///////////////Wealth gap between UK rich and poor narrows
22/10/2008
The gap between rich and poor has narrowed faster in the UK than in any other developed nation since 2000, researchers said yesterday.
But the 20 per cent earnings gap is still wider than in most first world countries.
A study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development blamed unemployment, single parenthood and lack of social mobility.
It said: "What your parents earned affects your earnings much more than elsewhere."
The OECD's Mark Pearson, warned: "Now we are entering recession, inequality and poverty may increase again."
////////////////////The advent of photosynthesis: postponing the event
The oldest widely accepted evidence for oxygenic photosynthesis on Earth comes from hydro-carbon biomarkers extracted from 2.7-billion-year-old shales in the Pilbara Craton of Australia, thought to be evidence of eukaryotes and photosynthetic cyanobacteria. This early date has caused controversy because of the long delay between this earliest appearance of oxygen-producing cyanobacteria and the 'great oxidation event' that caused the rise of atmospheric oxygen some 300 million years later. New work by Rasmussen et al. shows that the organic biomarkers are not of Archaean age and must have entered the rocks later, some time after about 2.2 billion years ago. The earliest unambiguous fossil evidence for eukaryotes and cyanobacteria thus reverts to 1.78–1.68 and 2.15 billion years, respectively.
////////////////////Pectin Power: Why Fruits And Vegetables May Protect Against Cancer's Spread (10/18/2008)
Tags:
cancer, pectin
Scientists have found a new possible explanation for why people who eat more fruit and vegetables may gain protection against the spread of cancers.
They have shown that a fragment released from pectin, found in all fruits and vegetables, binds to and is believed to inhibit galectin 3 (Gal3), a protein that plays a role in all stages of cancer progression.
"Most claims for the anticancer effects of foods are based on population studies," says Professor Vic Morris from the Institute of Food Research. "For this research we tested a molecular mechanism and showed that it is viable."
Population studies such as EPIC, the European Prospective Investigation of Cancer, identified a strong link between eating lots of fibre and a lower risk of cancers of the gastrointestinal tract. But exactly how fibre exerts a protective effect is unknown.
Pectin is better known for its jam-setting qualities and as being a component of dietary fibre. The present study supports a more exciting and subtle role.
///////////////////ALL NEED DOWNTIME
////////////////ANXIETY-PAIN -EVOLN SPEAKING MOTIVATES BEARER TO TAKE AXN
//////////////An idle mind is..........................The best way to relax
/////////////////Superstition
Belief in the Age of Science
Robert L. Park
To read the entire book description or a sample chapter, please visit: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8720.html
From uttering a prayer before boarding a plane, to exploring past lives through hypnosis, has superstition become pervasive in contemporary culture? Robert Park, the best-selling author of Voodoo Science, argues that it has. In Superstition, Park asks why people persist in superstitious convictions long after science has shown them to be ill-founded. He takes on supernatural beliefs from religion and the afterlife to New Age spiritualism and faith-based medical claims. He examines recent controversies and concludes that science is the only way we have of understanding the world.
"If a tree falls on a scientist in a forest with no one else around does it mean he won't make a sound? Not if that scientist is the indomitable Bob Park, the skeptic's skeptic, the Ralph Nader of nonsense, the man who rose from the (nearly) dead to pen this uncompromising critique of superstition and the beliefs that follow once you abandon science and reason. Read this book. Now."--Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic and author of
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