Kings of the carnivores
Wednesday, April 18 2012
Who’s Afraid of Greater Luxembourg?
Luxembourg is about as cuddly as countries come: prosperous, picturesque and delightfully tiny. At 999 square miles, it is the smallest but one of the European Union states. You could drive its length (55 miles) or its width (35 miles) in less time than it takes to watch a feature-length movie — provided you don’t stop at one of the many touristy villages or vineyards along the way. The capital, also called Luxembourg, is a cozy city of barely 100,000 souls; its major problem is not drugs or urban decay, but the apparently unfixable fact that it’s rather boring.
Luxembourg is the only country in the world ruled by a grand duke, which sounds more like the setup to a fairy tale than a real-world constitutional arrangement. The grand duchy is a founding member of the European Union and NATO, and hosts the European Court of Justice, Eurostat (the European Statistical Office), the Secretariat of the European Parliament and other supranational institutions. Luxembourg expects to be listened to and taken seriously by its international peers. And it is: of its last four prime ministers, one went on to become president of the United Nations General Assembly, another of the European Commission, and a third of the Eurogroup.
Sunday, March 11 2012
German tax for excerpting news sites
Germany’s government wants search engines and news aggregators to pay news publishers for using pieces of their material.
Its coalition committee has resolved that a collecting society should charge royalties to re-publishers of news material.
“The term of protection should be one year,” according to the committee.
“Commercial traders out there such as search engines and news aggregators should pay a fee to the publishers in the future for the distribution of press products (such as newspaper articles) on the internet.”
Friday, March 2 2012
Egg-making stem cells found in adult ovaries
Discovery could pave the way for new fertility treatments and a longer reproductive life.
It’s time to rewrite the textbooks. For 60 years, everyone from high-school biology teachers to top fertility specialists has been operating under the assumption that women are born with all the eggs they will ever produce, with no way to replenish that supply. But the discovery of human egg-producing stem cells, harvested from the ovaries of six women aged 22 to 33, puts that dogma in doubt.
The work, published online in Nature Medicine by Jonathan Tilly and colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, parallels the findings of a Shanghai-based group that isolated similar stem cells from mice in 2009. However, both this and Tilly’s earlier work in mice remained controversial, with many experts sceptical that such stem cells existed.
Thursday, February 23 2012
The ‘Rotting’ Y Chromosome Theory, Men Will Still Exist
Biologists have previously predicted that the male sex-determining Y chromosome, which once carried around 800 genes, like the X, has lost hundreds of them over the past 300 million years, will mutate itself out of existence, leading to the eventual extinction of men.
However, researchers of a study published in the latest issue of Nature found evidence to suggest that the Y chromosome will not shed anymore of the 19 ancestral genes that it is left with. Researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT compared sequenced the Y chromosome of the rhesus macaque, a primate whose evolutionary path diverged from that of humans around 25 million years ago, to human and chimpanzee Y chromosomes sequences and discovered that humans had only lost one gene from the Y chromosome since the time the rhesus macaque and people took on separate evolutionary paths. (more…)
