Category Archives: Uncategorized

In an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of Wisconsin researchers announced they had discovered a gene that confers blight resistance on potatoes. The late blight fungus was partly responsible for the great Irish … Continue reading →

The BBC recently ran an article on the state of research into using bacteriophages to vaccinate against diseases. A bacteriophage is a virus that attacks bacteria but which is generally harmless to human beings. The Soviet Union researched using bacteriophages … Continue reading →

The BBC published an article outlining how an emphasis on breastfeeding in developing countries could substantially reduce infant deaths. The BBC cites a recent Lancet study that found children born to mothers who went through a program designed to encourage … Continue reading →

Researchers at the University of Arizona and The Institute for Genomic Research have been taking a closer, detailed look at the rice genome and are finding some surprising results. The rice genome was decoded in 2002, but that effort was … Continue reading →

Commonwealth Secretary General Donald McKinnon made a trip to Zambia recently where he stated the obvious — African states need to stop changing their constitutions so frequently or no one will take the documents seriously. The Times of Zambia summarized … Continue reading →

The New York Times carried an interesting article on June 5 about environmentalists squaring off with other environmentalists over wind farms designed to harness the wind to produce energy. Wind farms never made much sense when you have such other … Continue reading →

At the recent G8 summit in France, Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva offered an intriguing proposal — institute a global tax on arms sales and use the money for a hunger fund to alleviate hunger. Lula told the … Continue reading →

Ben Wattenberg wrote a nice summary of the unprecedented changes in population back in March following the United Nations downward revisions of its population estimates. Wattenberg wrote, Now, in a new report, United Nations demographers have bowed to reality and … Continue reading →

According to data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, an estimated 777,000 children died in 2000 from measles. Deaths from measles makes up much of the 1.7 million annual deaths that the World Health Organization estimates could be … Continue reading →

Reuters featured a long article on author Richard Heinberg who has written a book guaranteed to attract attention — he’s the latest in a long line of folks predicting that this time the world really is about to run out … Continue reading →