Новости за 05.11.2010

Fashion designer Marc Ecko spoke with Wall Street Journal reporter Lee Hawkins about his design philosophy, his 2007 purchase of Barry Bonds's 756th home-run baseball, and his new activism for education reform in America.

Choose the right doors and make your way through the tower of a thousand grisly deaths.

Lauren Lynch reports the latest news from tennis. Rafael Nadal pulls out the Paris Masters for an unknown medical reason. The USA Fed Cup team are the underdogs to the Italian team but are confident facing them this weekend. The Basel semifinals will feature Roger Federer versus Andy Roddick and Novak Djokovic versus Viktor Troicki. Elena Demenitieva confirms that her retirement was due to a desire for a family. Maria Sharapova will make Cole Hann shoes for her upcoming wedding.

The brown squiggles you see here are ice worms making their living on the surface of the Whitechuck Glacier in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. These relatives of earthworms---seen here alongside a disintegrating balloon littering the ice---are found only on the glaciers of the North American west coast, where they graze on algae and bacteria. Unlike other animals, the worms have a metabolism that seems to increase at lower temperatures; they typically die above 50 degrees Fahrenheit

From Ed Yong: The vast majority of people who are infected with HIV go on to develop AIDS. Their bodies become riddled with the virus, their immune systems falter, and they are besieged by life-threatening infections. But not everyone shares the same fate. Around 1 in every 300 people infected with HIV carry genetic trump cards that allow them to resist and control the virus. These “HIV controllers” can live with the virus for years. They never develop AIDS and they live long, healthy lives, eve

The planet's tumult never ceases. Hurricane Tomas is bearing down on Haiti right now, and an erupting volcano continues to wreak destruction on Indonesia. At 8 a.m. EDT on Nov. 5, Tomas' center was about 80 miles south-southeast of Guantanamo, Cuba and 160 miles west of Port Au Prince Haiti.... Tomas is moving to the northeast near 10 mph, and is expected to speed up over the next couple of days. [NASA Press release] The hurricane is currently a category one, with sustained winds of 85 miles pe

The results were so staggering that they stopped the study ahead of schedule to get the word out: A giant study by the National Cancer Institute of more than 50,000 heavy smokers has found a 20 percent reduction in deaths among patients who received a CT scan to catch potential cancer as opposed to a simple X-ray. "This is huge," said Dr. Reggie Munden, a University of Texas M.D. Anderson diagnostic radiologist who led the research conducted at the Houston cancer center, one of 33 sites national

Sir Alex Ferguson's 24 years in charge at Old Trafford. We talk about the Scot's legacy and who might take over.

Sir Alex Ferguson's 24 years in charge at Old Trafford. We talk about the Scot's legacy and who might take over.

No, really. Read all about it in a remarkable (if awkwardly named) new paper from German team Zrenner et al, Subretinal electronic chips allow blind patients to read letters and combine them to words.The device acts as an artificial retina. It's a tiny 3 x 3.1 mm panel (about ? that size) containing an array of 1,500 individual light-sensitive microphotodiodes (38 x 40).Each sensor converts incoming light into an electrical current - the brighter, the stronger - and outputs it through a tiny ele

CORVALLIS — The answering machine at his family home in Corvallis still speaks his name, but Alex Hargreaves is living in a much grander arena.

Autism researchers already knew that a variant of gene called CNTNAP2 that appears in about one-third of people is associated with higher risk for developing the condition. A study this week out in Science Translational Medicine puts that genetic marker together with what it appears to do in the brain: cause too many connections inside the frontal lobe of the brain, but too few from there to other brain regions. That could be a key clue in unraveling the learning and language difficulties that

New neuroscience research is not only adding to our understanding of math and number processing in the brain, it's also suggesting a way to improve learning in the math-deficient. A small new study published in Current Biology involved electrical stimulation of the parietal lobe, a part of the brain involved in math learning and understanding. When this area was stimulated, students performed better on a math problem test. Said study leader Cohen Kadosh: "We've shown before that we can induce d