News Tech/Sci Sports Health

From the department of incipient urban legends comes a press release from the L.A. County Sheriff, warning that officers have seized medical marijuana products "packaged to resemble licensed commercial candy and snacks" and that some tricksters may try to sneak them into youngsters' Halloween candy. But like earlier warnings about razors in apples and other poisoned candy, there's no evidence that any such misdeed has ever occurred. Think about it for a moment: why would a presumed drug user or dealer waste expensive and often difficult to acquire drugs on children?    Read More  

A blood-pumping device commonly referred to as the Berlin Heart, which bridges children to transplant while they're awaiting a heart, is facing imminent approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It's already approved in Canada and has been used Europe since 1990. Currently, pediatric heart surgeons have to get special approval from the FDA on a case-by-case basis to use the device. The process, part of the FDA's compassionate use program, requires a bureaucratic undertaking involving letters of support from several other physicians. The process isn't onerous, but it takes up valuable time that many children don't have.   More Read  

All women are to have the right to request a caesarean on the NHS in a potentially hugely-expensive move.  Draft guidelines to be finalised next month by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence make it clear all women who do not want to give birth naturally will be allowed to have the procedure – even if there is no medical reason for one. Despite the move, NHS hospitals are still trying to curb the soaring rate of c-sections, which cost around £800 more than a natural birth, and experts say it is likely women in some areas may still be refused on cost grounds.   More Read

Bangaloreans from all walks of life came together to create awareness about breast cancer here on Sunday. The event was organised by HealthCare Global Enterprises Ltd. (HCG) to commemorate the Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which is observed in October every year.  As many as 6,583 people formed the largest pink ribbon, symbolising breast cancer awareness, at the Sullivan Police Grounds here. Donning pink t-shirts, holding pink umbrellas and wearing pink head-gears, the participants that included cancer survivors, cancer patients, care givers, nurses, corporate workers and students, stood for 10 minutes in the shape of a ribbon.  More Read

China will early on Tuesday launch an unmanned spacecraft for a docking exercise with the Tiangong-1 space laboratory module, which was put into orbit last month, marking a first for the country's rapidly growing space programme and a key step ahead of the planned launch of a permanent space station by 2020.   Read More

The recent seven billion milestone reached by the world population is no reason to celebrate. We can safely say that the earth is beginning to burst out of its seams. The rate of babies being born in the two billion years that it took the world to reach the population of one billion was one baby in two years. The last billion was added to the population only in the last 12 years. This steep rise in the population is thanks to industrialization and advancements in medicine and agriculture.   Read Here

As per reports, the US National Cancer Institute researchers affirmed have that all the women who face ovarian stimulation to produce extra eggs for In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) are more prone to develop borderline ovarian tumors. These entire claims came to limelight after the team of researchers inspected data from over 19,000 sterile women across the Netherlands, who endured ovarian stimulation procedures just before their IVF and along with these women, the researchers also tracked about 6,000 infertile women who did not experience these IVF conducts.   More Read

While it may sound weird in the first place, but it has been revealed that fatty acids flowing down the body of pythons could stimulate chances of healthy heart. It has been found by a team from the University of Colorado Boulder , which managed to probe the mechanism of body after pythons eat its prey. The team led by Professor Leslie Leinwand found that the presence of a key enzyme in the blood stream is the reason why python's heart is being protected against any heart damage. Despite having such excessive amount of fatty acids in the python bloodstream, heart remains fully fine and that's what has made researchers ponder over.   More Read

In West Suffolk Hospital’s £1.2 million modernization project, special emphasis is being given to better breast screening services and now patients would be offered better service, and also a new breast cancer screening unit. Some of the things which would take place of the old facilities are new digital imaging room, new equipments and a novel computerized mobile breast screening unit. This mobile unit would take the place of 12 year old analogue unit.  Read More

When doctors bustled excitedly into her hospital ward to tell Anjana Arora that her newborn daughter was India's 1 billionth person, she was bewildered. "I didn't know what a billion was," she recalled. That was in 2000, when the world population was a little over 6 billion. Yesterday it hit 7 billion, on the best guess of the UN, and is growing by about 200,000 a day.  Full Read

The source of most addictions - to drugs, to reality television programs, to gambling - is a single spontaneous act. My addiction to the Melbourne Cup's foreign raiders began at the back of a bookmaker's stand near the nursery car park at Flemington in 1993. Huddled beneath an umbrella, the young penciller paid out my winnings on race three - and kept paying. As it turned out, he had mistaken my place ticket for a winner. A triple-digit error.   Read More

Czech tennis player Petra Kvitova beat Belarusian Viktoria Azarenka in the final of the season-ending WTA Championships in Istanbul. ­ The tight match lasted for almost two-and-a-half hours. Kvitovoa was able to win the decisive break in the very ending of the opener, which she took 7-5. But Azarenka was stronger in the second match. The Belarusian had to take control of the match in the beginning of the third set, but failed to take advantage of three break points and lost her serve right after that.  Read Here

If you’re going to make claims that an environmental catastrophe is killing the lives of polar bears, you better pray to god that he has your back. Facing skepticism from within the scientific community, the US is asking leading researchers responsible for Polarbeargate to undergo a polygraph test.  More Read

Walt Disney is buying a 49% stake in Russian free-to-air television channel Seven TV - the biggest ever investment into the country’s media market. Seven TV will be rebranded as The Disney Channel, perhaps as soon as the end of the year. The new family-oriented channel will reach 75% of Russian viewers – about 40 million households. In the year prior to the move, Disney content in Russia was exclusive to homes with cable TV.   More Read

A presidential decree abolishing the autumn switch from Daylight Saving Time has been disobeyed by digital devices all over the country, resulting in widespread chaos. On the bright side, it is now always “summer time” in Russia. ­The last Sunday of October is the date when most European countries switch from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time.   Read More

Just in time for Halloween, the FDA has come out with a warning that eating too much black licorice could lead to heart problems in adults.. Here are five surprising hazards to keep an eye out for this Halloween. "Heart attack" licorice : Consuming too much black licorice may cause abnormal heartbeats, or arrhythmias, particularly in order adults, according to the Food and Drug Administration . Black licorice contains the compound glycyrrhizin, which can cause the body's potassium levels to fall.   Full Read

Women who drank anywhere from a few alcoholic drinks a month to more than three a week in the year leading up to a heart attack ended up living longer than women who never drank alcohol, according to a study . The findings, which focused on more than 1,000 women and were published in the American Journal of Cardiology, add to mounting evidence that alcohol, regardless of the type of drink, can be good for the heart.  More

A member of Saudi Arabia's royal family increased to $1 million a reward offered by a Saudi cleric to anyone who captures an Israeli soldier to swap him for Palestinian prisoners. Prince Khaled bin Talal, brother of billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, told the kingdom's al-Daleel TV station by telephone Saturday that he was raising a previous offer made by Sheik Awadh al-Qarani, a prominent Saudi cleric who promised $100,000 for capturing an Israeli soldier.    More Read

TRIPOLI, Libya –   Libya's interim prime minister has confirmed the presence of chemical weapons in Libya and says foreign inspectors would arrive later this week to deal with the issue. Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril said Sunday that Libya has no interest in keeping such weapons. Last week, Ian Martin, the top U.N. envoy to Libya, told the U.N. Security Council that undeclared chemical weapons sites have been located in Libya.  Full Read

(Reuters) - Taking two aspirin a day for two years reduces the long-term risk of bowel cancer in people with a family history of the disease by around 60 percent, according to a British study published Friday. The finding could also have implications for the wider population, though more research is needed to determine an ideal dose for different groups of people.    Read More

(Reuters) - Japan intervened to weaken the yen after the currency hit a record high against the dollar on Monday, saying it acted to counter speculative moves that did not reflect the health of the Japanese economy. The dollar spiked after the intervention as much as 4 percent past 79 yen from around 75.65 yen. The dollar touched a record low of 75.31 yen earlier on Monday.  More Read

Germany is 55.5 billion euros ($78.7 billion) richer than it thought due to an accountancy error at the bad bank of nationalized mortgage lender Hypo Real Estate (HRE), the finance ministry said. Europe's largest economy now expects its ratio of debt to gross domestic product to be 81.1 percent for 2011, 2.6 percentage points less than previously forecast, it said.    Read Here

MacDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — The Obama administration plans to bolster the American military presence in the Persian Gulf after it withdraws the remaining troops from Iraq this year, according to officials and diplomats. That repositioning could include new combat forces in Kuwait able to respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.    Read More

BOSTON — China’s economic miracle is showing signs of faltering. Growth has slowed to 9.1 percent — still a ferocious pace for any normal country, but a relative slump for China. Meanwhile, the government has begun putting the brakes on lending, in an effort to tame inflation and avoid a serious bubble. But now there’s evidence of real economic pain in China. In cities like Wenzhou, entrepreneurs have found themselves mired in debt — so hopelessly that some have gone into hiding or committed suicide.   More Read

I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.    Read Here

WASHINGTON — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.  More Read

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's parliament is set to summon President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for questioning over an economic scandal and his polices after the required number of lawmakers signed a petition Sunday, the latest salvo in a long battle between the president and his rivals.  Full Read

If you followed Jerseylicious (or you even happened to catch the South Park episode that poked fun at all the Jersey-based reality shows), you're probably familiar with makeup artist extraordinaire Alexa Prisco aka " The Glam Fairy ." Prisco may have left the Gatsby Salon in season two of Jerseylicious, but she's back now, running her own biz, The Glam Factory, and starring in a brand new show, airing Sunday nights on the Style Network, called Glam Fairy .   More

Halloween and the fall in general just wouldn't be the same without certain seasonal food staples. Apple cider, spiced coffees and beers , all different types of squash and sweet potatoes galore. But pumpkin will always hold a special place in all of our hearts, because not only is it perfect as the flavor of your morning latte or after dinner pie, but what's Halloween without a fresh Jack O'Lantern or two?! Of course, carving up a pumpkin makes for a boatload of pumpkin seeds , which you don't want to throw out when they themselves can make for an awesome snack.     More Read

Hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents remained without power today after a major nor’easter that dumped rain and up to 30 inches of wet, heavy snow. Authorities said the storm played a role in three deaths, two in a car accident and one because of a power line downed by the storm. One National Weather Service forecaster expressed astonishment at the magnitude of the storm, which hit the state unusually early, two days before children were expected to make their rounds for Halloween.   More

Forget getting away with carving the odd pumpkin for a seasonal display, this stunning effort used up 600 of the fruit and 100 different varieties. Made from pumpkins, squashes and gourds, the mural was created - for the 43rd straight year - by Robin Upton and ten helpers. The display attracts tourists from far and wide to the village of Slindon, near Arundel in West Sussex, and this year the stacked fruit shows a wheel barrow, a basket of fruit and buzzards in the sky.   More

These breathtaking photographs capture the remarkable moments when a tiger bowed its head and placed a paw up to the hand of a small girl. Photographer Dyrk Daniels noticed the 370lb Golden Bengal Tiger had taken an interest in the child, who was leaning against his glass enclosure. As the tiger, called Taj, headed over to her, Mr Daniels got his camera ready, expecting him to snarl and bang against the glass.  Read More

New York City and the East Coast are picking up the pieces hit by more than one inch of snowfall before Halloween for the first time ever - with experts predicting much more on the way. Three people were killed as the classic nor'easter chugged up the East Coast at an unusually early period and more than three million homes have lost power in the storm. Officials warned it could be days before many see electricity restored. Governors declared states of emergency in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and parts of New York, as snow blanketed areas from Maryland to Maine, snarling air and highway travel.    Read More

A cancer-stricken pensioner died after being attacked in hospital by an illegal immigrant who was in the bed next to him. Anthony Wilson was throttled by the Iranian man four days after an operation to remove part of his bowel. The 78-year-old, who had been battling cancer for three months, was asleep when he was assaulted by the immigrant, who had been brought into the hospital two days earlier complaining of breathing difficulties. Three UK Border Agency guards, tasked with sitting next to the Iranian during his hospital stay, were forced to intervene after the unprovoked attack.  Read More

After much speculation , YouTube finally announced today that it will be adding new channels from professional content creators in an attempt to "bring an even broader range of entertainment" to the site that will offer "more reasons to keep coming back again and again."  More Read

Critical medical decisions can be difficult to make — even for two Harvard doctors. But Dr. Jerome Groopman, who is also a staff writer for the New Yorker, and his wife, Dr. Pamela Hartzband, have thought a great deal about doing it correctly. In their recent book, Your Medical Mind: How to Decide What Is Right for You , they explain that a better understanding of your own personal values and history can help you cut through the swamp of statistics and make smart decisions.    Full Read

First things first: I'm jealous. Katie Clem has a 6-year-old daughter. So do I. Her little girl is earning thousands of dollars for her. Mine is not. This week, The New York Times chronicled the uncanny world we live in, where a mom with a Flip camera — a YouTube virgin, no less — can post her daughter's priceless reaction to the news that she'd soon be going to Disneyland and earn enough money from advertisements to send said daughter to college.   Read  More

In September, I went to India worried about how I could possibly speak to a daunting audience of 15,000 aboriginals. I left India wondering just who speaks for them. Indigenous peoples — dwelling in Thailand, Laos, the Philippines, Vietnam, China and even Japan — remain Asia's most marginalized group. India has the largest number of what it calls adivasi , already topping 84 million in the 2001 census (which was the last one — figures from the present 2011 census are not yet available). Inhabiting a place beneath even India's low-caste hordes, exposed to disease, mostly illiterate and barely subsisting, adivasi make headlines when they join the Naxalites, a shadowy Maoist army that has recruited up to a quarter of the forest populace to their slow-motion warfare. Do-gooding NGOs have hardly changed conditions.   More Read

“Behold, I show you a mystery,” Saint Paul wrote in one of his epistles, talking of grave and final but miraculous things. The sacraments of the Catholic Church too are holy mysteries—none more so than the Eucharist. At the climax of the Mass, the act of transubstantiation turns bread and wine into the literal body and blood of Christ. Or so devout Catholics believe.    Read More

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip  — An Israeli aircraft struck a pair of Palestinian militants on Sunday, killing one man and wounding a second in a new eruption of violence that raised the death toll in a weekend of rocket attacks and airstrikes to 11.  The strike cast doubts on efforts to forge a cease-fire after the deadliest round of fighting in months between Israel and Gaza militants, and raised the likelihood of a new bout of fighting.   Read More

When scientists first discovered the power of antioxidants to destroy cell-damaging free radicals, the hunt was on.  They knew these preventers of cancer and heart disease were in colorful fruits and vegetables and nuts, but recently researchers have uncovered them in new, unexpected places. “The number and variety of these kamikaze substances we find in foods continue to grow,” says Christine Gerbstadt, MD, RD, of the American Dietetic Association.     Read Here

SOUTH WINDSOR, Conn.  — Millions of people from Maine to Maryland were without power as an unseasonably early storm dumped heavy, wet snow over the weekend on a region more used to gaping at leaves in October than shoveling snow.  The snow was due to stop falling in New England late Sunday, but it could be days before many of the 3 million without electricity see it restored, officials warned. At least three deaths were blamed on the weather, and states of emergency were declared in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and parts of New York.    Full Read

When the sun sets, Naomi Benjamin scurries home. And tries not to take the same route twice. “Even just standing out here ... You can’t come outside,” said Benjamin, 32, a schoolteacher from the Howard Houses in Brownsville, Brooklyn. “Being on the street is enough to get you shot. When you go out, you got to take a different way every time.” The main threat, she said, is 8 Block -- a mini-gang of about 10 baby-faced thugs who take their name from the nearby building where they live at 1800 Pitkin Ave.    More Read

After 100 years, the Loeb Classical Library is not just a repository of history — it is itself a historical document, through which you can trace the evolution of modern understandings of the ancient world. Take, for instance, the introduction to the 1931 Loeb edition of the “Annals” of Tacitus. The translator, John Jackson, grants that “the greatness” of the Roman historian’s intellect and literary style can still “be felt after the lapse of eighteen centuries.” But “how long they will continue to be felt, one must at whiles wonder,” he goes on to write. On the whole, Jackson finds Tacitus’ picture of corruption and political violence in imperial Rome too uniformly dark to be credible. He speaks of the historian’s “wild exaggerations” and “poisoned” rhetoric, and complains that he lacked “a charity that thinks no evil.” At best, Jackson hoped that “as long as Europe retains the consciousness of her origins,” Tacitus would continue to find “some” readers.   M...

Akamai , a company that collects data about Internet use, says it gets over 1 trillion requests per day to its global server network. It has organized this data into its quarterly "State Of The Internet" report, which examines, among other things, the world's fastest and slowest Internet connections by country. In order to be included in the report, a country must have made more than 25,000 requests from unique IP addresses in the last quarter. Akamai sets this bar in order to avoid making unfair comparisons between countries with large disparities in population or infrastructure.    Read More

Though the iPhone 4S has set sales records and been met with hugely positive reviews , owners have been reporting a big problem with their new Apple smartphone: battery life. Could Apple be on the verge of Battery-Gate? A story in the Guardian reported that Apple engineers have begun contacting certain users who have complained about battery problems; apparently, Apple has asked those users to install diagnostic programs onto their phones so that Apple can better diagnose what is causing the battery problems. We've reached out to Apple for comment on that front and will update when we hear back.   More Read

YOU know you are on a wild holiday when it begins with how to tell the difference between black and brown bears. This is Alaska — one of the few places in the world still mostly unspoiled by humans. Until relatively recently, crossing the 663,268 square miles of America's 49th state was near impossible.   Read Here

GRUESOME in the extreme, this horrendous sea creature's horrible way of repelling prey has been captured on film for the first time. Scientists have filmed the hideous hagfish firing jets of slime at predators foolish enough to cross its path. Researchers from Massey University, New Zealand have released graphic underwater footage showing how the primitive beast – also known as the snot-eel – defends itself by emitting a choking, gill-clogging slime.    Read More

QANTAS grounded its entire domestic and international fleets indefinitely last night - stranding thousands of passengers - as it declared it would lock out all workers engaged in industrial action.  Read More

A 16-foot-long Burmese python was found to have a whole adult deer in its stomach after it was captured and killed in a U.S. national park . The reptile - one of the biggest ever found in South Florida - had recently swallowed a doe the size of a small child. Skip Snow, a python specialist who conducted the autopsy at Everglades National Park, said the animal had a girth of 44ins with the 5st 6lb deer inside its stomach.   More Read

It has already captivated millions, taking viewers on a spectacular polar expedition to the frozen wildernesses of the Arctic and the Antarctic. And now the makers of the landmark BBC series Frozen Planet, bringing the natural world of the North and South Poles to the small screen, has given a tantalising glimpse of things to come with these stunning images from future episodes. These incredible stills from the series reveal the frozen world as you have never seen it before - and may never see again, thanks to the onset of global warming.   Read Here

The date is October 29, 2018, and Britain faces its darkest hour. On the battlefields of Europe, our Armed Forces have been humiliated.  In makeshift prison camps on the continent, thousands of our young men and women sit forlornly, testament to the collapse of our ambitions. From the killing grounds of Belgium to the scarred streets of Athens, a continent continues to bleed. And, in the east, the Russian bear inexorably tightens its grip, an old empire rising from the wreckage of the European dream.   Full Read

A woman pensioner who had both her legs cut off but amazingly survived when she fell in front of a train, was fighting for her life in hospital today. The 60-year-old was believed to have thrown herself off an overbridge as a non-stop train passed through a station several miles from her home. Police said that she lost both legs when the train ran over her although she and the limbs were rushed to hospital in the remote hope of reattaching them.  More Read

(Livescience.com)  It's not quite "Inception," but new research has allowed scientists to "read" some people as they dream. Using brain imaging, researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Germany said they were able to compare the brain activity of " lucid dreamers " as they entertained the same thoughts awake and asleep. The brain activity was similar, if weaker during sleep, the researchers said.    Read Here

(CBS/AP) PERTH, Australia - The 16 Commonwealth countries for which Queen Elizabeth II is monarch agreed Friday that girls are to be given equal rights as boys in the order of succession to the throne. The change means that if Prince William and Kate's first child is a daughter, she will take precedence over any younger brothers in line for the throne.  Read More

WASHINGTON -- As the U.S. war in Afghanistan enters its second decade, a new Pentagon assessment acknowledged that the Taliban insurgency remains "resilient" and able to mount spectacular attacks and assassinations even in the heavily fortified capital city of Kabul. A senior defense official insisted that President Obama's plan to withdraw all 33,000 "surge" troops deployed last year by the end of 2012 is "on track."  More

LOVEBIRDS Shane Warne and Elizabeth Hurley came under attack from their feathered friends while on a family outing to a Melbourne wildlife park yesterday.   Full Read