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From Dump to Park in Cairo

Wed, 07 May 2008 23:47:15 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Cairo's first new green space in more than 100 years has opened -- on top of a 500-year old garbage dump.

"Amid Cairo's sprawling cityscape, there's a lush retreat where Egyptians can find some breathing space."

"Like New York's Central Park, the 74-acre Al-Azhar Park is a green getaway for the city's 17 million residents. But less than a decade ago, Al-Azhar Park was little more than a mound of dirt and trash — a 500-year-old garbage dump."

'It was … the shame of the city,' says Thomas Taha Rassam Culhane, founder of Solar Cities, a group that is installing environment-friendly solar hot-water heaters in Cairo's slums."

"At a cost of $30 million, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture hired world-class Egyptian, European and American architects who worked with the city and local residents to create Cairo's first new green space in more than a century."

Full Story: Slow but Sure Environmental Progress in Cairo

Tags: cairo, environment, park

Missing Matter Spotted by European Probe

Wed, 07 May 2008 23:06:28 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

An orbital X-ray telescope has found a chunk of matter whose existence had long been theorized, but evidence for which had been lacking, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Wednesday.

Twin Galaxy Clusters

The discovery made by ESA's XMM-Newton telescope is part of so-called baryonic matter, which comprises less than five percent of the cosmos.

Most of the universe consists of matter and energy of an unknown nature, which astrophysicists call "dark matter." It is believed to be distributed in a web-like structure.

The new claim is based on the observation of a pair of distant galaxy clusters, called Abell 222 and Abell 223, located 2.3 billion light-years from Earth.

Tags: science, astronomy, discovery

How Boys Become Boys (and Sometimes Girls)

Wed, 07 May 2008 22:14:13 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

New research explains how three proteins conspire to determine an embryo's sex

In research that could give doctors a way to reassign sex in cases of unclear gender, scientists report this week that they have figured out why some children with genes that should make them boys are instead born as girls.

The study, published in Nature, explains why some embryos with X and Y chromosomes—which should be born as male—develop ovaries and eventually become girls.

The key is whether a gene called Sox9, involved in formation of the testes, is active. "There are a surprisingly large number of cases where this process goes wrong," says Robin Lovell-Badge, a biologist at London's MRC National Institute for Medical Research, who estimates that this phenomenon could effect up to 1 in every 20,000 genetic males. "Maybe one could treat some of these sex reversal or intersex cases after birth by manipulating whether Sox9 is active or not. This is all speculation but it's possible."

Tags: research, sex, males, females