Last year, 48 under-18s were arrested for gun crime in Merseyside.
The "rubber hand illusion," for example, can trick you into losing track of a single body part. Someone strokes a rubber hand in front of you while at the same time stroking your real hand out of view. After a while, you start to think the rubber hand is your own.How odd. Pity I don't have any rubber hands around the house with which to try.
The Prophet said, “If anyone of you, when having sexual intercourse with his wife, says: Bismillah, Allahumma jannibna-Sh-Shaitan wa jannib-ish-Shaitan ma razaqtana,The meaning of this prayer is given in the following post:
and if it is destined that they should have a child, then Satan will never be able to harm him.”
‘With the name of Allah! O Allah! Save us from the evil of Shaytan and save whatever children You bestow us.’A religion whose founder recommends praying during sex is a religion too far.
When Harriet Westbrook, in rebellion against her father and her school, begged Shelley to rescue her, it was the kind of cause that he found hard to resist. He agreed to elope with a girl he had never considered more than a friend. “If I know anything about love, I am not in love,” he had written just weeks before the marriage. He loved the idea of getting married even less: “A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter.” But he recognized that living together out of wedlock would hurt Harriet’s reputation much more than his own, and he agreed to go through with the ceremony.A child or two later he subsequently fell in love with another 16 year old:
....in the summer of 1814, Shelley fell in love with Mary Godwin. Mary was then sixteen, the same age that Harriet had been when Shelley married her, and she had intellectual gifts that Harriet could never match. Just as important was her intellectual pedigree: she was the daughter of William Godwin, a radical thinker whom Shelley worshipped, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the crusader for women’s rights. Add the fact that Mary was instantly smitten with Shelley—it seems that they had sex for the first time by her mother’s grave, to mark their spiritual union—and Harriet never really had a chance.There is a lot more detail in the review.
The invitation read: “Let my mum know if you can drink and if so bring some.”...
On the way to the party, I asked my son if he wanted to take a bottle of wine. He declined then retracted, saying he supposed he would if others were drinking. Reluctantly, I bought a bottle of white wine. I did not want him to be embarrassed and besides, I was looking forward to a drink at the party myself....
By 10.30pm the consequences of my friend’s drinks policy were all too obvious. Everywhere I looked there was someone vomiting. I wondered what their parents would be thinking if they knew their children were quite so drunk. They had, after all, supplied the booze.I don't think this comment which follows the article is meant to be funny, but it made me laugh:
A whole bottle of wine for one 14 year old's personal use? What lunacy! When I was 14, my parents would not let me take more than four bottles of lager to a party. I'd inevitably scrounge another couple, but that was outside their control. My parents have continued to place (low) limits on what I can take to parties - but these days I am more often in pubs and clubs.
CLAIMS by Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews that his decision to cancel Mohamed Haneef's visa was based on much more than a mobile phone SIM card given to a second-cousin have been undermined by the release of the second police record of interview.
Police officer Adam Simms, who questioned Dr Haneef during the second interview last month, told him: "Tell me exactly. Now let's not forget, Mohamed, the reason you are sitting here and the reason you've been in police custody is because of this issue with the SIM card -- now it's causing you a lot of grief. We need to be clear as to what is happening with this SIM card. OK?"
How the hell does the fact that the police said that in the record of interview discredit Andrew's claim that there is significant other evidence that informed his decision?
This idea of being caught as negotiator between Moses and God is a curious one.Since the Koran does not provide specific detail of the Night Journey, historians have to draw on accounts by Islamic scholars versed in the Hadith, or prophetic traditions, for the specific details of what Armstong describes as “the most important mystical experience of Muhammad’s life”.
Alighting on the Temple Mount, he was greeted by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and other prophets, whom he led in prayer. Then Muhammad and Gabriel ascended the seven heavens to the Throne of God, who instructed Muhammad on the five daily prayers. According to tradition, God initially said Muslims should pray 50 times a day. But on his way down Muhammad met Moses, who told him to go back and get the number reduced. Moses kept sending Muhammad back to plead with God until the number of prescribed prayers was reduced to five.
As Armstrong points out: “This tradition shows that religion was not meant to be a crushing burden, but a moderate discipline which everybody could manage.”
Abu Sway agrees: “The amount decided on shows that God is merciful, and the intercession by Moses shows that there should be moderation in matters of faith.”
At 50, I have never married, never raised any children. And about a month before the call, I had reached a point where I was feeling anxious and socially disconnected, no longer relaxed with my friends and sensing there had to be something more meaningful in my life.This is entirely consistent with my long standing suspicion that the majority of therapists and social workers do not come to the job with much resembling a normal, stable, happy domestic life. Social workers in particular seem drawn to the job because of an injustice they have suffered in their own life, whether it physical or emotional in nature, and this career is their way of helping others who may be also be suffering.
The Australian’s blogging system broke down yesterday under the volume of people from around the world who’ve tried to contact us to tell us nobody is interested in whether or not the alternative PM visited a strip joint four years ago.Kevin's reaction, and his ill-advised decision to just keep talking about it yesterday, is the true story now.
Blanket coverage on television confirmed The Sketch’s inkling that this was a non-story, not least because most talkback callers on radio thought so too.
True, newspapers across four continents carried the non-story and every website in the land has a chat-room discussion or a poll on whether this sort of behaviour is acceptable for somebody who wants to run the country.
Anguished relatives of Chinese coal miners trapped in flooded shafts clashed with managers on Monday to demand information, but hopes for the 181 men faded after another day of efforts to pump the mines dry.It is pretty amazing how a mining disaster on this scale can attract such little notice in the West, compared to the relatively minor scale of death (9) in the Utah incident.The disaster in the eastern coastal province of Shandong is the latest to strike China's coal mines, which -- with over 2,000 people killed in the first seven months of this year along -- are the world's deadliest.
The miners have been trapped since Friday when a burst river dyke sent water rushing into two shafts. Rescuers hold out little hope of survival for many, if not all, of the men who could not outpace the torrent -- 172 in a main shaft and nine in one nearby.
Couples who have had children via in vitro fertilization are often left with extra embryos--and the rather difficult decision of what to do with them. Embryos can be donated to research or to other couples, destroyed, or left languishing in frozen storage. But now a California-based biotech startup is offering a new option: to use these embryos to create personalized stem-cell lines for couples or their families.
Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition – that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals – and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty.
In fact it cannot be emphasised too strenuously that there is nothing – not a scrap, not a mote – that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.
A recent Doctor Who episode (taking its cue from "Shakespeare in Love", no doubt) again portrayed Shakespeare as a rakish charmer, but it is entirely possible that he was the complete opposite. He may be the beneficiary of the most generously imagined personality ever. Just for a change, I would like some popular fictional work to portray him as intensely dislikeable.
It cannot be overemphasised how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare’s works, for the usual condition of 16th and early 17th century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwright survive, and even printed plays are far more often missing than not. Of the approximately 3,000 plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare’s birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in a coup of joylessness in 1642, 80% are known only by title. Only 230 or so play texts still exist from Shakespeare’s time, including the 38 by Shakespeare himself – about 15% of the total, a gloriously staggering proportion.There are bigger gaps in the records of history than I imagined.
"I've seen reports in the paper today about interjections in Parliament by Mr Downer some months ago, but I make no particular allegations against him," he said.UPDATE 6: With all the outrage about this at LP, there are few comments with which I can agree, but this one comes close (except for the part about "normally sensible") :
(Sigh) I wish the normally sensible commenters on here were not in such a rush to reassure everybody that of course strip clubs are just a normal part of blokedom, of course the women are all doing this stuff because they really prefer it and of course the pornulation of everything and the insistence of providing naked female flesh everywhere for male enjoyment is just fine and dandy.UPDATE 7: (Gosh, I just can't stop): Crikey has some interesting background on how this became a story, and it doesn't jibe well with the Libs being behind it. I like this part about Col Allen (whose denial that Rudd did anything improper is being treated as gospel by all Kevvie defenders):
And, for goodness sake, Col Allen, who is variously described in today’s papers as “knockabout”, “larrikin”, “famously brash” and “pugnacious”. They are all euphemisms. There is a nice profile here in which Allen is described as a bully by Stuart Littlemore, and Allen himself admits to occasionally pissing in his office sink during news conferences.
One wonders by what standard Allen judged Rudd’s behaviour in order to pronounce it gentlemanly.
Increasing production of biofuels to combat climate change will release between two and nine times more carbon gases over the next 30 years than fossil fuels, according to the first comprehensive analysis of emissions from biofuels...Biofuels look good in climate change terms from a Western perspective, said Dr Spracklen, but globally they actually lead to higher carbon emissions. "Brazil, Paraguay, Indonesia among others have huge deforestation programmes to supply the world biofuel market", he said.
The researchers say the emphasis should be placed on increasing the efficiency of fossil fuel use and moving to carbon-free alternatives such as renewable energy.
Smaller mass black holes that have already evaporated away could have left vacuum bubbles behind that contribute to the dark matter.To be fair, the article only talks about larger black holes, and "primordial" ones in particular, but I am curious to know if this is relevant to the evaporation of micro black holes of the type that may be created at CERN.
We have applied the RG to the black hole production scenario in the context of large extra dimensions. This has two surprising effects:The paper notes that this RG stuff had previously been used to predict that the final outcome of black hole evaporation is a remnant which is a "mini black hole of Planckian size". The article which discusses this notes that:
• First, the area of the black hole (which is of the same order as the production cross-section) does not only inherit the UV safety as it was observed for standard
scattering cross-section, but it even gets damped so strongly that it goes to zero.
• Second, the truncation parameter t, which does not play an important role in the
qualitative standard scattering cross-section picture, gets central importance for
the BH threshold. Even more, BH production could be completely forbidden3 for values of t ≤ 1, which according to [6] are perfectly possible.
In the light of such dramatic consequences of the application of RG to the simplest
picture of BH production, we conclude that more detailed studies have to be made
on both sides of the problem. It would be of great interest to see whether the straight forward statements, which were made here, would survive an improved formulation of the BH production threshold, of the RG solutions, and of the determination of the truncation parameter t. If the results persist and t can be determined to be ≤ 1, no black holes will be produced at the LHC whether large extra dimensions exist or not.
It would be interesting to investigate the possible astrophysical implications of a population of stable Planck size mini-black holes produced in the Early Universe or by the interaction of cosmic rays with the interstellar mediumThe suggestion being, I assume, that some of the dark matter in the universe may be very tiny black holes swarming around the place.
If BHRs (Stable Remnants) are made available by the LHC or theBut how do you actually make it into an energy generator? Shot particles at it in an accelerator? Would it be easy to hit? And more importantly, what does it mean if you drop one, or thousands, into the centre of the earth? Here's some speculation: are some planet interiors already partially heated by captured black hole remnants? Would adding thousands of human made ones be a bad idea?
NLC and can be used to convert mass in energy, then the total 2050 yearly world energy consumption of roughly 1021 Joule can be covered by just ∼ 10 tons of arbitrary material, converted to radiation by the Hawking process via m = E/c2 = 1021J/(3·108m/s)2 = 10 4kg.
THE reason many people with HIV-AIDS develop dementia has long baffled researchers, but scientists finally believe they have the answer - the virus hits the brain with a one-two punch.First, a protein on the surface of the virus directly kills brain cells, or neurons. Then the same protein disrupts the formation of new neurons from adult stem cells.
In people, the dementia triggered by the virus, HIV-associated dementia (HAD), slows thinking, memory and even movement.
Perversely, although highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) helps HIV-infected people live longer and with less severe dementia, the prevalence of HAD has not declined.
Statistics from the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (NCHECR) at the University of NSW in Sydney reveal that almost 9800 Australians have HIV-AIDS.
According to Bruce Brew -- head of neurology at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney -- roughly 20 per cent of people with AIDS will develop HAD. Surprisingly, many will remain otherwise quite well.
In the BCC report on the same research, it is noted:
Keith Alcorn, senior editor of the HIV information service NAM, said: "The discovery that HIV affects stem cell proliferation in the brain is bound to add to concerns that people with HIV doing well on antiretroviral therapy may nevertheless face a higher risk of dementia in years to come.
"Antiretroviral drugs have lowered viral load so that HIV will not kill cells directly, but we don't know the consequences for brain functioning of a long-term low level of infection.
"It may be that low level infection is enough to interfere with the regeneration pathways in the way shown in this experiment."
The acclaimed writer of the Inspector Rebus novels said in an interview last year: “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”Further in the report, it states this:
McDermid is one of several prominent lesbian thriller writers, including Patricia Cornwell, Louise Welsh and Manda Scott.I have never gotten into crime fiction, and didn't know Patricia Cornwell was lesbian. I agree with Rankin that this is a curious thing.
Fran Kelly: Just quickly...is it time to stop worrying about who Peter Costello had dinner with two years ago and start focusing on policy issues that voters really care about?How rich is that, given their performance yesterday?
Julia Gillard: I think that’s a question you should really be asking the government. It’s a stale and self obsessed government that is looking at all of these questions. It’s a stale and self obsessed set of ministers who are more worried about who is sitting in what chair more than anything else, they are certainly more worried about that than they are about the future of Australians working families, and it’s a self obsessed back bench that has lost touch with the needs of their constituents and is now much more enthralled by the internal dynamics of the Liberal Party and Mr Howard versus Mr Costello.
"The method used in Hizb ut-Tahrir is a change in thought patterns. We call it 'thought revolution'. When someone is given Islamic teaching - given the brilliant thinking of Islam - then they'll naturally undergo a thought revolution, and will see what is good and what is bad."
Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family's sandwich shop.
The student, of Stanley, County Durham, was taken to the University Hospital of North Durham, where doctors confirmed she had overdosed on caffeine.
She has since made a full recovery and is now warning others about the dangers of excessive coffee drinking.
Ms Willis, who had thought the coffees were single measures, said the effects were so severe that she began laughing and crying for no reason while serving customers at the shop.
She developed a fever and began struggling to breathe after being sent home by her father.
"My nerves were all over the place.
"I was drenched. I was burning up and hyperventilating.
"I was having palpitations, my heart was beating so fast and I thought I was going into shock.
That's a type of overdose you don't hear about every day.
Last financial year Australian wine exports topped $3 billion for the first time, pushed up by demand in China, which bought $51 million worth.
Government officials have secretly briefed ministers that Britain has no hope of getting remotely near the new European Union renewable energy target that Tony Blair signed up to in the spring - and have suggested that they find ways of wriggling out of it.
In contrast to the government's claims to be leading the world on climate change, officials within the former Department of Trade and Industry have admitted that under current policies Britain would miss the EU's 2020 target of 20% energy from renewables by a long way. And their suggestion that "statistical interpretations of the target" be used rather than new ways to reach it has infuriated environmentalists.
An internal briefing paper for ministers, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, reveals that officials at the department, now the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, think the best the UK could hope for is 9% of energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar or hydro by 2020.
It says the UK "has achieved little so far on renewables" and that getting to 9%, from the current level of about 2%, would be "challenging". The paper was produced in the early summer, around the time the government published its energy white paper.
Three-quarters of teens in year 10 remain virgins, says a national survey of secondary students in 2002, and the adolescents themselves tend to think this is a good thing.But barely a few sentences later:
Hmm. That's what we have to thank porn for; increasing this activity amongst 15 year olds?The average age for first intercourse among men 40 years ago was 18, and for women, 19. It has dropped to 16 for both sexes.
By year 10, most kids are deep kissing and genital touching. Roughly a third experience oral sex, with the practice widely seen as a safer alternative to intercourse. This development is new. Before the porno flick Deep Throat popularised fellatio in the 1970s, it tended to be the preserve of married couples.
Kids already know about bestiality, anal sex and the turkey slap, but they could use a word or two on how real intimacy might feel. Professor Susan Sawyer, a leading pediatrician who directs the Centre for Adolescent Health at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital, thinks parents ought to start the conversation with their kids by giving condoms and the morning-after pill on their 15th birthday. Not as a green light, but as a reality check and an opening to confide. "By the time they're 16, kids ought to have opened up a condom, blown it up and played with it."What an understatement opens the next sentence:
This won't be everyone's style...Given the frequent perversity with which teenagers don't exactly follow their parents' world views, I can imagine that the (surely rare!) sort of parent that wants to play condom balloons with their son or daughter on their 15th birthday will sometimes find said child recoiling with horror at the affront to their desire to remain a virgin until married.
It's a worry.The authors call such methods I3, for inhalation, ingestion and immersion. One of the writers, Peter Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist, said yesterday that a well-planned radiological attack "would be capable of killing several hundred, maybe upwards of a thousand, and paralysing a city without any question at all."
The article does not provide details of the most devastating method of attack the authors have conceived, for security reasons, but Professor Zimmerman described one scenario using a water-soluble radioactive isotope widely used in hospitals and industry: "I can then tap into the anti-fire spray in a theatre, and if I can trigger the spray, I can soak everyone in the room."
Polonium-210, which was used in Mr Litvinenko's murder, is even more deadly because it emits alpha radiation, which is not picked up by radiation sensors.
The team is now weighing several options: an inflatable home that could be packed for launch and then inflated on the Moon's surface using oxygen transported in tanks, a rigid structure, or a combination of both. ...I don't know. One of the prime things I would be looking at would be long lines of sight inside, rather than moving from one time cramped bubble of a spaceship into another tiny cramped bubble of a shelter for a couple of weeks.All that’s needed to shield astronauts from deadly onslaughts of high-energy protons spewed from the Sun during solar flares, Thomas says, is a 5-centimetre layer of water. This could be integrated into an inflatable structure using a bladder-like layer filled with water, sandwiched into a rigid structure, or simply stacked on top of the habitat in tanks.
Used packing materials and other waste could be piled against the structure to provide even more protection. Meteorites larger than dust-sized grains could be deflected by aluminium or Kevlar shields like those used on the International Space Station.
Thanks for mentioning my book..... Although I enjoyed the New Yorker Review, reading it barely scratches the surface of what my book contains. I hope you have a chance to delve a little deeper into the history of American whaling. LEVIATHAN will be coming out in Australia soon. If you have any suggestions for getting the word out about it in your part of the world, please let me know.I had cheekily suggested that reading the New Yorker review made it unnecessary to actually read the book. Of course, I don't want to cause authors of interesting books to lose money, so I think we should all trust Eric's promise that there is much to be gained by reading the book, and go and buy it when it appears here.
Seems to have taken an unusually long time for someone to get around to testing their effectiveness.Researchers have long known that the Nile tilapia feeds on mosquito larvae but the study was the first to test its potential to fight the disease in the field, said Francois Omlin, a researcher at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi.
"A fish in the field may act differently than a fish in an aquarium and it was important to test how effective it could be," Omlin, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. "The tilapia species was never tested in the field for its ability to eat mosquito larvae."....
In the study, the team cleared three ponds of fish and vegetation in the highlands of Western Kenya and measured the mosquito population before introducing young tilapia.
Ten days later, no malaria mosquito larvae were recorded compared with a similar pond with no tilapia, and 41 weeks after the fish were introduced the number of mosquitoes fell by more than 94 percent, Omlin said.
Subscribers must pay €29 (£20) a year, give their credit card details and leave a €150 credit card deposit to join the Vélib scheme. This buys half an hour’s pedalling a day and a card to lock and unlock bicycles from automated stations spaced every 300 metres in the city’s centre.
A simple swipe releases the bike and secures it at the other end, where a computer charges users on a sliding scale for any time over the first 30 minutes. This ensures that Vélib bikes are used for short journeys. Bikes are redistributed daily by electric trailers to avoid stations becoming empty or full.
I find it difficult to imagine the scheme working in Brisbane, or Sydney for that matter, simply because of the narrowness of many inner city streets.
Let's hope the side effects don't include sleeping most of the day and then a strong urge to jump in front of cars in the evening.A Queensland scientist has won a $750,000 fellowship to develop a lung cancer treatment from a bacterium found in eastern grey kangaroos...
Dr Wei says his research involves spores of bacteria that target cancer cells."By injecting the spores into the blood, the spores can get into the centre of the tumour and that would work as a live active and tumour seeking agent that destroys tumours from the inside," he said.
... a wax present in the head cavities of the Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus) and in the blubber of all whales. Spermaceti is extracted from whale oil by crystallisation at 6 °C, when treated by pressure and a chemical solution of caustic alkali. Spermaceti forms brilliant white crystals that are hard but oily to the touch, and are devoid of taste or smell, making it very useful as an ingredient in cosmetics, leatherworking and lubricants.As for why sperm whales have it in their head, this is rather interesting:
One function of the spermaceti organs is a buoyancy or diving organ. Before diving, cold water is brought through the organ and the wax is solidified . The increase in specific density generates a down force (approx 40 kg equiv) and allows the whale effortless sinking. During the chase in deep levels (max 3km!) the stored oxygen is consumed and excess heat melts the spermaceti. Now only hydrodynamic forces (by swimming) keep the whale down before effortlessly surfacing.Knowledge gap filled.
In the 1990s, daring researchers finally tackled a question that was discussed everywhere except in formal academic settings. When someone's speech "sounds gay", what makes it sound that way?Not exactly crucial to the advancement of the human condition, but it's good to see that I am not the only person to have wondered why (some) gay men sound so gay.
The APA report also featured a 1998 study, in which the same researchers asked college-aged girls to try on either a swimsuit or a sweater, assess their appearance, then perform mathematical tests. The girls asked to wear swimsuits performed significantly worse.“This is how sexualisation fragments consciousness,” says Dr Lamb. “These girls were so hung up on their appearance they literally didn’t have room in their heads to do maths. They learn that preoccupation from the women they look up to in the media.”
One psychologist explains the problem this way:
Though Dr Wilson believes flirtation and exhibitionism are natural for young girls, he says that clear lines must be drawn. “Children want to be looked at, but wearing items like thongs and revealing clothes sends the message that they are sexually available. It also implies knowledge of sexuality that just isn’t there,” he says.As to the group think of girls, it also points out this:
But while criticism of the media is the answer Dr Lamb hopes for, it is girls criticising each other that is beginning to change attitudes among some groups. “There is a backlash beginning,” she says. “Girls quickly go from being popular to being derided for their slutty behaviour. It’s sad because they do all these things to fit in, but go too far and they are soon turned against.”I wonder if anyone has looked at the comparative "early sexualisation" behaviour of girls from mixed gender schools and girls only ones.
Makes me feel so much better.Mr Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.
Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them, the Government says.
Nor is there anything like skinning the whale’s penis, “longer than a Kentuckian is tall,” and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like “a candidate for an archbishoprick.” For “Moby-Dick,” Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter “none of Melville’s fish documents was particularly helpful.” In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol.It's a really interesting read. Go to it.
The Japanese obsession with fish is a problem. As another Foreign Correspondent report (this one on massive Japanese overfishing of tuna off Australia and elsewhere) noted:Tetsuya Endo, a professor and researcher at Hokkaido Health Science University's faculty of pharmaceutical sciences, affirmed the other doctors' condemnation of small-cetacean food products.
In a terse e-mail sent to this correspondent, Endo said, in reference to dolphin meat, "It's not food!"
In 2005, Endo published the results of a three-year study on random samples of cetacean food products sold throughout Japan, and concluded all of it was unhealthy because of high levels of mercury and methylmercury.
However, Hideki Moronuki, deputy director of the government's Far Seas Fisheries Division of the Resources Management Department, in an interview with The Japan Times, maligned Endo's study, calling it "misleading information." When pressed, though, he failed to substantiate his accusation.
Japan has only two per cent of the world’s population yet Japanese eat a chunky ten per cent of the global fish catch. The national appetite seems almost insatiable.
Petrol costs about 10p a litre, so Tehran is usually one continuous traffic jam. On Friday there is gridlock at midnight. And electricity is 70% subsidised. Seen from the air at nights, the capital burns as bright as any American metropolis. Because petrol is sold so cheaply, it makes no economic sense to build refineries in Iran, but because of the absence of refineries there is actually a petrol shortage. Rather than raise prices, the government has introduced rationing, handing out smart cards that limit most users to 100 litres a month. There was an initial wave of protests a month ago when the scheme was first introduced but those have since faded. The lull may be an illusion though. Many people have burned through much of the four-month ration on their initial smart card in just over 30 days. When the cards run out and people can no longer get to work, there is likely to be another bout of anger and frustration.
....the grain of the original film is visible when scans are fully enlarged. The most detailed images from lunar orbit show rocks and other surface features about 40 inches (1 meter) wide.I wonder just how carefully these photos have been looked at already (there's 36,000, after all.) What's the bet that some people might will be spending hours looking at them for an alien artefact that been missed so far.
