Shanghai gets muted Chinese New Year after crush
Shanghai (AFP) Feb 18, 2015 -
Shanghai is toning down Chinese New Year celebrations by cancelling events and limiting people at tourist spots after a stampede killed 36 people seven weeks earlier.
Revellers, many of them young women, were trampled to death on New Year's Eve after flocking to the historic riverfront, known as the Bund, a popular tourist destination.
Police on foot patrol and driving golf cart-like veh ...
more
Chinese cosmetic tourists reap regret in South Korea
Beijing (AFP) Feb 18, 2015 -
Chinese businesswoman Chen Yili paid a South Korean hospital thousands of dollars to reshape her face in the hope she would look more like the glamorous stars she saw on television.
Instead she says she was disfigured by the operation - one of a growing number of Chinese women who claim shoddy procedures and a lack of regulation in South Korea's booming "medical tourism" industry, have left ...
more
Flu shot protects against new strain H7N9: study
Miami (AFP) Feb 17, 2015 -
The flu vaccine may not have protected most people against influenza circulating widely this season, but a study Tuesday showed it was effective against the new H7N9 strain that emerged in China in 2013.
Antibodies that protect against H7N9 avian flu make up a small portion of people's immune response to the annual flu shot, "but appear to broadly neutralize H7 viruses and represent promisin ...
more
Chinese MH370 relatives protest at Malaysia PM's office
Putrajaya, Malaysia (AFP) Feb 18, 2015 -
Chinese relatives of MH370 passengers gathered outside the Malaysian prime minister's office Wednesday to demand his government rescind its declaration that all on board the plane were presumed dead.
"We want an explanation from (Prime Minister Najib Razak). And we want him to cancel the declaration that the incident was an accident," said Kelly Wen, a Chinese national whose husband was on t ...
more
Dutch 'put production before safety' in quake-hit area
The Hague (AFP) Feb 18, 2015 -
A Dutch public commission said Wednesday government and energy companies had put production ahead of safety in Europe's biggest gas field, triggering a series of minor earthquakes.
"It seems that safety in regards to earthquakes had no influence on the decision to extricate gas" from northern Groningen, the independent Dutch Safety Board (OVV) said in a report.
The OVV launched an invest ...
more
MIT creates self-assembling underwater chair
Cambridge, Mass. (UPI) Feb 18, 2015 -
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a chair that uses magnets to assemble itself from six pieces underwater.
The MIT Self-Assembly Lab team, led by Skylar Tibbits, released a video showing how the six pieces move around in the current of the water and assemble themselves using unique connection points that only allow the pieces to connect in the correct ...
more
Pygmy attacks on Bantu rivals in DR Congo leave 27 dead: UN
Kinshasa (AFP) Feb 18, 2015 -
Pygmy militia attacks against Bantu villages in the Democratic Republic of Congo last week claimed the lives of 27 people, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
The three attacks, around the town of Manono in the southeastern province of Katanga, occurred between February 9 and 15, Felix-Prosper Basse, spokesman for the UN peacekeeping mission in DR Congo, told a press conference.
Since ...
more
New drug shields monkeys from AIDS: study
Paris (AFP) Feb 18, 2015 -
Scientists said Wednesday a new drug tested on monkeys provided an astonishingly effective shield against an animal version of the AIDS virus, a major gain in the quest for an HIV vaccine.
Macaque monkeys given the drug were able to fend off high repeated doses of the simian version of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), they reported in the journal Nature.
"We... show a way to achie ...
more
New map of human epigenomes is most expansive ever
San Francisco (UPI) Feb 18, 2015 -
At team of geneticists from across the country have built the most comprehensive map of human epigenomes - both expansive and detailed. It's the culmination of almost a decade of research into gene expression.
In recent years, doctors, researchers and the pharmaceutical industry have become increasingly interested in better understanding disease from an epigenomic perspective. The huma ...
more
Heavy snowstorm causes travel chaos in Istanbul
Istanbul (AFP) Feb 18, 2015 -
A heavy fall of snow on Wednesday caused travel chaos in Istanbul, forcing the temporary closure of Turkey's main airport and causing hundreds of traffic accidents.
Istanbulites woke up to find the famed minarets and domes of the historic city's skyline layered in snow after a heavy fall overnight that has still shown no sign of abating.
National carrier Turkish Airlines was forced to de ...
more
Size matters to adapt to diverse environments and avoid extinction
Toronto, Canada (SPX) Feb 19, 2015 -
A new University of Toronto study may force scientists to rethink what is behind the mass extinction of amphibians occurring worldwide in the face of climate change, disease and habitat loss.
The old cliche "size matters" is in fact the gist of the findings by graduate student Stephen De Lisle and Professor Locke Rowe of U of T's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in a paper pu ...
more
Mapping seascapes in the deep ocean
Southampton, UK (SPX) Feb 19, 2015 -
Researchers from University of Southampton have developed a new, automated method for classifying hundreds of miles of the deep sea floor, in a way that is more cost efficient, quicker and more objective than previously possible.
Currently there is very little information about the geographic distribution of life on the sea floor. This is largely because of the practical difficulty in acce ...
more
Researcher finds evidence of climate change in ancient Northern China
Waco TX (SPX) Feb 19, 2015 -
Using a relatively new scientific dating technique, a Baylor University geologist and a team of international researchers were able to document--for the first time--a drastic climate change 4,200 years ago in northern China that affected vegetation and led to mass migration from the area.
Steve Forman, Ph.D., professor of geology in the College of Arts and Sciences, and researchers--using ...
more
Potential new breathalyzer for lung cancer screening
Washington DC (SPX) Feb 19, 2015 -
Researchers from Chongqing University in China have developed a high sensitive fluorescence-based sensor device that can rapidly identify cancer related volatile organic compounds - biomarkers found exclusively in the exhaled breath of some people with lung cancer.
Their work, described in a paper published this week in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments, from AIP Publishing, de ...
more
New ozone-destroying gases on the rise
Leeds, UK (SPX) Feb 19, 2015 -
Scientists report that chemicals that are not controlled by a United Nations treaty designed to protect the Ozone Layer are contributing to ozone depletion. In the new study, published in Nature Geoscience, the scientists also report the atmospheric abundance of one of these 'very short-lived substances' (VSLS) is growing rapidly.
Study lead author Dr Ryan Hossaini, from the School of Eart ...
more
Ancient rocks show life could have flourished on Earth 3.2 billion years ago
Seattle WA (SPX) Feb 19, 2015 -
A spark from a lightning bolt, interstellar dust, or a subsea volcano could have triggered the very first life on Earth. But what happened next? Life can exist without oxygen, but without plentiful nitrogen to build genes - essential to viruses, bacteria and all other organisms - life on the early Earth would have been scarce.
The ability to use atmospheric nitrogen to support more widespr ...
more
Turning smartphones into personal, real-time pollution monitors
Washington DC (SPX) Feb 19, 2015 -
As urban residents know, air quality is a big deal. When local pollution levels go up, the associated health risks also increase, especially for children and seniors. But air pollution varies widely over the course of a day and by location, even within the same city.
Now scientists, reporting in the ACS journal Environmental Science and Technology, have used smartphone and sensing technolo ...
more
UI engineers find switchgrass removes PCBs from soils
Ames IO (SPX) Feb 19, 2015 -
University of Iowa researchers have found a type of grass that was once a staple of the American prairie can remove soil laden with PCBs, toxic chemicals once used for cooling and other industrial purposes.
The researchers report that switchgrass successfully removed up to 40 percent of the PCBs from contaminated soils in lab experiments. When boosted by a PCB-oxidizing microorganism, the ...
more
