International aid agencies fear that the levels of death and starvation last seen 24 years ago are set to return
The spectre of famine has returned to the Horn of Africa nearly a quarter of a century after the world’s pop stars gathered to banish it at Live Aid, raising £150m for relief efforts in 1985. Millions of impoverished Ethiopians face the threat of malnutrition and possibly starvation this winter in what is shaping up to be the country’s worst food crisis for decades.
Read More ‘Millions facing famine in Ethiopia as rains fail’
Infertile couples may be spared years of fruitless treatment with the discovery that the human egg can read the father’s genetic key and screen out failures
Thousands of infertile couples could be spared the pain, anguish and expense of fruitless IVF treatments, thanks to the discovery of a lock-and-key mechanism between sperm and egg cells.
The research could explain why so many couples with no apparent reproductive problems are unable to conceive. Although more than 40,000 in vitro fertilisation cycles are prescribed in Britain each year, only 10,000 births result. Read More ‘The secret life of sperm is unlocked’
Creature that features in New Zealand folklore really existed, scientists say
A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand. It was said to be named after its cry and to have “raced the hawk to the heavens”. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast’s eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago, say the authors of a study in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Read More ‘Maori legend of man-eating bird is true’
As a 10-year-old ’space geek’, Paul Rodgers was glued to the television when Neil Armstrong uttered the immortal words, ‘The Eagle has landed.’ Forty years on, he looks back at mankind’s giant leap – and the Cold War politics that turned the space race into a mad dash
The first sign of trouble came when the Eagle was five minutes into its descent, 33,500ft above the Moon’s surface. A shrill alarm rang through the cramped, seatless cabin in which two astronauts stood facing the stars. An error message flashed up on their primitive computer’s tiny read-out: “1202″. Neither Neil Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin knew what it meant. It was left to Steve Bales, a 26-year-old technician at Mission Control in Houston to decide they should keep going. The error, he was fairly sure, would fix itself, and he repeatedly called “Go!” as the alarm sounded four more times. Read More ‘‘The Eagle has landed’: A space geek remembers the moon shot’
A planned reduction of a Lincolnshire TV mast has prompted protests
It is more than 1,000ft high, but so unobtrusive that most people in the UK never even realised it existed, let alone that it held a European record. Now, Belmont Transmitting Station, one mile west of the quiet village of Donington on Bain, is about to divest itself of the only thing that made it notable. Read More ‘Europe’s tallest structure to be cut down to size’
But 99.5 per cent conviction rate may take time to alter
(Co-written with Kyoko Nishimoto)
Japanese popular culture has few courtroom dramas. There is no Rumpole of the Tokyo Bailey, no Perry Mason in Osaka. Juninin no yasashii nihonjin, a 1991 remake of Henry Fonda’s jury-room classic Twelve Angry Men, is a comedy, its title translating as “Twelve Gentle Japanese“. And Shun Nakahara’s film is also a fantasy; for the past 66 years, no jury has sat in Japan.
Screenwriters and defendants alike should therefore embrace the country’s looming judicial reform. Currently, the pinnacle of court excitement comes when the prosecutor files a stack of summarised affidavits with the judge’s clerk. This is trial by paperwork. Oral testimony is rare, and cross-examination all but unheard of. Trials not only lack drama, they give defendants little hope. Prosecutors have a better than 99.5 per cent chance of winning. Read More ‘Juries return to Japanese courts after 66 years’
The Canadian city has been named the best place in the world to live. But those halcyon days are over
Once upon a very recent time, Vancouver had a clean, safe image. Nestled between a spectacular bay and snow-capped mountains, this Canadian city, which is twice the size of Birmingham, was described by The Economist as the most liveable in the world. Not any more. As it prepares to host the 2010 Winter Olympics, what it’s got now is not cuddly, eco-friendly publicity, but blood-spattered streets littered with shell casings and corpses. Read More ‘From heaven to hell: 18 die as drugs war rages on streets of Vancouver’
From a cluster of Chiltern villages, GE Healthcare is leading the way in detecting and treating diseases
For the lucky, a check-up at the GP consists of nothing more sophisticated than a blood-pressure cuff, an icy stethoscope and a jar to pee in. For those with bigger problems, it can involve medicine’s heavy artillery, from bedside ultra-sound devices to giant metal doughnuts that generate magnetic fields several times stronger than the Earth’s. Read More ‘Fantastic voyage: new-generation imaging heralds revolution in medical treatment’
British scientists have boosted the power of an MRI scanner 1,000,000%, giving doctors a window into living, breathing lungs for the first time. The technique, called hyperpolarisation, makes the signal detected by a standard magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner so strong it reveals details that could only be seen previously by slicing the patient open. Read More ‘MRI boost gives view into lungs’
It’s all systems go at Canon because it didn’t chase growth
The robot trolleys scooting around Canon’s Toride photocopier assembly plant quietly beep a little melody – “Toryanse”, a traditional folk song – to warn workers that they’re coming. The lyrics translate as: “Unless you are going to the shrine, don’t take this path”, a typically obtuse Japanese way of saying, “be careful or you’ll meet your maker”. It’s an appropriate choice for the famously conservative company; Canon hopes to sidestep the deadly economic juggernaut that is bearing down on its rivals in the electronics sector. Yet it’s doing so in a typically conservative way. Read More ‘Cut-free zone: a company to copy in a slump’
The spectre of famine has returned to the Horn of Africa nearly a quarter of a century after the world’s pop stars gathered to banish it at Live Aid, raising £150m for relief efforts in 1985. Millions of impoverished Ethiopians face the threat of malnutrition and possibly starvation this winter in what is shaping up to be the country’s worst food crisis for decades.