Topic: DRUGS - on December 15, 2011 at 10:17:00 AM CET
Weed Wars: Medical Marijuana Hits Reality TV
"Most of our patients and our staff were really skeptical about doing a reality TV show because they were watching Jersey Shore and The Kardashians," says Andrew DeAngelo, general manager of Oakland, California's Harborside Health Center, the largest medical marijuana dispensary in the world. Andrew and his brother, Harborside's Executive Director Steve DeAngleo, are co-stars of Weed Wars, a new show by the Discovery Channel that looks into lives of those who run Harborside, the patients that seek out their services, and the politicians looking to shut them down.
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Topic: Space - on December 15, 2011 at 10:12:00 AM CET
The Milky Way's black hole may spring to life in 2013
Quasars, the brightest objects we're aware of, are powered by the supermassive black holes that are thought to reside at the center of every galaxy. But many galaxies fail to feed their black holes enough matter, leading to a body that's quiet and difficult to detect. Our own galaxy's central black hole, called Sgr A*, falls into the latter category. We can detect it at wavelengths up to the X-ray range, but it's dim enough that we'd have a hard time spotting it if it weren't so close.
That may be about to change, however. Astronomers have spotted a cloud of gas with a mass about three times that of Earth that's on a trajectory that will have it pass close to Sgr A* in 2013. When it does, it may feed matter into the black hole's accretion disk, powering a sudden surge in Sgr A*'s output.
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Topic: nuclear power - on December 15, 2011 at 9:52:00 AM CET
Japanese Use Wild Monkeys To Track Radiation
Scientists in Japan are taking a novel approach to measuring the impact of radiation in a forest affected by the Fukushima nuclear crisis: enlisting the help of local wild monkeys.
Takayuki Takahashi, a professor of robotic technology at Fukushima University, told CNN Wednesday his team was working on a collar fitted with a dosimeter to measure radiation levels that could be fitted to the monkeys before they are released back into the wild.
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Topic: food - on December 15, 2011 at 9:48:00 AM CET
Zweifel an Lieferung von Schwindel-Soja nach Österreich
"Wir sind uns sicher, dass in den letzten Jahren kein Soja von den verdächtigten italienischen Betrieben an einen unserer Partnerbetriebe geliefert wurde" , betont hingegen Rudi Vierbauch, Obmann des heimischen Bio-Austria-Verbands, dem rund zwei Drittel aller österreichischer Biobauern angehören.
Denn die Bio-Austria-Bauern hätten sich in Selbstverpflichtung mehrfach gegen derartige Praktiken abgesichert, wie Vierbauch im Standard-Gespräch erläutert. "Unseren Landwirten waren die entsprechenden EU-Verordnungen noch zu wenig."
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Topic: War and Peace News - on December 15, 2011 at 9:02:00 AM CET
TIME's Person of the Year 2011 - The Protester
Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the '70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the '80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.
And then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay declaring that mankind had arrived at the "end point of ... ideological evolution" in globally triumphant "Western liberalism." The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant. (See the Battle of Seattle, 1999.)
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