Scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug rose from his childhood on an Iowa farm to develop a type of wheat that helped feed the world, fostering a movement that is credited with saving up to 1 billion people from starvation.
Borlaug, 95, died last week from complications of cancer at his Dallas home, said Kathleen Phillips, a spokesman for Texas A&M University where Borlaug was a distinguished professor.
"Norman E. Borlaug saved more lives than any man in human history," said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Programme."His heart was as big as his brilliant mind, but it was his passion and compassion that moved the world."
He was known as the father of the "green revolution", which transformed agriculture through high-yield crop varieties and other innovations,helping to more than double world food production between 1960 and 1990.Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.
"He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much," said Dr Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M University's Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and a close friend who persuaded Borlaug teach at the school."He made the world a better place - a much better place."
Borlaug began the work that led to his Nobel in Mexico at the end of World War II. There he developed diseaseresistant varieties of wheat that produced much more grain than traditional strains.
He and others later took those varieties and similarly improved strains of rice and corn to Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa. In Pakistan and India,two of the nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain yields more than quadrupled.
His successes in the 1960s came just as experts warned that mass starvation was inevitable as the world's population boomed.
"More than any other single person of his age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world," Nobel Peace Prize committee chairman Aase Lionaes said in presenting the award to Borlaug in 1970."We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace."
But Borlaug and the Green Revolution were also criticised in later decades for promoting practices that used fertiliser and pesticides, and focusing on a few high-yield crops that benefited large landowners.
Borlaug often said wheat was only a vehicle for his real interest, which was to improve people's lives.
"We must recognise the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life," he said in his Nobel acceptance speech."For a decent and humane life we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing and effective and compassionate medical care."
Borlaug also pressed governments for farmer-friendly economic policies and improved infrastructure to make markets accessible. A 2006 book about Borlaug
is titled The Man Who Fed the World .Norman Ernest Borlaug was born March 25,1914, on a farm near Cresco, Iowa, and educated through the eighth grade in a one-room schoolhouse.
He left home during the Great Depression to study forestry at the University of Minnesota.While there he earned himself a place in the university's wrestling hall of fame and met his future wife, whom he married in 1937. Margaret Borlaug died in 2007 at the age of 95.
After a brief stint with the US Forest Service, Norman Borlaug returned to the University of Minnesota for a doctoral degree in plant pathology. He then worked as a microbiologist for DuPont, but soon left for a job with the Rockefeller Foundation. Between 1944 and 1960,Borlaug dedicated himself to increasing Mexico's wheat production.
In 1963, Borlaug was named head of the newly formed International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre in Mexico, where he trained thousands of young scientists.
Borlaug retired as head of the centre in 1979 and turned to university teaching,first at Cornell University and then at Texas A&M, which presented him with an honorary doctorate in December 2007.
He remained active well into his nineties, campaigning for the use of biotechnology to fight hunger. He also helped found and served as president of the Sasakawa Africa Foundation, an organisation funded by Japanese billionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa to introduce the green revolution to sub-Saharan Africa.
In 1986, Borlaug established the Des Moines, Iowa-based World Food Prize,a $250,000 award given each year to a person whose work improves the world's food supply.
He received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honour given by Congress, in 2007.
He is survived by daughter Jeanie Borlaug Laube and her husband Rex; son William Gibson Borlaug and his wife Barbie; five grandchildren and six greatgrandchildren.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
A piece of the action
And the crowd went wild as Steve "President for Life" Jobs of Apple Computer came out on the stage to emcee the now-annual September music sales pitch, with loads of new stuff; in the biggest news, the iPod Nano got a video camera and FM radio, and Steve showed off the new iTunes Ver 9 management software; he also showed off the iPhone OS 3.1, available for download, which actually recommends apps you might like, has better synching for music and video, and lets you save video from email attachments into your playlist, aka Camera Roll.
Apple cut the prices of its old iPod models just hours ahead of announcing new iPod models; the price of the 32-gigabyte iPod Touch was cut $120 to $279, or 9,500 baht in real money; a 120-gig iPod Classic now costs $229, a $20 cut by the generous folks who run Apple. Palm introduced a smaller,cheaper smartphone than the successful Pre; the Pixi, as it's called, is aimed at younger users; it's slimmer, has a smaller screen, but features a Qwerty keyboard,8GB of memory and a two-megapixel camera.
US President Barack Obama, in a controversial school-time speech to most US children, advised them to be careful about what they put on Facebook and other social networks;"Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life," he warned.
First Solar of America signed a contract with the Chinese government to build the world's largest solar power plant in Inner Mongolia; assuming it is built, the Ordos City plant will push out 2,000 megawatts of electricity,around four times the size of the projects being built by the US Army in the Mojave Desert and by First Solar in California;the China project isn't near anything much; Ordos City is a coal-producing,eight-year-old, planned low-carbon development with about 1.5 million residents, roughly 800km west of Beijing.
Networking firm Huawei of China,which has suffered a scandal or two in its Thailand work, was stung to the quick by mean stories in the Australian media that it might be tied to the Chinese espionage services; Guo Fulin, managing director of Huawei in Australia, was hurt by the insensitive stories that his company was under investigation by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation; Huawei is a public-owned company, he said, and it is unthinkable that any government agency would be using Huawei to conduct spying.
The government of Cuba took a huge security gamble, and authorised post offices to provide Internet access to the public - just in case the Cuban government ever authorises the public to use the Internet at some point in the future; the only public access currently allowed is to an inside-Cuba intranet for email, provided by post offices at a cost of the equivalent of 55 baht an hour, in a country where the average wage is 680 baht a month.
Japan fired an unmanned cargo craft into orbit; the 16.5-tonne unmanned H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) is on a mission to re-supply the space station;it will stay up there to continue ferrying stuff to the US shuttle fleet next year.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologised for the way that people treated World War Two code-breaker and extraordinary computer geek Alan Turing for being gay; Turing was prosecuted for homosexual conduct in 1952,and a mere two years later, he committed suicide;"I am pleased to have the chance how deeply sorry I and we all are," said Mr Brown.
Google , which plans to give away grazillions of books in order to get the (commercial) goods on its customers,offered to let all its opponents have a piece of the action;Amazon.com , which wants to sell grazillions of books to make tonnes of money directly, scoffed.Rupert Murdoch, the American media mogul, began collecting money at the tollgate to his news sites, in an interesting experiment to see if people will actually pay for news on the Net.
IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corp and Google all responded to a plaintive "Help" from the Newspaper Association of America on how to get money from customers who don't want to pay for news; Randy Bennett, who is the senior president for vice in newspapers, said he's looking over 11 different proposals on how to squeeze money out of you;Google, to no one's surprise, offered to put all newspapers behind one vast,semi-expensive firewall, because that would be so convenient for everyone to just pay one company one time, and then Google would spread the money around; sure, that ought to work.
South African technology firm Unlimited IT dispatched Winston, a pigeon,from its office in Pietermaritzburg, with some data for its main hub in Durban strapped to the bird's leg; it took Winston one hour and eight minutes to fly the data card; meanwhile, Unlimited IT tried to send the same data via the speedchallenged Internet connections provided by leading Internet Telkom , and that download was four percent finished by the time Winston arrived; so it's not only countries that start with "T" that have Internet problems.
T-Mobile of Germany and Orange of France merged their yuppiephone operations in Britain, creating a new $13.5 billion company with 28.4 mobile phone customers; the Deutsche Telekom-France Telecom venture will be the biggest provider in the UK, with a 37 percent market share, larger than O2 of Telefonica.
Apple cut the prices of its old iPod models just hours ahead of announcing new iPod models; the price of the 32-gigabyte iPod Touch was cut $120 to $279, or 9,500 baht in real money; a 120-gig iPod Classic now costs $229, a $20 cut by the generous folks who run Apple. Palm introduced a smaller,cheaper smartphone than the successful Pre; the Pixi, as it's called, is aimed at younger users; it's slimmer, has a smaller screen, but features a Qwerty keyboard,8GB of memory and a two-megapixel camera.
US President Barack Obama, in a controversial school-time speech to most US children, advised them to be careful about what they put on Facebook and other social networks;"Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life," he warned.
First Solar of America signed a contract with the Chinese government to build the world's largest solar power plant in Inner Mongolia; assuming it is built, the Ordos City plant will push out 2,000 megawatts of electricity,around four times the size of the projects being built by the US Army in the Mojave Desert and by First Solar in California;the China project isn't near anything much; Ordos City is a coal-producing,eight-year-old, planned low-carbon development with about 1.5 million residents, roughly 800km west of Beijing.
Networking firm Huawei of China,which has suffered a scandal or two in its Thailand work, was stung to the quick by mean stories in the Australian media that it might be tied to the Chinese espionage services; Guo Fulin, managing director of Huawei in Australia, was hurt by the insensitive stories that his company was under investigation by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation; Huawei is a public-owned company, he said, and it is unthinkable that any government agency would be using Huawei to conduct spying.
The government of Cuba took a huge security gamble, and authorised post offices to provide Internet access to the public - just in case the Cuban government ever authorises the public to use the Internet at some point in the future; the only public access currently allowed is to an inside-Cuba intranet for email, provided by post offices at a cost of the equivalent of 55 baht an hour, in a country where the average wage is 680 baht a month.
Japan fired an unmanned cargo craft into orbit; the 16.5-tonne unmanned H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) is on a mission to re-supply the space station;it will stay up there to continue ferrying stuff to the US shuttle fleet next year.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly apologised for the way that people treated World War Two code-breaker and extraordinary computer geek Alan Turing for being gay; Turing was prosecuted for homosexual conduct in 1952,and a mere two years later, he committed suicide;"I am pleased to have the chance how deeply sorry I and we all are," said Mr Brown.
Google , which plans to give away grazillions of books in order to get the (commercial) goods on its customers,offered to let all its opponents have a piece of the action;Amazon.com , which wants to sell grazillions of books to make tonnes of money directly, scoffed.Rupert Murdoch, the American media mogul, began collecting money at the tollgate to his news sites, in an interesting experiment to see if people will actually pay for news on the Net.
IBM, Microsoft, Oracle Corp and Google all responded to a plaintive "Help" from the Newspaper Association of America on how to get money from customers who don't want to pay for news; Randy Bennett, who is the senior president for vice in newspapers, said he's looking over 11 different proposals on how to squeeze money out of you;Google, to no one's surprise, offered to put all newspapers behind one vast,semi-expensive firewall, because that would be so convenient for everyone to just pay one company one time, and then Google would spread the money around; sure, that ought to work.
South African technology firm Unlimited IT dispatched Winston, a pigeon,from its office in Pietermaritzburg, with some data for its main hub in Durban strapped to the bird's leg; it took Winston one hour and eight minutes to fly the data card; meanwhile, Unlimited IT tried to send the same data via the speedchallenged Internet connections provided by leading Internet Telkom , and that download was four percent finished by the time Winston arrived; so it's not only countries that start with "T" that have Internet problems.
T-Mobile of Germany and Orange of France merged their yuppiephone operations in Britain, creating a new $13.5 billion company with 28.4 mobile phone customers; the Deutsche Telekom-France Telecom venture will be the biggest provider in the UK, with a 37 percent market share, larger than O2 of Telefonica.
HI-TECH HEALTH PLAN WITHOUT A FRAMEWORK?
To make Thailand into a country where people can expect equality in receiving high-quality health and medical services no matter where they seek them, the country needs a distinguished national e-health policy as a frame-woke for its investment in healthcare technology.
So says Boonchai Kijsanayoti, health-informatics officer at the Public Heath Ministry.
Moreover, he says the country's health and medical systems need a national e-health governance body as well as additional investment in healthcare-related information and communications technology(ICT).
At present, Thailand's annual information-technology(IT) expenses for the healthcare industry amount to 3-6 per cent of gross domestic product(GDP), whereas the United States spends 15 per cent of its GDP per year on healthcare-related IT investments.
The World Health Organisation(WHO) says e-health means the use of information and communications technology(ICT) to improve the quality of healthcare, the overall health of the population and the efficiency of the healthcare system.
Boonchai said the establishment of an e-health system required a development model, and there were three main elements involved: foundation policy and strategy - such as governance, fixing of policy, funding and infrastructure; enabling policy and strategy - such as citizen protection, equality and interoperability; and e-Health applications - such as public health services, knowledge services and providers of service.
Meanwhile, the Public Health Ministry has rolled out the second phase of the National Health Information System, covering the three years between 2010 and 2012. The plan aims to improve healthcare services by providing a health information system at 11,160 healthcare points of service throughout the country.
Under the plan, there are four stages of implementation. First is the establishment of the infrastructure and net works for the new system, connecting healthcare service facilities with the Internet and establishing health data centres at provincial health offices. It will also connect central health-information offices with provincial health data centres and develop health-information security systems.
Second, the ministry will develop both the infrastructure for a Health Information Exchange and national standards for minimal health-data sets, health-information messaging standards, health-information privacy and security standards and health-terminology standards.
The third stage will involved the implementation of telemedicine services using an Internet connection(Web technology) to provide teleconsultations between primary care providers and secondary care providers in provincial of district hospital. It will enable 252 provincial or district hospitals around the country to serve 1,500 sub-district health-promotion hospitals.
The fourth stage will be the implementation of a health television system with the aim of providing health-education broadcasting and health-threat alerts from the minstry's central office facilities across country.
The government has allocated Bt2.97 billion to roll out the plan over the next three years.
Additionally, the ministry is working on the second phase of the National Health Standard Data Set, concerning standards for clinical data. It has been working with the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre and the National Health Security Office, Boonchai said.
He said the ministry was also continuing work on the first phase of National Health Standard Data Set, which was due to end this year. The work involes harmonising reimbursement data sets of three health-insurance schemes: social security insurance, national health security insurance and civil service medical benefits, as well as decreasing the reporting workloads of health-service providers.
"We will continue to work on the development of national standare codes, including medical disease classifications, drug codes, the Thailand drug code, the health facilities code and the laboratory code," Boonchai said.
So says Boonchai Kijsanayoti, health-informatics officer at the Public Heath Ministry.
Moreover, he says the country's health and medical systems need a national e-health governance body as well as additional investment in healthcare-related information and communications technology(ICT).
At present, Thailand's annual information-technology(IT) expenses for the healthcare industry amount to 3-6 per cent of gross domestic product(GDP), whereas the United States spends 15 per cent of its GDP per year on healthcare-related IT investments.
The World Health Organisation(WHO) says e-health means the use of information and communications technology(ICT) to improve the quality of healthcare, the overall health of the population and the efficiency of the healthcare system.
Boonchai said the establishment of an e-health system required a development model, and there were three main elements involved: foundation policy and strategy - such as governance, fixing of policy, funding and infrastructure; enabling policy and strategy - such as citizen protection, equality and interoperability; and e-Health applications - such as public health services, knowledge services and providers of service.
Meanwhile, the Public Health Ministry has rolled out the second phase of the National Health Information System, covering the three years between 2010 and 2012. The plan aims to improve healthcare services by providing a health information system at 11,160 healthcare points of service throughout the country.
Under the plan, there are four stages of implementation. First is the establishment of the infrastructure and net works for the new system, connecting healthcare service facilities with the Internet and establishing health data centres at provincial health offices. It will also connect central health-information offices with provincial health data centres and develop health-information security systems.
Second, the ministry will develop both the infrastructure for a Health Information Exchange and national standards for minimal health-data sets, health-information messaging standards, health-information privacy and security standards and health-terminology standards.
The third stage will involved the implementation of telemedicine services using an Internet connection(Web technology) to provide teleconsultations between primary care providers and secondary care providers in provincial of district hospital. It will enable 252 provincial or district hospitals around the country to serve 1,500 sub-district health-promotion hospitals.
The fourth stage will be the implementation of a health television system with the aim of providing health-education broadcasting and health-threat alerts from the minstry's central office facilities across country.
The government has allocated Bt2.97 billion to roll out the plan over the next three years.
Additionally, the ministry is working on the second phase of the National Health Standard Data Set, concerning standards for clinical data. It has been working with the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre and the National Health Security Office, Boonchai said.
He said the ministry was also continuing work on the first phase of National Health Standard Data Set, which was due to end this year. The work involes harmonising reimbursement data sets of three health-insurance schemes: social security insurance, national health security insurance and civil service medical benefits, as well as decreasing the reporting workloads of health-service providers.
"We will continue to work on the development of national standare codes, including medical disease classifications, drug codes, the Thailand drug code, the health facilities code and the laboratory code," Boonchai said.
"Strange lights" seen after Nasa launch
Nasa says it successfully launched a rocket in Virginia as part of an experiment, and the blast may have caused dozens of people to report seeing strange lights in the sky.
The US space agency said it launched the Black Brant XII on Saturday evening to gather data on the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. Around the time of the launch, people in the northeast US reported seeing strange lights.
Along the east coast, reports of the bright, cone-shaped light poured into weather stations and news organisations.
The calls came from as far away as Boston, which is about 610km northeast of the launch site.
The rocket is designed to create an artificial cloud. Nasa hopes the experiment will provide information on the formation and properties of noctilucent clouds, which form at high altitudes.
The US space agency said it launched the Black Brant XII on Saturday evening to gather data on the highest clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. Around the time of the launch, people in the northeast US reported seeing strange lights.
Along the east coast, reports of the bright, cone-shaped light poured into weather stations and news organisations.
The calls came from as far away as Boston, which is about 610km northeast of the launch site.
The rocket is designed to create an artificial cloud. Nasa hopes the experiment will provide information on the formation and properties of noctilucent clouds, which form at high altitudes.
Monday, September 21, 2009
A DAINTY DINO IS DUSTED OFF
A relatively tiny new ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus rex has been unearthed in China, researchers said Thursday.
The three-metre-long dinosaur dubbed the Raptorex only weighed about 60 kilograms and was nearly 100 times smaller than the king of the dinosaurs.
But it was nearly identtical in structure-even down to the scrawny arms-and had all of the traits which made T Rex such a successful preda-tor, says lead author Paul Sereno, a paleontologist with the University of Chicago.
"It was jaws on legs," he says.
This unexpected new link in the evolution of the mighty predator which once dominated the northern half of the globe has provided researchers with an entirely new pic-ture of how T Rex evolved.
"Raptorex, the new species, really throws a wrench into the observed pattern," says co-author Stephen Brusatte of the American Museum of Natural History.
"Hers we have an animal that's 1/100th of the size of T Rex-about my size-but with all of the signature features-big head, strong muscles, tiny little arms-that werd thought to be necessary adaptations for a large-body predator"
The Raptorex fossil shows that the skinny arms evolved not in order to help it offset a heavier overall bodyweight, but instead as a trade-off for agility and speed.
The powerful muscles of the back legs would have helped the T Rex chase down its prey while the smaller front legs allowed it to remain upright and attack with its deadly jaws.
The Raptorex fossil-which was estimated to be a juvenile of five to six years old when it died-is about 125 million years old.
The tyrannosaurus genus did not reach its full size until about 85 million years ago and was wiped out about 65 million years ago in the great extinction, which ended the Cretaceous Period.
"What that means is that for most of their evolutionary history, about 80 per cent of the time that they were on earth, tyrannosauruses were small animals that lived in the shadow of other types of very large dinosaur predators," says Brusatte.
It's likely that T Rex was able to grow to its colossal size because other competing predators became extinct.
"We connot say that this incredibly successful, scalable blueprint for a predator was responsible for their total domination... because we never saw them cohabiting in environ-ments with these other, earlier types of predators," says Brusatte.
But once tyrannosauruses were able to expand in body size, "there was no turning back until the aster-oid hit because they really had it down pat".
The incredibly well-preserved and nearly complete fossil was almost lost to science after it was unearthed illegally and spirited out of China for sale on the private market.
An american eye surgeon and dinosaur enthusiast purchased the still-embedded fossil and recognised its potential value to science.
Henry Kriegstein contacted Sereno, who agreed to analyse the fossil so long as Kriegstein was willing to return it to China once the work is complete.
"We repidly achieved that agreement and Raptorex sees the light of day," Sereno explains
"I hope this is a pathway that can be used again so that other importhant specimens that do find their way out of the ground in the dark of night do not get lost to science."
The full name of the new species is Raptorex kriegsteini, in honour of Kriegstein and the dinosaur's link to raptors and the T Rex.
The study was published in the journal Science.
The three-metre-long dinosaur dubbed the Raptorex only weighed about 60 kilograms and was nearly 100 times smaller than the king of the dinosaurs.
But it was nearly identtical in structure-even down to the scrawny arms-and had all of the traits which made T Rex such a successful preda-tor, says lead author Paul Sereno, a paleontologist with the University of Chicago.
"It was jaws on legs," he says.
This unexpected new link in the evolution of the mighty predator which once dominated the northern half of the globe has provided researchers with an entirely new pic-ture of how T Rex evolved.
"Raptorex, the new species, really throws a wrench into the observed pattern," says co-author Stephen Brusatte of the American Museum of Natural History.
"Hers we have an animal that's 1/100th of the size of T Rex-about my size-but with all of the signature features-big head, strong muscles, tiny little arms-that werd thought to be necessary adaptations for a large-body predator"
The Raptorex fossil shows that the skinny arms evolved not in order to help it offset a heavier overall bodyweight, but instead as a trade-off for agility and speed.
The powerful muscles of the back legs would have helped the T Rex chase down its prey while the smaller front legs allowed it to remain upright and attack with its deadly jaws.
The Raptorex fossil-which was estimated to be a juvenile of five to six years old when it died-is about 125 million years old.
The tyrannosaurus genus did not reach its full size until about 85 million years ago and was wiped out about 65 million years ago in the great extinction, which ended the Cretaceous Period.
"What that means is that for most of their evolutionary history, about 80 per cent of the time that they were on earth, tyrannosauruses were small animals that lived in the shadow of other types of very large dinosaur predators," says Brusatte.
It's likely that T Rex was able to grow to its colossal size because other competing predators became extinct.
"We connot say that this incredibly successful, scalable blueprint for a predator was responsible for their total domination... because we never saw them cohabiting in environ-ments with these other, earlier types of predators," says Brusatte.
But once tyrannosauruses were able to expand in body size, "there was no turning back until the aster-oid hit because they really had it down pat".
The incredibly well-preserved and nearly complete fossil was almost lost to science after it was unearthed illegally and spirited out of China for sale on the private market.
An american eye surgeon and dinosaur enthusiast purchased the still-embedded fossil and recognised its potential value to science.
Henry Kriegstein contacted Sereno, who agreed to analyse the fossil so long as Kriegstein was willing to return it to China once the work is complete.
"We repidly achieved that agreement and Raptorex sees the light of day," Sereno explains
"I hope this is a pathway that can be used again so that other importhant specimens that do find their way out of the ground in the dark of night do not get lost to science."
The full name of the new species is Raptorex kriegsteini, in honour of Kriegstein and the dinosaur's link to raptors and the T Rex.
The study was published in the journal Science.
A mammoth find in Serbia
Wading through the swamps that hundreds of thousands of years later would become eastern Serbia, "Vika" became stuck, never managing to pull herself ree, and eventually died.
Now Vika, a mammoth whose skeleton was found perfectly preserved in a crouched postion, has been hailed as a "sensational" find despitr disputes over her age, species and even sex.
In the millennia since the animal's death, 27 metres of earth were deposited on her until in May when a digger in the Kosolac mine pit, 60 kilometres east of Belgrade, exposed her skeleton.
Fortunately, no damage was done during the surprise discovery and now vika's remains, preserved at the site by a climatised tent, have been made accessible to scientific visitors.
"Our geologists dated Vika's age at 4.8 million years, based on the age of the surrounding stratum," says the director of the Belgrade Natural Museum, Zoran Markovic.
If Serbian experts are correct, Markovic says, Vika's remains are the oldest ever found in Europe.
Serbian scientists say that Vika was a sounthern mammoth Mammuthus Meridionalis, standing four metres tall and weighing seven tonnes, with 2.5-metre-long tusks.
For now, Serbian scientists have decided to leave Vika exactly where she (or he) was and in the crouched position in which she was found. This was due to one last posthumous event. Shortly after she died in the mud of Kostolac, Serbian experts say, her stomach literally exploded, breaking her spine and scattering a few ribs.
Leaving the ancient skeleton as it was found allows scientists to continue arguing over her age, species and gender, while also allowing tourists to created their own picture of Vika's final days long ago.
Vika, a mammoth whose skeleton was found perfectly preserved in a crouched position, has been hailed as a "sensational" find despite disputes over her age, species and even ses.
Now Vika, a mammoth whose skeleton was found perfectly preserved in a crouched postion, has been hailed as a "sensational" find despitr disputes over her age, species and even sex.
In the millennia since the animal's death, 27 metres of earth were deposited on her until in May when a digger in the Kosolac mine pit, 60 kilometres east of Belgrade, exposed her skeleton.
Fortunately, no damage was done during the surprise discovery and now vika's remains, preserved at the site by a climatised tent, have been made accessible to scientific visitors.
"Our geologists dated Vika's age at 4.8 million years, based on the age of the surrounding stratum," says the director of the Belgrade Natural Museum, Zoran Markovic.
If Serbian experts are correct, Markovic says, Vika's remains are the oldest ever found in Europe.
Serbian scientists say that Vika was a sounthern mammoth Mammuthus Meridionalis, standing four metres tall and weighing seven tonnes, with 2.5-metre-long tusks.
For now, Serbian scientists have decided to leave Vika exactly where she (or he) was and in the crouched position in which she was found. This was due to one last posthumous event. Shortly after she died in the mud of Kostolac, Serbian experts say, her stomach literally exploded, breaking her spine and scattering a few ribs.
Leaving the ancient skeleton as it was found allows scientists to continue arguing over her age, species and gender, while also allowing tourists to created their own picture of Vika's final days long ago.
Vika, a mammoth whose skeleton was found perfectly preserved in a crouched position, has been hailed as a "sensational" find despite disputes over her age, species and even ses.
ROBOT CAN SWITCH BED TO WHEELCHAIR
Japan's Panasonic Corp has developed a "Robotic Bed" that can transform into a wheelchair to make life easier for elderly and disabled people, it announced yesterday.
The invention in designed to help people with limited mobility maintain an independent lifestyle, the firm said in a statement.
"Now, the user can join the family meal by converting the bed into a wheelchair and moving to the dining table without the need of assistance from other people," it said.
Panasoinc will exhibit the Robotic Bed at a home care and rehabilitation exhibition in Tokyo from September 29 to October 1, it said.
"It is still a concept model and we will not be selling it soon," said Panasonic spokeswoman Yuka Arii. "We plan to bring it to markets in or after 2015. But we don't know the price yet."
Japan has one of the owrld's oldest populations and faces a constant shortage of care workers.
The invention in designed to help people with limited mobility maintain an independent lifestyle, the firm said in a statement.
"Now, the user can join the family meal by converting the bed into a wheelchair and moving to the dining table without the need of assistance from other people," it said.
Panasoinc will exhibit the Robotic Bed at a home care and rehabilitation exhibition in Tokyo from September 29 to October 1, it said.
"It is still a concept model and we will not be selling it soon," said Panasonic spokeswoman Yuka Arii. "We plan to bring it to markets in or after 2015. But we don't know the price yet."
Japan has one of the owrld's oldest populations and faces a constant shortage of care workers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)