Health & Science

• Friday, August 26th 2011 - 13:01 UTC

  Lager beer yeast arrived in Europe from Patagonia 500 years ago

  

  The mystery behind the birth of lager beer has been solved. Scientists have successfully traced the origin of the popular alcoholic beverage to a type of yeast, believed to have travelled 11,000 kilometres from Patagonia, (Argentina) to Bavaria 500 years ago.

• Thursday, August 25th 2011 - 06:26 UTC

  Australian entomologists find cheap way of neutralizing dengue virus mosquitoes

  

  By infecting mosquitoes with bacteria from flies that commonly live in kitchen fruit bowls, researchers have stopped the insects spreading the dengue virus.

• Thursday, August 25th 2011 - 06:01 UTC

  World’s largest camera to survey 300 galaxies from an observatory in north Chile

  

  “The camera that we built is really very similar to the digital cameras you can buy at Walmart or wherever” Brenna Flaughter told US National Public Radio. “But this camera is big — its guts fill a shiny cylinder that's about the size of a car engine”.

• Friday, August 19th 2011 - 09:59 UTC

  First complete map of Antarctica ice flow speed and direction

  

  The first complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica will help scientists to track future sea-level increases, according to the team behind the project.

• Wednesday, August 17th 2011 - 07:22 UTC

  Conference to upgrade international movement of horses in South America

  

  The FEI (International Equestrian Federation) and the World Animal Health Organization (OIE) will jointly host a conference in Guadalajara, Mexico on 24 October focusing on modernizing international movement of horses in South America.

• Wednesday, August 17th 2011 - 07:14 UTC

  African swine fever outbreak in southern Russia: 12.000 pigs to be culled

  

  A state of emergency has been imposed in a district in the Krasnodar Region in south Russia amid a major out-break of the African swine fever, the regional emergencies centre announced Sunday.

• Tuesday, July 26th 2011 - 19:13 UTC

  Brazil second scientific station in Antarctica, 500 km from the South Pole

  

  Brazil is planning to set up its second scientific station in Antarctica and its first fully automatic data collecting module close to the Southern pole, revealed Jefferson Simoes coordinator of the country’s National Science and Technology Institute.

• Wednesday, July 20th 2011 - 11:09 UTC

  Fossils discovered in Uruguay could derail America’s population-origin theory

  

  Recent excavations in Uruguay to uncover and begin researching fossilized remains estimated to date back 29,000 years could shoot down the theory that the populating of the Americas came via the Bering Strait some 12,000 years ago, Uruguayan scientists said.

• Wednesday, July 20th 2011 - 01:47 UTC

  Beef scare in Japan: caesium contaminated meats reached consumers

  

  Japan has imposed a ban on all beef coming from the prefecture of Fukushima, where three nuclear reactors melted down following the March 11 magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami. The Japanese government is also apologizing for its delayed response to radioactive meat reaching the market.

• Thursday, July 14th 2011 - 07:13 UTC

  Controversy in the US: severely obese children “should be placed in foster care”

  

  The government should have the right to remove severely obese children from their parents' home and place them in foster care, two US health experts argued in a controversial editorial published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.