America has been adding fluoride to its public water supplies for decades, based on overwhelming evidence that even low levels of the substance can significantly reduce tooth decay, with no major side effects. Now research from Japan suggests expanding the list of aqueous additives — namely, to lithium.
Lithium often occurs naturally, in trace amounts, in water supplies, particularly in areas with a high concentration of granite. In The British Journal of Psychiatry earlier this year, the neuropsychiatrist Takeshi Terao and other researchers showed that communities in Japan’s Oita Prefecture with higher levels of naturally occurring lithium in their water supplies had fewer suicides than those with lower levels. Read the full story
Bangalore: Scientists at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) are on the brink of a path-breaking discovery. They may have found signs of life in some form or the other on the Moon.
They believe so because scientific instruments on India’s first unmanned lunar mission, Chandrayaan-1, picked up signatures of organic matter on parts of the Moon’s surface, Surendra Pal, associate director, Isro Satellite Centre (Isac), said at the international radar symposium here on Friday. Read the full story
Dubai said on Monday that it has received $10 billion from Abu Dhabi, another member of the United Arab Emirates, sparing the city state from defaulting on a $3.52 billion bond maturing that day.
The announcement ends weeks of speculation about whether Dubai would make good on the most immediately pressing of the obligations it incurred during years of freewheeling spending. The Islamic bond maturing Monday was issued by Nakheel, the property development arm of Dubai’s main investment vehicle, Dubai World. Read the full story
Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.
The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story. Read the full story
RIO DE JANEIRO — The search for the black boxes from an Air France airliner crash off Brazil six months ago will resume in early February, the head of the French office investigating the accident said here Saturday.
The new underwater sweeps, approximately 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) off Brazil’s northeast coast, will last a maximum three months and involve sonar and robot submarines, said Jean-Paul Troadec, director of the Investigation and Analysis Bureau. Read the full story
The world’s largest atom smasher has recorded its first high-energy collisions of protons, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.
Physicists hope those collisions will help them understand suspected phenomena such as dark matter, antimatter and ultimately the creation of the universe billions of years ago, which many theorize occurred as a massive explosion known as the Big Bang. Read the full story
The mammoth chunk of ice, which measures 12 miles long and five miles wide, was spotted floating close to the mainland by scientists at the Australian Antarctic Division (ADD).
Known as B17B, it is currently drifting 1,000 miles from Australia’s west coast and is moving gradually north with the ocean current and prevailing wind.
2009 will go down as the beginning of the end of the United States drug war. I have worked at the Drug Policy Alliance promoting alternatives to the war on drugs for 10 years, and I can say without a doubt that there was more debate and movement toward sensible drug policies this year than in the last 9 years combined! Here are 10 stories that contributed to the unprecedented momentum to end America’s longest running war.
1) Three Former Latin American Presidents Call Drug War a Failure (February) Read the full story
NEW YORK – Brazil has recently generated positive headlines with its 2016 Olympic bid victory, as well as its increased economic and political visibility.
Based on current economic trends, it could be one of the world’s five biggest economies — along with China, the United States, India and Japan — by the middle of this century, according to The Economist.
Yet, the evidence of progress has been marred by the nation’s troubling crime statistics — and reports of unlawful methods employed by the security forces. Read the full story
Meteorologists said the snow storm closing in on the Iowa City area will create a “truly life-threatening situation,” in the next few days.
The snow storm is expected to drop more than a foot of snow on the Iowa City area, follow it up with blizzard conditions and leave bitter cold in its wake.
“Everything you can expect in the worst of winter weather is coming our way in the next few days,” said Andy Ervin, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the Quad Cities. Read the full story
If you’re in Chicago, then you might want to head over to the Adler planetarium today, when they unveil an enormous 2.5 billion pixel mosaic of the Galaxy! It’s composed of 800,000 separate Spitzer Space Telescope images (I mean, c’mon, holy Haleakala, eight hundred thousand images!) stitched together. The image was actually released last year, but the ginormous print version is premiering at Adler today.
The image above is one very tiny piece of the mosaic; it was originally about 6000 pixels across, and I shrunk it down by a factor of 10 to fit it here on the blog. And that is still only an eensy weensy piece of the whole thing!
The images are in the infrared, well outside what the eye can see. The colors represent IR light at 3.6, 8, and 24 microns (depicted in the picture as blue, green, and red). Different objects emit at different wavelengths: warm dust is red, while nebulae forming stars are yellow. The diffuse green glow seen everywhere in the image is from complex organic molecules called PAHs, or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. On Earth those are created when fossil fuels are burned; in space, they are byproducts of stellar birth and death. Read the full story
Rwanda has been declared free of landmines – the first country to achieve this status.
The announcement was made at the Cartagena Summit on a Mine-Free World in Colombia.
Hundreds of people have been killed and horrifically injured by landmines in Rwanda.
Landmines were laid between 1990 and 1994 in Rwanda and over the past three years more than over 9,000 have been destroyed by Rwandan soldiers. Read the full story
FORWARD OPERATING BASE SHANK, Afghanistan – Veterans of Iraq recall rolling to war along asphalted highways, sweltering in flat scrublands and chatting with city-wise university graduates connected to the wider world.
Now fighting in Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers invariably encounter illiterate farmers who may never have talked to an American as they slog into remote villages on dirt tracks through bitterly cold, snow-streaked mountains.
“Before deploying here we were given training on language, culture, everything. I thought that since I was an Iraq combat veteran, I didn’t need any of that stuff. I was wrong. Both countries may be Muslim but this is a totally different place,” says Sgt. Michael McCann, returning from a patrol in the east-central province of Logar. Read the full story
It looks more like the Starship Enterprise sinking in the sea – but this huge vertical vessel could be the future of ocean exploration.
Called the SeaOrbiter, the huge 51m (167ft) structure is set to be the world’s first vertical ship allowing man a revolutionary view of life below the surface.
Although currently only a prototype its inventor Jacques Rougerie thinks his international oceanographic station will soon be setting sail. Read the full story
One of the most interesting things I found out about in this 60 Minutes story is that Wal-Mart is the largest gold retailer in the United States. Here at Disinfo, we distributed Robert Greenwald’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, and here’s another troubling consequence to add to this idea, that low price doesn’t come without costs that you, the consumer, may not be aware of. Costs that can make you think twice about exactly what you are buying.
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