obama One, in Jordan had paid thousands of dollars to accompany him but missed the first four days of a trip that took him to Afghanistan and Iraq - and information was in short supply.

"People were frustrated and upset at the start of the trip," one of the pack confirmed yesterday. But they traversed an arc in the course of the week.
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Saturday July 26, 2008

We have a drinking problem, and it makes oil seem cheap

Marina Hyde
Guardian

It is an astonishing kind of stupidity that sees us duped into paying for bottles of water - stuff that flows free out of taps

A half-litre bottle of water in your average sandwich chain, now costs 80p. That's around four times the price of oil. And it's not like you've got an oil tap in your own kitchen. If only there were some godforsaken country we could invade in the adorably misguided belief that it would bring the price of this stuff down.

And yet - perhaps because bottling water is precisely the sort of business that would entrance Dick Cheney - we've yet to alight on the killing fields that would get us out of this mess. Not that bottled water giants such as Nestlé and Coca-Cola would class it as a mess, what with the global industry being worth £30bn and rising. For the rest of us, I'm afraid it's time to swallow the bottled water lecture again. Come on: more of it is being sold than beer - you and I know that can't be right.
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Saturday July 26, 2008

Is Blackwater Leaving the Security Biz?

Dan Schulman
Mother Jones

If his controversial company exits the private security business, Blackwater president Gary Jackson wants you to know exactly who's to blame: "If you could get it right," he told the AP, referring to the journalists covering Blackwater, "we might stay in the business." According to the AP, which recently visited the company's Moyock, North Carolina headquarters, Blackwater is planning to refocus its operations on aviation, logistics, and training, moving away from the security work that has earned the firm hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts since 9/11.

"The experience we've had would certainly be a disincentive to any other companies that want to step in and put their entire business at risk," Erik Prince, the company's founder and CEO, told the wire service.
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Saturday July 26, 2008

Views of Jupiter

Jupiter is in the news again, this time because its "Baby Red Spot" - a storm less than a year old - appears to have been swallowed up by the massive storm known as the Great Red Spot. This is good occasion to share some of the best photographs of Jupiter and its larger system of rings and moons, as seen by various probes and telescopes over the past 30 years.
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Friday July 25, 2008

'Fuel battery' could take cars beyond petrol

Colin Barras
NewScientist

A new approach to storing electrical energy can store more energy than gasoline in the same volume, and could help extend the range of electric vehicles. But some experts say other approaches are more practical.

The biggest technological hurdle facing electric vehicles is their range. Even the best rechargeable batteries cannot match the density of energy stored in a fuel tank.

Combining electric power with a combustion engine to make a hybrid electric vehicle sidesteps that problem. But a new take on electrical power storage that is part battery, part chemical fuel cell could ditch gasoline for good.
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Friday July 25, 2008

New windows double as solar panels

Steve Connor
Independent

A new type of solar panel that allows light to pass through it like a pane of glass has been invented by scientists who said that it is 10 times more powerful than conventional methods of producing energy from sunlight.

The discovery raises the prospect of using ordinary domestic windows to generate electricity with minimum structural alterations, although scientists have not yet worked out how much it would cost to convert a domestic home to a solar-powered generator.
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Friday July 25, 2008

How one day we may all be eternally young

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

Growing old may not be mandatory after all. Failing eyesight, loosened teeth and greying hair could be driven by regulatory genes that determine when it is time to shuffle off our mortal coil, rather than being indicators of the ravages of age.

American scientists have challenged the conventional view that ageing is caused by wear and tear – like rust on an old car. Instead, they suggest specific genetic instructions drive the process. If they are right, science might one day find ways of switching the signals off and halting or even reversing ageing.
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Thursday July 24, 2008

Music industry to tax downloaders

Nigel Morris
Independent

£30 'licence fee' set to revolutionise illegal file-sharing

Internet users could face an annual charge of up to £30 to download music, under plans to be unveiled today that aim to tackle illegal file-sharing.

Ministers are backing proposals that would enable millions of broadband users to pay an annual levy which would allow them to copy as much – previously illegal – music from the internet as they wanted. The money raised would be channelled back to the rights-holders, with artists responsible for the most popular songs receiving a bigger slice of the cash.
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Tuesday July 22, 2008

Have scientists discovered a cure for Alzheimer's?

Jeremy Laurance
Independent

Scientists were amazed when a 20-year-old hay fever drug was found to be highly effective in treating dementia

A hundred years after Alzheimer's disease was discovered, a cure for the degenerative condition that strips sufferers of their memory and personality remains a dream. The main advances have been in drugs to control symptoms such as agitation and restlessness. Restoring memory and cognitive ability has proved much harder.
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Monday July 21, 2008

How China's Taking Over Africa, And Why The West Should Be Very Worried

Evening Standard

On June 5, 1873, in a letter to The Times, Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and a distinguished African explorer in his own right, outlined a daring (if by today's standards utterly offensive) new method to 'tame' and colonise what was then known as the Dark Continent.

'My proposal is to make the encouragement of Chinese settlements of Africa a part of our national policy, in the belief that the Chinese immigrants would not only maintain their position, but that they would multiply and their descendants supplant the inferior Negro race,' wrote Galton.
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Sunday July 20, 2008

Ministers embrace electric car revolution

Geoffrey Lean
Independent

A transport gear change could see vehicles given away free, with revenue made from selling motorists contracts to supply power

Gordon Brown is to launch the biggest revolution in the way Britons drive since the development of the internal combustion engine. He will meet manufacturers this week to try to persuade them to mass-produce electric cars, and is considering a remarkable plan to sell the cars cheap, together with their fuel, that is modelled on mobile-phone contracts.
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Sunday July 20, 2008

Still not booked up? Then how about the first $1m holiday?

Richard Osley
Independent

Week-long luxury package to Abu Dhabi takes travel to new heights – or new depths – of 'trophy tourism'

If you've spent the past few weeks desperately scouring holiday websites or Teletext for a cheap last-minute deal to somewhere sunny, look away now. A luxurious seven-star hotel yesterday unveiled the world's first US$1m (£500,000) holiday.

Abu Dhabi's Emirates Palace Hotel is offering an eye-wateringly expensive seven-day break for two people in what is being billed as the "ultimate holiday experience".
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Saturday July 19, 2008

When propaganda turns out to be fact

Robert Fisk
Independent

What happens when myths turn out to be true? I'm talking about the "myth" of the German army's atrocities in little Belgium in 1914, the raped nuns and the babies spitted on Prussian bayonets. "Hun barbarism" was the powerful propaganda tool to send the British Tommies and the French poilus – literally, "the hairy ones" – off to the killing fields of the Somme, Ypres, Passchendaele and Verdun. But now, thanks to the analytical, brilliant, horrifying work of Alan Kramer, a history professor at my own alma mater of Trinity College, Dublin, it all turns out to be – well, let's speak frankly – true.
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Friday July 18, 2008

Women's brains are different from men's – and here's scientific proof

Michael McCarthy
Independent

Men and women show differences in behaviour because their brains are physically distinct organs, new research suggests. Male and female brains appear to be constructed from markedly different genetic blueprints.

The differences in the circuitry that wires them up and the chemicals that transmit messages inside them are so great as to point to the conclusion that there is not just one kind of human brain, but two, according to recent neurological studies.
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Thursday July 17, 2008

The tree of life (and its super fruit)

Claire Soares
Independent

It didn't matter what was wrong with me, be it a stomach upset or a rogue spot, the remedy prescribed by Senegalese friends was always the same. Baobab fruit – and lots of it.

Usually it was administered in the form of a Senegalese smoothie, the fruit pulp mixed with water to make what is known in the local Wolof language as bouye. The white drink delivered hints of velvety yoghurt with a flick of tart sherbet to the tongue. And it was not only mighty tasty, it left Western anti-diarrhoea fixes, such as Imodium, lagging and was soon an ever-present item in my fridge.
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Wednesday July 16, 2008

Beat your biological clock

Jane Feinmann
Independent

If you think that men can safely ignore their biological clock, think again. New research shows that men's fertility is just as susceptible to the effects of time as women's. The quality of sperm begins to deteriorate in the mid-thirties, according to a new French study. And by the time a man is 45, one in three pregnancies ends in miscarriage, regardless of the age of the mother.

The report has left experts arguing about how far modern lifestyles are to blame for failing sperm. And it's not just the ability to have children that may or may not be affected by environmental factors.
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Tuesday July 15, 2008

Mugabe employs foreign fighters in terror campaign

Ian Evans and a Special Correspondent in Manicaland
Independent

Foreign mercenaries have joined so-called "war veterans" and militiamen attacking opposition supporters in rural parts of Zimbabwe, human rights workers have confirmed.

Eyewitnesses say the men are more vicious than their Zimbabwean counterparts, with the marauding gangs attacking suspected members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), forcing them to renounce the party.
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Saturday July 12, 2008

'Six months to save Lascaux'

John Lichfield
Independent

Experts believe that up to half of the prehistoric art in the Lascaux caves is at risk. Efforts to combat a fungal invasion have been unsuccessful

Unesco, the world cultural body, has threatened to humiliate France by placing the Lascaux caves – known as the "Sistine Chapel of prehistory" – on its list of endangered sites of universal importance.

The Unesco world heritage committee, meeting this week in Quebec, has given the French government six months to report on the success of its efforts to save the Lascaux cave paintings in Dordogne from an ugly, and potentially destructive, invasion of grey and black fungi.
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Friday July 04, 2008

Why Canada is the best haven from climate change

Michael McCarthy
Independent

A group of islands with the potential to develop into a tourist paradise has been named as the country least equipped to withstand the effects of climate change.

The Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean, between Mozambique and Madagascar, are a small nation of sparkling blue lagoons and picture-postcard beaches. But the country is politically unstable and a report published today says it is the world's most vulnerable country to the future impacts of global warming such as increased storms, rising sea levels and agricultural failure.
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Friday July 04, 2008

Miracle diet from the Med

Steve Connor
Independent

How adding six types of food can cut the risk of cancer by 22 per cent

Adopting elements of a Mediterranean-style diet, which is high in fruit and vegetables and low on red meat and dairy produce, can reduce the risk of cancer by almost a quarter, according to a major study of people's eating habits.

It has been thought for some time that making dietary changes such as eating more olive oil and less butter could lead to a significantly lower incidence of heart disease, and now comes detailed evidence of how it can dramatically cut the chances of all types of cancer developing.
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