Group items tagged

During pregnancy, the umbilical cord supplies a baby with nutrients and oxygen from the mother. After birth, it's clamped and snipped, leaving a short stump that eventually falls off.

Sinkkonen found we prefer belly buttons that are t-shaped or oval and vertical, with a little hooding, and which don't protrude. In short, we dislike outies and don't favor the cavernous variety either.

If further research confirms the signaling hypothesis, female umbilici may be routinely measured to detect risk pregnancies of several fetal abnormalities,"

They should know: it's their machine, they designed it and they've been telling everyone for a while that their research shows it's safe.

The lawsuit filed by a group of Hawaii residents is alleging that not enough safety checks have been made by CERN to prevent disaster when the LHC goes live in the coming weeks.

It may "create unsafe conditions of physics" which may have disastrous effects. How? Well, you may imagine a micro black hole gobbling up everything unstoppably, while a strangelet (a hypothetical clump of particles including strange quarks) may run amok converting all nearby matter into strange matter, also wrecking the Earth.

James Gillies, a CERN spokesman, suggests this is rubbish in this response to the New Scientist: "The LHC will start up this year, and it will produce all sorts of exciting new physics and knowledge about the universe." It's no threat at all, he says: "A year from now, the world will still be here." The LHC is actually designed to probe the boundaries of physics, and while a 2003 safety study did conceed that micro black holes or magnetic monopoles may be formed, they would be short-lived and offer no threat.

Twenty-five years after the federal report A Nation at Risk challenged U.S. public schools to raise the quality of education, the study finds high schoolers still lack important historical and cultural underpinnings of "a complete education." And, its authors fear, the nation's current focus on improving basic reading and math skills in elementary school might only make matters worse, giving short shrift to the humanities — even if children can read and do math.

n all, students earned a C in history and an F in literature, though the survey suggests students do well on topics schools cover. For instance, 88% knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led the USA into World War II, and 97% could identify Martin Luther King Jr. as author of the "I Have a Dream" speech.

Fewer (77%) knew Uncle Tom's Cabin helped end slavery a century earlier.

"School has emphasized Martin Luther King, and everybody teaches it, and people are learning it,"

The findings probably won't sit well with educators, who say record numbers of students are taking college-level Advanced Placement history, literature and other courses in high school.

It also urged banks to disclose all their losses and bolster their balance sheets to help stabilise markets.

The group's statement came after a day-long meeting of ministers and central bank governors in Tokyo.

"In all our economies, to varying degrees, growth is expected to slow somewhat in the short term," it said.

The G7 nations said that continuing risks included further problems for the US housing market, tighter credit, high commodity prices and rising inflation.

They also called on oil producers to increase output and on China to let its currency appreciate faster.

China, India and other East and South East Asian economies have experienced break-neck growth over the past few years

But as the global credit crisis and US housing slump has brought the world's largest economy to its knees, concerns have persisted that these problems would spread to Asia, which is heavily reliant on US imports of its products and foreign investment for growth.

Revenues from Chicago's new bottled water tax are trickling in -- at a rate nearly 40 percent below projections -- exacerbating a budget crunch that has already prompted Mayor Daley to order $20 million in spending cuts.

January collections were $554,000. That's far short of the $875,000-a-month needed to meet the city's $10.5 million-a-year projection.

"Since January is generally one of the coldest months of the winter, we don't think January collections are a strong indicator of potential revenue for the remainder of the year," she said.

But that doesn't explain away what Vite calls "enormous increases" in suburban bottled water sales, particularly in stores near the Chicago border.

renews the Milk Income Loss Contract program at a higher rate

when prices fall below a baseline level, the federal government pays dairy farmers cash to cover

amendment that would have banned payments to full-time farmers who make more than $750,000 a year, and part-time farmers who make more than $250,000 a year. The vote was 48-47, but 60 votes were needed for passage.

would have limited overall farm payments to $250,000 a year - down from the current limit of $360,000.

would have required that farmers be "actively engaged" to receive subsidies, fell four votes short of the 60 needed.

urged his fellow Republicans to drop a filibuster of the legislation last week,

"followed his party's leadership, and supported subsidies given to wealthy millionaires who do not farm."

The focus here was to keep the money and the subsidies and the help in the hands of family farmers," she said, "and not to multimillionaire real estate developers in Florida or art collectors in San Francisco."

the memorandum will order the Office of Science and Technology Policy to "assure a number of effective standards and practices that will help our society feel that we have the highest-quality individuals carrying out scientific jobs and that information is shared with the public,"

the Bush Administration unduly influenced

ideological beliefs.

The opinion comes from Sheikh Mohamed al-Najimi, of the Islamic Jurisprudence Academy in Saudi Arabia.

the statement was not a fatwa but simply his own opinion.

He noted that any ban would extend beyond Islamic countries to cover observant Muslims in other countries. This might include tourists, students abroad, and other groups.