Recent breaches in airport security checks, such as an incident at Munich Airport on Wednesday, have authorities on both sides of the Atlantic searching for improvements. But there is a danger of taking things too far, say German commentators. Indeed, too much security could end up paralyzing air travel all together. It didn’t take long for the debate over airport security to hit the highest echelons of the German government. On Wednesday, a major security breach at Munich’s international airport resulted in the closure of a terminal building and the cancellation of 33 flights. On Thursday, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said he would take a close look at the lapse and strengthen airport security as necessary. He wasn’t alone. In a meeting of EU interior ministers, together with US Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, in Toledo, Spain on Thursday, the European Union and the United States agreed to improve the sharing of passenger data. The agreement came in response to the failed Christmas Day terror attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. In addition, the gathered officials agreed to work together to deploy better screening technologies. The European Commission is currently evaluating the […]
If you find video games a struggle, it could be to do with the size of certain parts of your brain, a study suggests. US researchers found they could predict how well an amateur player might perform on a game by measuring the volume of key sections of the brain. Writing in the journal Cerebral Cortex, they suggest their findings could have wider implications for understanding the differences in learning rates. There is broad acceptance of a link between brain size and intelligence. However it remains a complicated picture. Within the animal kingdom some smaller brains appear superior to many larger ones: the monkey’s compared with the horse, for instance, or the human and the elephant. But there are certain parts of the brain which can be disproportionately larger, and this may explain some differences in cognitive ability – between individuals as well as species. A multi-disciplinary team from the University of Illinois, the University of Pittsburgh and Massachusetts Institute of Technology recruited 39 adults – 10 men, 29 women – who had spent less than three hours each week playing video games in the previous two years. They then had to play […]
NEW YORK — Has the global economy recovered? Forecasters say there will be an uptick this year of 2.4 percent, but they’re forgetting something. China could fail soon, and, if it does, the world’s most populous state will drag the rest of us down. Skip to next paragraph At this moment, a Chinese crisis seems like the last thing we should be worried about. After all, last year China overtook America as the planet’s largest car market and passed Germany as the biggest exporter. On Thursday, Beijing announced that growth for the fourth quarter of 2009 was 10.7 percent and 8.7 percent for the entire year. Some analysts said the numbers were so strong that the country zoomed past Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy. Stock markets, property prices, you name it: Everything Chinese is soaring. Dubai was once soaring, too. Global markets therefore, shuddered in November at the news that Dubai World, Dubai’s state investment firm and biggest corporate debtor, had asked for an extension on its $59 billion of obligations. Troubles in the booming emirate had been evident for some time, but stock investors were nonetheless caught unawares, apparently thinking a default would not […]
Last November, U.N. climate chief Rajendra Pachauri delivered a blistering rebuke to India’s environment minister for casting doubt on the notion that global warming was causing the rapid melting of Himalayan glaciers. ‘We have a very clear idea of what is happening,’ the chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the Guardian newspaper. ‘I don’t know why the minister is supporting this unsubstantiated research. It is an extremely arrogant statement.’ Then again, when it comes to unsubstantiated research it’s hard to beat the IPCC, whose 2007 report insisted that the glaciers-which feed the rivers that in turn feed much of South Asia-were very likely to nearly disappear by the year 2035. ‘The receding and thinning of Himalayan glaciers,’ it wrote in its supposedly definitive report, ‘can be attributed primarily to the [sic] global warming due to increase in anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases.’ It turns out that this widely publicized prediction was taken from a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund, which based it on a comment by Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain from 1999. Mr. Hasnian now says he was ‘misquoted.’ Even more interesting is that the IPCC was warned in […]
Epidemiological studies indicate that being overweight or obese is associated with increased cancer risk. The most dramatic effect of obesity on cancer risk has been noted for a common form of liver cancer called hepatocellular carcinoma or HCC. Modeling the effect of obesity in mice, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have conclusively demonstrated that obesity is tumor-promoting and have obtained evidence that this effect depends on induction of low-grade, chronic inflammation. Their results, published January 22 by the journal Cell, may suggest novel therapy to prevent HCC development in obese men who suffer from chronic liver disease. Michael Karin, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology in UCSD’s Laboratory of Gene Regulation and Signal Transduction, who led the study, found that obesity enhanced the development of HCC by stimulating the production of tumor-promoting cytokines – interleukin-6 (Il-6) and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) – that also cause chronic inflammation. Production of these signaling molecules, which are elevated in obese mice and in humans, causes inflammation of the liver and activation of a tumor-promoting transcription factor, a protein called STAT3. This protein in turn activates the formation and growth of liver cancer. The primary role […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
