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This is Category: Something to think about...
Following are the News Items published under this Category.
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Nursery school bosses ordered the words of the rhyme Baa Baa Black Sheep to be altered to Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep. The change was made to avoid offending children after teachers examined the nursery's equal opportunities policy. Stuart Chamberlain, manager of the Sure Start Centre in Oxford, could not explain why children might be offended. But he said: "No one should feel pointed out because of their race, gender or anything else. "We've taken the equal opportunities approach to everything we do. "This is fairly standard across nurseries. We are following stringent equal opportunities rules"...
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Living too close to overhead power lines appears to increase the risk of childhood leukaemia, researchers say. A major study found children who had lived within 200m of high voltage lines at birth had a 70% higher risk of leukaemia than those 600m or more away. But the Oxford University team stressed that there are no accepted biological reasons for the results and that they may, therefore, be chance. Alternatively, it may be down to the environments where pylons are located. People who currently live or have lived near power lines in the past need not panic about this research. Professor John Toy of Cancer Research UK. And they said it did not resolve the debate about whether it was unsafe to live next to power lines. Around 1% of homes in the UK are estimated to be within 200m of high voltage National Grid power lines. The researchers said their findings showed living in such close proximity to power lines at birth could account for five extra cases of childhood leukaemia in a total of around 400 that occur in a year - a total of 1%. The British Medical Journal study did not look at level of exposure to magnetic fields. But other scientists who have considered the issue have suggested that low frequency magnetic fields, such as those caused by the production of electricity, could possibly be linked to cancer. However, others have disputed this link. And experts agree that there are likely to be many factors involved in leukaemia, including genes and the environment. Even if the apparent risk was found to be real, the number of cases of leukaemia that would result would be very few, said the authors...
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While blasting rock at Dorchester, near Boston, Massachusetts, workmen found a zinc vase, inlaid with silver and intricately decorated with flowers and wreaths. According to Scientific American of June 5 1852, the vessel was about 6.5 inches wide by 4.5 inches high. The rock from which it had apparently sprung was about 600 million years old. June 1891: the Morrisonville Times relates that Mrs SW Culp of Morrisonville, Illinois, found 10 inches of eight-carat gold chain firmly embedded in a large lump of coal. Her supply originated in a seam 260-320m years old. There are many such reports, mostly in 19th and early 20th-century science journals and newspapers. Others document finds of iron nails, hammers, drill bits, arrowheads, coins, pots, and bones in coal and ancient rock. Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson, whose book Forbidden Archaeology collects a number of them, see the finds as proof that waves of human civilisation have existed on the planet for hundreds of millions of years. This comes as less of a surprise when we learn that they are Hare Krishnas, who believe in such great cyclical patterns of time. Christian fundamentalists use the data to bolster Biblical accounts of creation. Other authors invoke extraterrestrials, time travellers and teleportation. Sadly, those cases that can be investigated further often turn out to have less exciting explanations. Many objects turn out to be natural formations. Take, for example, the '2.8 billion-year-old metal cricket balls' - grooved spheres found in mines in South Africa's Western Transvaal during the 1980s. Considered by some to be the products of anomalous engineering technologies, they were identified by geologists as naturally occurring pyrite nodules, formed from clay or volcanic ash. Other objects are exactly what they appear to be - it's their geological surroundings that are incorrectly identified. The 'Coso Artefact', a metallic object found in a half-million-year-old geode near Olancha, California in February 1961, was described as looking like a spark plug. That's because it was a spark plug, manufactured by Champion in the 1920s. The surrounding material wasn't a geode after all, but a 40-year-old encrustation of clay. Some things just aren't what they used to be...
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A huge cosmic explosion could have caused a mass extinction on Earth 450 million years ago, according to an analysis by scientists in the US. A gamma ray burst could have caused the Ordovician extinction, killing 60% of marine invertebrates at a time when life was largely confined to the sea. These cosmic blasts are the most powerful explosions in the Universe. The scientists think a 10-second burst near Earth could deplete up to half of the planet's ozone layer. We don't know exactly when one came, but we're rather sure it did come - and left its mark. With the ozone layer devastated, the Sun's ultraviolet radiation could have killed off much of the life on land and near the surface of oceans and lakes. Gamma ray bursts are rare occurrences, but scientists estimate that at least one must have occurred near the Earth in the past one billion years. Scientists think that gamma-ray bursts are generated in two principal scenarios. In one scenario, a star collapses in on itself, giving birth to a black hole and releasing a high-energy jet of material travelling at close to the speed of light. The bursts could also be generated when two neutron stars collide. "A gamma ray burst originating within 6,000 light-years from Earth would have a devastating effect on life," said co-author Dr Adrian Melott, an astronomer at the University of Kansas, US. "We don't know exactly when one came, but we're rather sure it did come - and left its mark. What's most surprising is that just a 10-second burst can cause years of devastating ozone damage." Dr Melott and his colleagues used computer models to calculate the effects of a nearby gamma ray burst on the Earth's atmosphere and its life forms. They showed that up to half the ozone layer would be destroyed within weeks. Five years on, at least 10% would still be missing...
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There is a supermarket in Taiwan where you can buy jars of that famous Chinese delicacy - new-born baby brains. Among the lesser-known perils of the Iraq war are the formidable spiders of the desert - huge, screaming, with a preference for human flesh. To sedate their prey, these spiders jab with a dart that has an effect akin to Novocain. When the Twin Towers came down on September 11 2001, the face of the devil appeared in smoke rising above the ruins. Only one thing survived the crash of the hijacked plane that smashed into the Pentagon: a copy of the Bible. Mossad was responsible for the September 11 attacks; and as everybody knows, all Jews working in the World Trade Centre were mysteriously absent from work that morning. What all the above stories have in common is they are untrue, yet they have found believers in many countries and among millions of otherwise sensible, intelligent people around the world. They are urban myths. We tend to suppose that legends are the things people believed before there were scientists to put them right, belonging to a shadowy past when our ancestors huddled around their hearths, terrifying each other with tales of bogeymen and hobgoblins. Yet despite scientific progress, the legends produced by modern civilisation are quite as charming, sinister, evil, beguiling or delightful as those of the old days. And thanks to the Internet they travel faster, and the same stories are found - with local variations that make them more believable - all over the world…
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