Save the Children ranked 72 developing countries by the strength of their health systems and found that many fell below the nations worst hit by Ebola. Here are the five most vulnerable: 1 – Somalia 2 – Chad 3 – Nigeria 4 – Afghanistan 5 – Haiti
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What happened to the Conservatives’ promise to roll back the surveillance state? said James Ball. The British are already the most-spied-upon people on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of video cameras recording our comings and goings. Junior-level bureaucrats have the authority to “ping” our mobile phones to find out where we are at any given moment. Now they also […]
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On the 35th anniversary of its launch, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is close to becoming the first man-made object to escape our solar system. The spacecraft—run by a 1977 computer 100,000 times less powerful than an iPod Nano—is currently 11.3 billion miles away. In 2004, Voyager 1 entered the turbulent boundary zone beyond Pluto, where solar winds encounter plasma pushing […]
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Visiting your doctor for an annual physical examination might actually have a negative impact on your health, WebMD.com reports. Danish researchers analyzed studies involving 183,000 patients and found that those who received regular checkups were no less likely to die of cancer or heart disease than those who only saw the doctor when they had symptoms. People who skipped their […]
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California firefighters spent two hours extracting a naked woman from a chimney after she tried to sneak into her ex-boyfriend’s home at 5 a.m. The 35-year-old took off her clothes in the hope it would help her fit down the 1-foot-wide chimney. But halfway down, she became wedged and called the ex on her cellphone. “I said, ‘Where are you […]
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Toxic air pollution in the Indian capital of Delhi has given some 2.2 million children irreversible lung damage, according to a 2010 study from the Kolkata-based Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute that surfaced this month. The report has raised fresh concerns in a country where carbon emissions are forecast to increase for decades.
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As diabetes rates rise worldwide, so does the illegal trade in human kidneys.The World Health Organization estimates that 10,000 black-market operations a year are being performed in places like China, Pakistan, and India, as doctors transplant kidneys purchased from poor donors for as little as $5,000 into richer patients paying up to $200,000.
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It turns out that there’s strong evidence to suggest that at least one kind of dolphin sound, studied extensively over the past decade, does function as a kind of referential symbol. Dolphins use distinct “signature whistles” to identify and call to one another. Each dolphin is thought to invent a unique name for itself as a calf and to keep […]
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A Pennsylvania girl’s Sweet 16 party was ruined after her celebration was showered with poop, apparently dumped from a passing airplane. Jacinda Cambray and 40 guests were partying in her family’s backyard when the brown liquid began raining down. “We’d just gotten done with the cake, thank God,” said Cambray’s sister, Kristie Rogy. “Because within two minutes something fell from […]
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Percentage of the average “knowledge worker’s” time that is spent reading and writing emails: 28
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