Check out
Dedicated server hosting in Europe
Are you looking for quality dedicated server hosting in Europe? Our company has two datacenters in Prague and Brno. If you are starting own business in Europe, you can put your website on our dedicated servers. Check out our dedicated server hosting service ...
Search
Calendar
| Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | Su |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||
Navigation
6,442 articles from Guardian Unlimited Science
- title
- Guardian Unlimited Science
- tags
- description
- Articles published by Guardian Unlimited Science
- last updated
- September 6, 2010 (10:09)
- homepage
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/science?gusrc=rss&feed=science
- feed url
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/rss
- date added
- September 13, 2007 (14:53)
- meta
- alexa, technorati, rojo
-
MONDAY 6. SEPTEMBER, 2010
-
10:09
Notes from Chicago
-
01:01
-
01:01
A behind the scaffolding tour as MOSI in Manchester undergoes an eight million pound redevelopment
-
SUNDAY 5. SEPTEMBER, 2010
-
22:16
Two Danish space enthusiasts failed in their first attempt to launch a privately built rocket. Peter Madsen and Kristian von Bengtson had hoped to send the nine-metre-long rocket 18.6 miles into the sky from a barge near the island of Bornholm. Their spokeswoman, Sophie Dalgaard, said a fuse problem had prevented the launch, but that they would try again. They have permission to launch the 1.6-tonne prototype from a military test zone until 13 September as part of the €50,000 (£41,770) Danish project. It is the first step towards their dream of flying to the edge of space, 62 miles above sea level.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
15:50
Colourful self-taught forecaster Jörg Kachelmann accused of raping long-term girlfriend
He is a household name in Germany, affectionately known for his five-o'clock shadow, kipper ties and colourful weather forecasts.
But tomorrow Jörg Kachelmann, Germany's top weatherman, is to go on trial charged with raping his girlfriend.
Kachelmann, 52, had been in a relationship with the journalist, identified only as Simone W, for 10 years. She accused him of holding a knife to her throat and raping her at her home near Frankfurt last February after she confronted him with her suspicions that she was not his only girlfriend.
Kachelmann has denied the charges.
Germany's media have raked over every aspect of the case. It has been a cover story on best-selling news magazines Spiegel and Stern.
The tabloids have been fighting to buy up the stories of Kachelmann's ex- and current girlfriends, as well as the alleged victim, and have uncovered the weatherman's complicated love life, including a penchant for S&M.
Kachelmann has not denied this, or that he had several girlfriends simultaneously, but has said no one was interested in his love life until now as long as he more-or-less correctly predicted the weather.
"When I was a mere fourth-class television celebrity, no one was much interested in my private life," he said in a recent interview.
The self-taught meteorologist owns a multi-million-euro weather service called Meteomania and is best known for his descriptions of "slurping winds" and "cauliflower clouds". In one of his more famous broadcasts, he scooped up a cat which wandered on set and held it while reading the weather map.
Kachelmann, who set up his company after becoming frustrated about inaccurate weather reports when he went sailing, beat the state-funded German Weather Service for the contract to provide forecasts for state television and hundreds of local radio and TV stations in 2002.
His company, which has hundreds of weather stations around the country, was credited with considerably increasing the accuracy of weather bulletins. It relies heavily on the British Met Office's "fine-mesh system", which produces 24-hour weather patterns. Meteomania's future has been in doubt since his arrest.
During the four months he spent in prison awaiting news of his trial, Kachelmann said he "missed the weather". "In order to see the sky I had to stand on the bed because the window was so high up," he told Spiegel magazine.
The court in Mannheim, where the case will open tomorrow amid high security, is due to hear evidence from 26 witnesses, including several of Kachelmann's former and current girlfriends. Kachelmann was arrested at Frankfurt airport on his return from the Vancouver Olympics in March. He was held in investigative custody until his release from prison in a surprise move at the end of July after the court ruled there was "insufficient evidence to continue holding him". The judge said the case would probably come down to Kachelmann's word against his girlfriend.
If convicted, he faces a year in prison.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
01:07
-
01:07
-
01:07
-
01:07
-
01:06
Health tourists travel the world and spend thousands, but their hopes of being cured are likely to be dashed
For the past decade stem cells have sparked huge excitement among scientists, dramatic media coverage about breakthroughs that could mean a cure for some of the nastiest diseases, and hope – sometimes desperate – among patients that the reality will match the hype. That has fuelled a booming trade in stem cell tourism – people heading to clinics abroad and forking out large sums for what are called stem cell treatments but which are unlikely to work and possibly do harm.
It is, as some of the UK's leading stem cells experts warned last week, a world of unproven therapies, patient optimism and predatory clinicians. Despite the lack of reliable evidence underpinning the treatments being offered, the number of people resorting to stem cell tourism is growing. Experts voiced their fears and frustrations after finding that many patients, often desperately ill, were asking their advice on whether to travel overseas.
"I've made some very strong comments which could potentially land me in court, but people still go to these clinics," said Professor Peter Coffey, director of the London Project to Cure Blindness at University College London. There are now several hundred clinics around the world which claim to have turned the potential of stem cells into effective treatments. They lure those suffering from diabetes, multiple sclerosis, heart failure, Parkinson's disease, autism, HIV, eye problems, spinal cord injuries and much else besides.
Several thousand people from around the world so far are estimated to have spent up to £20,000 or more in such places. Yet while stem cells could transform medicine, there is as yet scant actual proof of their efficacy. But still the tourists come.
The fact that scientists believe it is likely to be 15 to 20 years before the continuing worldwide flurry of trials and tests results in reliable treatments has not stopped clinics from offering exactly that already. Strong regulation means there are no such places in the UK or America. But the experts did single out the XCell Centre in Düsseldorf, Germany, and Beike Technology, which runs one in Shenzhen in China.
In 2008 the Multiple Sclerosis Society warned sufferers not to be taken in by Integrated BioSciences, a company registered in the Turks & Caicos Islands, which had offices in the Seychelles, Persian Gulf and Oxford, because there was no scientific backing for the claim that stem cells could cure the condition.
People's willingness to trust their savings and their health to such clinics recently prompted the International Society for Stem Cell Research to launch a website to educate patients about the risks involved. Anyone thinking about going would be well advised to check it out and think again.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
01:06
Brookside and Gavin & Stacey may do more to spread local slang than social networking sites
In one school in estuary Essex in the 1980s, when you had a good time you had a "grindle", and if you had a jolly good time you had a "right ol' grindle". Yet stray outside the catchment area of the school – my old school – and no one was grindling. Some years later in the offices of a monthly magazine, anyone who was proving irritating was a "nizer". Despite nize-derived terms accounting for every fourth word uttered, it was an expression never heard beyond a work leaving do.
But last week we learned that local argot isn't staying put any more. Dialect words are spreading across the nation thanks to social networking. Dr Eric Schleef, lecturer in English Sociolinguistics at the University of Manchester, said: "Twitter, Facebook and texting all encourage speed and immediacy of understanding, meaning users type as they speak. We are all becoming exposed to words we may not have otherwise encountered."
He said that Welsh terms like "tidy" and "lush" have spread nationwide thanks to social networking, yet surely Gavin & Stacey might have helped via old-fashioned television.
In the 90s Brookside introduced the nation to Scouse and resulted in folk in Sussex paying their "leccy" bills and getting arrested by the "bizzies". Would Cockneys have described their new Nike Air Max as "mint" before Shameless? We tend only to social network with people we already know, who probably speak a bit like us. It takes television, film and literature to introduce us to new language.
Not that Dr Schleef denies the influence of television. He cites the use of "bootiful", a word not heard outside East Anglia until Bernard Matthews' turkey adverts. But I've not heard anyone say that outside a TV set, let alone East Anglia. Despite all the airtime, "bootiful", like "nize" and "grindle", didn't catch on, not because Twitter didn't exist but because they were just a bit "whack".
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
01:06
-
01:06
The African Union has approved a feasibility study for the creation of an African Space Agency
Science fiction writer Larry Niven shrewdly observed: "The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space programme." Africa, the cradle of mankind, has been slow to heed the warning, but that could be about to change.
A decision by the African Union to approve a feasibility study for the creation of an African Space Agency prompted debate. A summit of ministers agreed that the study would also draft a common space policy for the 53 member countries. Some commentators argue that a rival to Nasa could provide jobs and spin-off technology. Others said the continent can ill-afford to pour scarce resources into stargazing when millions continue to face poverty, disease and food shortages.
But the future is already here, if unevenly distributed. Astronomers have worked in Cape Town for centuries and in 1820 established the Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, the first of its kind in the southern hemisphere. Africa has launched several satellites and, in 2002, internet millionaire Mark Shuttleworth flew on a Russian Soyuz rocket to become the first African in space.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recently awarded Cape Town its Global Astronomy for Development Office to help take astronomy to the developing world. Africa is also competing with Australia in a bid to host the world's most powerful radio telescope, able to peer back billions of years in time.
An international panel is expected to announce the winner from the two shortlisted continents in 2012, with the victor hosting the £1.25bn Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescope, 50 times more sensitive and 10,000 times faster than any other radio imaging telescope built.
The SKA telescope would eventually consist of about 3,000 antennas, half concentrated on the outskirts of Carnarvon in the Northern Cape in South Africa, with the rest distributed in Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique, Ghana, Mauritius, Madagascar, Kenya and Zambia.
, Johannesburg
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
01:06
The dispersal of tiny sea creatures in Antarctica has alerted scientists to the vulnerability of Earth's ice sheets
Bryozoans make unlikely prophets of doom. Nevertheless, scientists believe these tiny marine creatures, which live glued to the side of boulders, rocks and other surfaces, reveal a disturbing aspect about Antarctica that has critical implications for understanding the impact of climate change.
British Antarctic Survey researchers have found the dispersal of these minute animals suggests a sea passage once divided Antarctica 125,000 years ago. The discovery was made for the ongoing Census of Antarctic Marine Life project and involved comparing bryozoans from the Ross and Weddell seas. These two seas are separated by the west Antarctic ice sheet, one of the planet's largest masses of ice. Bryozoans found in the Ross and Weddell seas should have been fairly different in structure if the sheet had been stable and ancient. The two populations would have slowly evolved in different manners, if the sheet was millions of years old.
But Dr David Barnes and his team discovered that the two populations were almost identical, indicating the two seas must have been connected by a major sea passage in the recent past, around 125,000 years ago. "What we've got is this group of animals that don't disperse very well because the adults don't move at all and the larvae are short-lived and sink, so they find it difficult to get around," says Barnes. "So you're left with this nice signal of where things used to be connected and, in this case, it appears to be a connection between what is now an ice sheet."
The impact of the west Antarctica ice sheet melting sufficiently to let a major sea passage extend through it would have been considerable. A complete collapse of the sheet today would lead to a sea-level rise of between 11ft and 16ft, for example, though the event uncovered by Barnes may only have been a partial one. Nevertheless, the research indicates that the great ice sheet, once thought to be impregnable, is really highly vulnerable.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds -
01:04
Naposledy aktualizované zdroje
-
-
Sci-Tech Today (dnes, 08:18)
-
NYT > Science (dnes, 08:02)
-
ScienceDaily (dnes, 06:22)
-
Yahoo! (dnes, 06:09)
-
EurekAlert (dnes, 06:00)
-
CBC - Technology & Science News (dnes, 05:14)
-
BBC Science/Nature (dnes, 01:09)
-
PhysOrg (5. 9, 22:23)
-
Discovery (5. 9, 12:17)
-
ScienceNOW (4. 9, 00:22)
-
National Geographic News (4. 9, 00:11)
-
TIME (3. 9, 16:23)
-
Astronomy.com (3. 9, 00:00)
-
NASA (2. 9, 22:54)
