LONDON, England — Britons including Prime Minister Gordon Brown have leapt to the defense of their creaking healthcare service after President Barack Obama’s plans for a similar system in the United States were branded ‘evil’ by Republicans. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a heartfelt message of support for the NHS via Twitter. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a heartfelt message of support for the NHS via Twitter. Tens of thousands of people have joined a Twitter group expressing pride in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), which offers free taxpayer-funded medical care to all British residents, while leading politicians have spoken out in support. Republican former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin earlier this week condemned Obama’s plans to introduce a public heath insurance scheme as an ‘evil’ move that would result in ‘death panels’ deciding who would live or die. Her criticism has been echoed by fellow Republicans in direct attacks on Britain’s NHS. In an article, Former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich said British healthcare was run by ‘Orwellian’ bureaucrats who put a price tag on life. The comments caused a storm of protest in the United Kingdom, with Prime Minister […]
The idea that studying music improves the intellect is not a new one, but at last there is incontrovertible evidence from a study conducted out of the University of Toronto. The study, led by Dr. E. Glenn Schellenberg, examined the effect of extra-curricular activities on the intellectual and social development of six-year-old children. A group of 144 children were recruited through an ad in a local newspaper and assigned randomly to one of four activities: keyboard lessons, voice lessons, drama lessons, or no lessons. Two types of music lessons were offered in order to be able to generalize the results, while the groups receiving drama lessons or no lessons were considered control groups in order to test the effect of music lessons over other art lessons requiring similar skill sets and nothing at all. The activities were provided for one year. The participating children were given IQ tests before and after the lessons. The results of this study revealed that increases in IQ from pre- to post-test were larger in the music groups than in the two others. Generally these increases occurred across IQ subtests, index scores, and academic achievement. Children in the drama group also exhibited improvements […]
One of the largest glaciers in Antarctica is thinning four times faster than it was 10 years ago, according to research seen by the BBC. A study of satellite measurements of Pine Island glacier in west Antarctica reveals the surface of the ice is now dropping at a rate of up to 16m a year. Since 1994, the glacier has lowered by as much as 90m, which has serious implications for sea-level rise. The work by British scientists appears in Geophysical Research Letters. The team was led by Professor Duncan Wingham of University College London (UCL). Calculations based on the rate of melting 15 years ago had suggested the glacier would last for 600 years. But the new data points to a lifespan for the vast ice stream of only another 100 years. The rate of loss is fastest in the centre of the glacier and the concern is that if the process continues, the glacier may break up and start to affect the ice sheet further inland. One of the authors, Professor Andrew Shepherd of Leeds University, said that the melting from the centre of the glacier would add about 3cm to […]
A new theory, concluded by researchers from the University of Haifa, Israel, and the University of Kuopio in Finland, reaches 35 million years back in time to solve the puzzle Walking outdoors in the fall, the splendidly colorful leaves adorning the trees are a delight to the eye. In Europe these autumn leaves are mostly yellow, while the United States and East Asia boast lustrous red foliage. But why is it that there are such differences in autumnal hues around the world? A new theory provided by Prof. Simcha Lev-Yadun of the Department of Science Education- Biology at the University of Haifa-Oranim and Prof. Jarmo Holopainen of the University of Kuopio in Finland and published in the Journal New Phytologist proposes taking a step 35 million years back to solve the color mystery. The green of a tree’s leaves is from the larger proportion of the chlorophyll pigment in the leaves. The change in color to red or yellow as autumn approaches is not the result of the leaves’ dying, but of a series of processes – which differ between the red and yellow autumn leaves. When the green chlorophyll in leaves diminishes, the yellow pigments that already […]
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ice cores drilled through a glacier more than four miles up in the Himalayan Mountains have yielded a highly detailed record of the last 1,000 years of earth’s climate in the high Tibetan Plateau. Based on an analysis of the ice, both the last decade and the last 50 years were the warmest in 1,000 years. The core also showed a clear record of at least eight major droughts caused by a failure of the South Asian Monsoon, the worst of these a catastrophic seven-year-long dry spell that cost the lives of more than 600,000 people. The new findings, published in this week’s issue of the journal Science, outline data recovered from three cores drilled through the Dasuopu Glacier, a two-kilometer-wide ice field that straddles a flat area on the flank of Xixabangma, a 26,293-foot (8,014-meter) peak on the southern rim of the Tibetan Plateau. The international team, including American, Chinese, Peruvian, Russian and Nepalese members, retrieved the cores during a 10-week, 1997 expedition to the region. The expedition was supported by the National Science Foundation. ‘This is the highest climate record ever retrieved,’ explained Lonnie Thompson, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
