Health & Science

• Wednesday, November 25th 2009 - 06:00 UTC

  On the 150th anniversary of “On the origin of species”, Darwin’s missing notebook

  

  Charles Darwin's encounter with the first of the two creatures that would provide him with the early clues for his theory of evolution was not a dramatic one. “Met an immense Turpin; took little notice of me,” the 26-year-old jotted in his notebook in 1835.

• Sunday, November 22nd 2009 - 15:41 UTC

  Senate healthcare vote clears the way for formal debate to begin

  

  The US Senate has narrowly voted to hold a full debate on a landmark bill designed to overhaul the country's healthcare.

• Friday, November 20th 2009 - 10:29 UTC

  Papua New Guinea cannibal tribe could hold clue to “mad cow disease”

  

  Darwinian natural selection could help halt human “mad cow disease”, experts say after finding a tribe impervious to a related fatal brain disorder. The Papua New Guinea tribe developed strong genetic resistance after a major epidemic of the CJD-like disease, kuru, spread mostly by cannibalism.

• Thursday, November 19th 2009 - 06:44 UTC

  “Passion mousse” (containing Viagra) an instant success in gastronomy fair

  

  A dessert under the name of “Passion mousse made out of Viagra and Mburucuyá (Passion flower) fruit, the inspiration of four gastronomy students has been the great success at Bogotá, Colombia, national Gastronomy Fair which closed this week.

• Wednesday, November 18th 2009 - 09:28 UTC

  Chile in select group of eleven countries with insignificant mad-cow risk

  

  Beginning Tuesday Chile belongs to the select group of eleven countries who have insignificant risk of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease. This places Chile among the nations with the best sanitary conditions on the planet.

• Tuesday, November 17th 2009 - 09:05 UTC

  Plan to recover two crates of Shackleton’s whisky buried in Antarctica

  

  Explorers are planning to recover a rare batch of whisky lost during explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated voyage to the South Pole a century ago. Two crates of the now extinct “Rare Old” brand of McKinlay and Co whisky have been buried in the Antarctic ice since Shackleton was forced to abandon his polar mission in 1909.

• Saturday, November 14th 2009 - 13:19 UTC

  NASA announces discovery of “significant amount” of water in the moon

  

  It's official: There's water on the moon—and a “significant amount” of it, too, members of NASA's recent moon-crash mission, LCROSS, announced Friday. In October, NASA crashed a two-ton rocket and the SUV-size LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) into the permanently shadowed crater Cabeus on the moon's South Pole.

• Wednesday, November 11th 2009 - 11:15 UTC

  Glaxo donates 50 million doses of H1N1 virus vaccine to WHO

  

  The international laboratory GlaxoSmithKline has promised to donate 50 million doses of pandemic H1N1 vaccine to the World Health Organization (WHO) under an agreement signed at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

• Wednesday, November 11th 2009 - 10:43 UTC

  Buenos Aires hosts conference on clowns and Patch Adams’ doctors

  

  Some 400 clowns and doctors skilled at clowning took part in an international conference in Buenos Aires to present scientific evidence, backed by their own experience, to show why laughter was healthy

• Tuesday, November 10th 2009 - 11:37 UTC

  Phytoplankton flourishes in Antarctic open areas of water where ice retreated

  

  Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula.