Clipmarks | Deepti's 'world' clips

Global consortium to hunt for cancer genes

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 13:48:33 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Scientists from around the world are joining forces to hunt for key genetic mutations involved in cancer

The International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC), launched on Tuesday, will look at up to 50 different types of cancer and researchers hope it will eventually lead to better diagnosis, treatment and prevention

Other members of the consortium include the U.S. National Institutes of Health, as well as cancer and genetic research groups from Australia, Canada, China, France, India, Japan and Singapore

Tags: cancer, genes, consortium, world

World's oldest oil paintings in Afghanistan

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:10:11 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

Scientists said on Tuesday they have proved the world's first ever oil paintings were in caves near two destroyed giant statues of Buddha in Afghanistan, hundreds of years before oil paint was used in Europe

Samples from paintings, dating from the 7th century AD, were taken from caves behind two statues of Buddha in Bamiyan blown up as un-Islamic by Afghanistan's hardline Taliban in 2001

Scientists discovered paintings in 12 of the 50 caves were created using oil paints, possibly from walnut or poppy, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in France said on its Web site on Tuesday

The cave paintings were probably the work of artists traveling along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route between China, across Central Asia to the West

Now work is underway to try restore the biggest of the two statues, once the tallest standing Buddha in the world, but the mammoth task could take a decade to complete

Tags: afghanistan, buddha, paintings, cave

Map pinpoints disease 'hotspots'

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:35:00 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Map of world's Emerging Infectious Diseases hotspots

Enlarge Map

A detailed map highlighting the world's hotspots for emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) has been released

It uses data spanning 65 years and shows the majority of these new diseases come from wildlife

Among the examples listed by the team was the emergence of Nipah virus in Malaysia and the Sars outbreak in China

Others included the H5N1 strain of bird flu, Ebola and West Nile virus

the main sources were mammals that were most closely related to humans

While some pathogens may be picked up while hunting or by accident, others - such as Nipah virus - are transmitted to humans from wild animals via livestock

The main hotspots were located in low latitude regions, like South Asia and South-East Asia, which were not the financial focus of global funds to prevent the spread of EIDs

Tags: world, disease, map, infectious

Hit them back!

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 21:41:48 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

Lebanon cleric advises 'modern Shiites'

Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah's liberal fatwas, or edicts, have shocked conservative Muslims around the world.

The ayatollah has a simple piece of advice for any Muslim woman being abused by her husband: Hit him back.

"A woman can respond to physical violence inflicted on her by a man with counter- violence as a self-defense measure," Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's senior-most Shiite cleric, wrote in a fatwa late last year that shocked conservative Muslims around the world.

Tags: muslims, women

World's most corrupt and least corrupt nations

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 11:11:49 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: www.gulfnews.com

Corruption watchdog Transparency International has released a list of the world’s most and least corrupt nations

The report comes ahead of a conference in Bali this week where more than 100 countries are expected to gather for a United Nations anti-corruption conference

The lower the CPI of a country, the higher corruption is, with 0 being the most corrupt and 10 being very clean

Most corrupt country and CPI score
Somalia: 1.4
Myanmar: 1.4
Iraq: 1.5
Haiti: 1.6
Uzbekistan: 1.7
Tonga: 1.7
Sudan: 1.8
Chad: 1.8
Afghanistan: 1.8
Laos: 1.9
Norway: 8.7

Least corrupt country and CPI score
Denmark: 9.4
Finland: 9.4
New Zealand: 9.4
Singapore: 9.3
Sweden: 9.3
Iceland: 9.2
Netherlands: 9.0
Switzerland: 9.0
Canada: 8.7

Tags: corrupt, nations, world, countries, international

Linguistic superpowers

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 11:53:25 GMT

clipped by: Deepti
clipper's remarks: The book Limits of Language by Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall is a sort of languages-only Guinness Book of Records, listing everything that’s large, small and otherwise interesting about the manifold manners of human speech and associated forms of communication. One item deals with the world’s most linguistically diverse countries, and is illustrated with this map, of the world’s ‘linguistic superpowers’.

Clip Source: strangemaps.wordpress.com

“Languages are very unevenly distributed among the countries of the world. The map tries to capture this fact by rendering each country in a size corresponding to the number of languages spoken in it. (Because of the inherent problems in accomplishing this, sizes are rather approximate). The ten shaded countries are those in which more than 200 languages are in use.”

The Ethnologue, cited a bit further, only lists 9 countries with more than 200 languages, however. Here are the 12 top countries:

Papua New Guinea 823 languages
Indonesia 726
Nigeria 505
India 387
Mexico 288
Cameroon 279
Australia 235
DR Congo 218
China 201
Brazil 192
United States 176
Philippines 169

It’s curious how the linguistically most diverse country in the world is Papua New Guinea – because it’s also the place with the biggest biodiversity anywhere, one of the last places in the world where new species get discovered regularly. I wonder whether there’s a single explanation for both phenomena.

Tags: languages, country, world, superpowers, speech

15 Quotes by Famous Atheists

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 22:17:14 GMT

clipped by: AcesLucky
clipper's remarks: Bertrand Russell:

“You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”

Clip Source: www.dvorak.org

15 Quotes By Famous Atheists

9. Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. — Denis Diderot

15. It’s an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous. — Gloria Steinem

5. Faith means not wanting to know what is true. — Friedrich Nietzsche

8. I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. — Frank Lloyd Wright

3. All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway

11. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. — Sigmund Freud

2. I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. — Andrew Carnegie

4. Lighthouses are more helpful then churches. — Benjamin Franklin

Tags: atheism, bible, christianity, god, life, religion, society

Internet-censor world championship

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:10:02 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: www.rsf.org

Most of the world’s authoritarian regimes are trying to control what their citizens read and do online. They’re getter better and better at blocking “objectionable” material, usually with technology bought from US firms

China, the world champion

Vietnam: a very tough team

Tunisia: "model" players

Iran: a vicious squad

Cuba: the "legend"

Saudi Arabia: record goals

Uzbekistan: dummy pass experts

Tags: internet, censorship, oppressive, block, web, world

Indian Universities feature in top rankings list

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 10:19:25 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: www.gulfnews.com

Four Indian education institutions figure in the latest world university rankings, which continue to be topped by the universities of Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford, for their strengths in teaching and research.

The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Delhi University (DU) all featured in the rankings.

The IITs rank was 57th in the world's top 200 universities list while the IIMs rank was 68th. The JNU came 183rd in The Times Higher Education Supplement, an authoritative journal in academia

In the list of the world's top 100 science universities, IITs rank was 33rd, while in the list for top technology universities, the IITs jumped to third place, only behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley

The IIMs rank was 68th in the list of top technology universities

Tags: india, university, list, top, teaching, research, education

Miss Arab World 2007

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 14:04:51 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: www.gulfnews.com

Miss Arab World 2007 Wafaa Ganahi.

Miss Arab World 2007 Wafaa Ganahi poses with first runner-up Egyptian Shaimaa Mansour (second left), second runner-up Lebanese Rula Bahij (left), third runner-up Tunisian Khadija Mrabt (second right) and fourth runner-up Libyan Rima Al Kseri, following the contest results in Cairo late on Friday.

Miss Bahrain bagged the Miss Arab World 2007 crown in Cairo on Friday night after nearly six hours of contest

Wafaa Ganahi, a 23-year-old teacher from the Law Faculty of Bahrain University, won the title, while the first runner-up was 25-year-old Miss Egypt Shaimaa Mansour. Miss Lebanon Rula Bahij, 23, was the second runner-up

Wafaa, Bahrain's first ever contestant in the event, was crowned by Miss Arab World 2006 Claudia Hanna from Iraq

Seventeen women from 15 countries attended the final competition, one of the major attractions of the second Arab Tourism Festival, which opened in Cairo

Tags: beauty, contest, arab, muslim, bahrain, iraq, lebanon, egypt, tunisia, libya

Afghan Helmand province becoming main drug supplier

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 07:28:28 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

Afghanistan's Helmand province, heartland of Taliban guerrillas fighting NATO forces, is about to become the world's largest drug supplier, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

Helmand, a province in the south of Afghanistan, cultivated more drugs than entire countries such as Myanmar, Morocco or even Colombia, the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crimes (UNODC) said in its 2007 World Drug Report.

While the amount of land under illicit poppy cultivation fell by 10 percent globally between 2000 and 2006, global opium production soared by 43 percent to a record high of 6,610 tons in 2006 from a year earlier.

This was due to a shift in output from inferior Southeast Asian fields to more productive ones in Afghanistan -- which in 2006 produced 92 percent of all opium in the world.

Other worrying signs came from Africa, suggesting the impoverished continent could find itself at the crossroads of international drug crime.

Tags: afghanistan, drugs, supplier, illegal, world, asia, africa, taliban, guerilla, nato

World Bank refuses funds to purchase condoms

Sun, 04 Mar 2007 08:22:22 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: www.gulfnews.com

New Delhi: The World Bank and the United Kingdom's Department for International Development have refused to finance the Indian government's purchase of condoms to fight HIV/Aids because of an alleged lack of transparency in procurement procedures.

The government now obtains condoms from local manufacturers such as the state-owned Hindustan Latex, which supplies hundreds of millions of contraceptives required under National Aids Control Programme-III, a five-year plan starting next month.

HIV prevention organisations are angry about the high cost of government-procured condoms, saying that scarce funds are being wasted in India, which has the world's highest HIV caseload, according to UNAids, with an estimated 5.7 million carriers last year.

Tags: condoms, aids, hiv, prevention, india, world bank, uk, funds

World's hottest chillies

Sun, 18 Feb 2007 06:04:23 GMT

clipped by: Deepti

Clip Source: www.gulfnews.com

The Bhut Jolokia chilli pepper.

Professor Paul Bosland displays the official certificate received from the Guinness Book of World Records.

India's Bhut Jolokia chilli has been confirmed as the world's hottest pepper by the Guinness Book of World Records, a US researcher said.

Bhut Jolokia comes in at 1,001,304 Scoville heat units, a measure of hotness for a chilli. It is nearly twice as hot as Red Savina, the variety it replaces as the hottest. By comparison, an average jalapeno measures at about 10,000.

The Bhut Jolokia is a naturally occurring hybrid native to the Assam region of northeastern India. A member of the university's Chile Pepper Institute who was visiting India sent its seeds to New Mexico for testing in 2001. The plant does not produce fruit easily, so it took some years to get enough for field testing, Bosland said. He then grew Bhut Jolokia, Red Savina and habanero peppers under controlled settings and found that Bhut Jolokia had significantly higher Scoville ratings. Those findings were confirmed by two independent laboratories.

The Bhut Jolokia variety has potential as a food additive in the packaged food industry, Bosland said. It could be pickled while green, dehydrated and used as seasoning. Because the heat is so concentrated, food manufacturers would save money because they would use less. The pepper's name translates as ghost chilli, Bosland said.

Tags: india, chillies, chilly, hottest, world, record

not same Islam as we know it

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:39:04 GMT

clipped by: zeeshanasir
clipper's remarks: It lifts the veil on hundreds of innovations - from kiosks and chess through to windmills and cryptography - that are often popularly associated with the western world but originate from Muslim scholarship and science.

Clip Source: news.independent.co.uk

How Islamic inventors changed the world

From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. As a new exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them

Tags: islam, science, technology, muslims

Burj Dubai reaches 100 floors

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 08:27:58 GMT

clipped by: Deepti
clipper's remarks: more details of the Burj @ http://www.gulfnews.com/articles/06/07/21/10053993.html

Clip Source: www.gulfnews.com

At 347.3 metres, Burj Dubai is one of only 38 structures in the world that are 300 metres or more high.

Dubai: World’s tallest tower Burj Dubai reached 100 floors on Tuesday, becoming the sixth to reach the milestone scaling 347.3 metres and utilising 242,000 tonnes of reinforced concrete and 46,000 steel rebars to date.

Sears Tower in Chicago (110 floors), Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea (105), Empire State Building, New York (102), Taipei 101 (101) and John Hancock Centre, Chicago (100) are the only other structures in the world that are currently at 100 storeys or more.

At 347.3 metres, Burj Dubai is one of only 38 structures in the world that are 300 metres or more high.

It is now higher than three other super-tall structures in the region — the Burj Al Arab (321 metres), Emirates Towers Hotel (309 metres) and Kingdom Centre, Saudi Arabia (302 metres).

Tags: dubai, uae, arab, buildings, tallest, world