Archive for March, 2008
Igor Volodin believes vodka is no more harmful than chocolate. He is proud to be the first Russian to produce the spirit in a special women’s version, designed to be sipped with salad after a workout in the gym.
Touted as a glamour product for upwardly mobile women in booming Russia, Damskaya or “Ladies” vodka worries doctors, who fear a fresh wave of female alcoholics in a country already suffering one of the world’s worst drink problems.
Males will go to extreme lengths to get females, but playing dead might not seem like an obvious strategy. Some male nursery web spiders, however, regularly feign death, and those that do are more likely to mate.
A Chinese bride burned her new husband to death after he got into bed after a drunken argument without washing his feet, state media reported.
“Wang and his wife, Luo, were married on February 2. The couple, however, frequently fought over trivial things while still on their honeymoon,” the official Xinhua news agency quoted a local newspaper as saying. View full article »
Lawmakers defiantly chewed coca in Peru’s Congress on Thursday while criticizing a U.N. recommendation to criminalize traditional uses of the plant.The coca leaf, the raw ingredient of cocaine, is used by millions of people to stave off hunger and fight altitude sickness. It is also used in teas, in cooking and by fortune tellers.
In recent years, crystal meth (methamphetamine) and ecstasy (MDMA) have become some of America’s top problem drugs. Meth can cause severe problems in the cardiovascular and central nervous systems. Furthermore, because there is no way to remove the drug from the body, therapies tend to focus on treating its side-effects.
But antibodies that bind to methamphetamines and methamphetamine-like compounds to effectively remove them from the bloodstream could change that. Michael Owens, director of the Center for Alcohol and Drug Abuse at the University of Arkansas, US, and colleagues claim to have developed a way to generate them.
Science fiction writer, inventor and futurist Arthur C. Clarke has died, leaving fans bereft at the loss of his brilliance and creativity.
Clarke died early Wednesday after suffering from breathing problems, the Associated Press reported. He was 90 years old. He suffered from post-polio syndrome and was confined to a wheelchair toward the end of his life. Clarke wrote more than 100 sci-fi books, including “2001: A Space Odyssey.” He is credited with coming up with the idea for the communications satellite and predicting space travel before rockets were even test fired.
A six-inch robotic spy plane modeled after a bat would gather data from sights, sounds and smells in urban combat zones and transmit information back to a soldier in real time.
Read the rest at The University of Michigan College of Engineering
Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota’s state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.
A brain surgeon used a £30 DIY drill to carry out a successful operation on a fully conscious patient.
Henry Marsh, 58, used a Bosch cordless drill because he did not have his normal equipment on him.
