Wednesday, May 19, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Wednesday, May 19, 2010)
(1)- LANGUAGE FIX – A Chinese commission of 600 volunteers and a politburo of adroit English speakers has fixed more than 10,000 public signs, rewritten English-language historical placards and helped hundreds of restaurants recast offerings.

(2)- NEWLY FOUND -- Researchers discover some of the tiniest and weirdest microbes growing in a copper mine sludge that is as acidic as battery acid. Scientists reconstructed their genomes and found they are among the simplest.

(3)- OLDE HATES -- For the past 18 years, political debate in the Indian megalopolis of Bangalore revolved over a critical issue: whether to remove burlap sacks covering a small statue of a two-millennia-old poet.

(4)- SEAWEED USE -- Tasmanian scientists discover a compound occuring naturally in Japanese seaweed which could provide the key to beating swine flu. A compound in the seaweed acts as a natural defence against marine viruses and toxins.

(5)- ALBINO KILLINGS -- Seven new albino killings have been reported in Tanzania and Burundi amid signs that the lucrative trade in their body parts has not waned.

(6)- FINDING FAULT -- Aids denialism is estimated to have killed many thousands. Jon Cartwright asks if scientists should be held accountable, while overleaf Bruce Charlton defends his decision to publish the work of an Aids sceptic.

(7)- CHINA WANTS IN -- All across Africa, new tracks are being laid, highways built,ports deepened, commercial contracts signed—all on an unprecedented scale, and led by China, whose appetite for commodities seems insatiable.

(8)-WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ – He says Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.

(9)- DISCOVERED -- Physicists discover a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter.


POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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