Health & Lifestyle

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While Indonesia's bird flu death toll climbs to 119, deadly strain (a nasty mash-up of swine, avian, & human viruses) of swine flu gets under radar of the immune system and pushes death toll in Mexico to 152 and climbing. "Residents [of La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu.’ However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak."  read more »

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Jobless compete at unemployment Olympics

The increasing ranks of the unemployed today aren't just sitting around the house feeling sorry for themselves. A group of the recently job-deprived gathered in New York City's East Village on Tuesday, March 31 2009, for an event described as the Unemployment Olympics.

Rather than an expensive stadium and firework display, the inaugural jobless games took place in an appropriately low-budget concrete playground decorated with hand-painted cardboard signs. Events included "Pin the Blame on the Boss," a dash to the "unemployment office" and a content in which participants tossed an office phone at targets. A planned competition to see who could throw a fax machine the farthest was sadly canceled at the last minute due to safety concerns.  read more »

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On Saturday November 29th, the successful transportation and installation of the world’s first heavy traffic road bridge made from Accoya wood took place. The bridge, located in Sneek in the Netherlands, is the first wooden bridge in the world that can support the heaviest load class of 60 tons. Spanning 105 feet and rising more than 50 feet in the air, the structure will serve as a grand entrance to the city of Sneek.

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French Defence Minister Hervé Morin said, "It's time for our country to be at peace with itself". The French government offered for the 1st time Tuesday to compensate victims of nuclear tests in Algeria and the South Pacific. Victims cautiously welcomed the move, nearly 50 years after France conducted its first atomic tests. But some victims say the offer is still too stingy, and is only a first step toward healing wounds left by explosions that sent blinding white flashes cascading over French Polynesia and the Sahara Desert. A total of 150,000 people, including civilian and military personnel, were on site for the 210 tests France carried out from 1960-1996, both in the atmosphere and underground, in the Sahara Desert and the South Pacific.

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Pacific Gas and Electric, which serves San Francisco and northern California, is to seek approval to buy 200 megawatts of energy from solar power firm Solaren. Within seven years, Solaren plans to send a satellite equipped with solar panels around 22,000 miles into space on board a conventional rocket.

Satellite solar cells would capture the sun’s rays 24 hours a day, without fear of cloudy mornings or dark nights. The orbiters then convert this solar power to radio-frequencies that transmit to ground stations in Fresno County, Calif. Once received, the radio energy would change into electricity and flow into the grid.

Sunlight in space is at least ten times more powerful than that on Earth, making orbiting solar panels far more efficient than those which are land-based. Solaren believes the technology could provide enough clean electricity to power at least 150,000 Californian homes.

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Images courtesy of Mafic Studios and Newscom  read more »