Why do referees sometimes get it wrong?
I think everyone would agree that soccer referees have a very difficult job. They have to keep a close eye on a fast-moving game in which incidents often occur away from the ball, and need to make decisions in an instant which in high-profile games will be endlessly dissected by pundits and fans – sometimes…
Travel advice: Watch out for the mozzies!
The Hand Picked blog is not perhaps a place where you'd normally expect to find pictures of celebrities. And fear not, we're not going down the route of showbiz gossip. But sometimes celebrity news and serious topics overlap. And the power of celebrity has been harnessed this week to highlight the malaria risk when travelling…
What can you do with 12,000 solar cells?
Image from solarimpulse.com Power an airplane, of course! A team of Swiss engineers, led by Mr. Andre Borschberg and fellow aviator Bertrand Piccard, have been doing just that for the past few years – building an airplane powered entirely by sun energy, which they named ‘Solar Impulse’. The airplane has 12,000 solar cells arranged on…
Cutting The Salt
Salt reduction is a hot topic at the moment in the US and the UK as officials react to research that suggests decreasing salt intake could decrease levels of stroke in the population. Consumers can do a lot to reduce the salt they consume, but as most of salt consumption comes from eating processed food,…
What can you do with 12,000 plastic bottles?
Plastiki departing from San Francisco-photo by Catherine Sparks How about a 20-metre catamaran? That’s what British adventurer and environmentalist David de Rothschild and his crew of scientists and ecologists are sailing on, from San Francisco to Sydney since mid-March. Read on to find out more about the Plastiki and the expedition.
Health Literacy in action
This blog is contributed by Dr. Arthur Culbert, a member of the Global Health advisory board, and Executive Director of the non-profit organisation Health Literacy Missouri (HLM), USA. On May 27, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy. The long-awaited action plan is aimed…
New hope for vultures?
The vulture population in South Asia has declined catastrophically in the last 2 decades, with population decreases since 1992 reported to be over 97% (Senacha et al., 2008). With populations of three of the Asian vulture species decreasing from the 'tens of millions' to less than 60,000 for all species combined, the decline has been…
Darwin’s finches threatened by invasive nest maggots in the Galapagos Islands
Contents of a Darwin’s finch nest: dead nestlings with larval feeding wounds surrounded by parasitic larvae of the introduced fly Philornis downsi. As mentioned in another entry on this blog a few weeks ago, 2010 has been declared International Year of Biodiversity by the United Nations. Continuing this theme, here is a guest entry by…
Luxury insect hotels
Today is the last day of National Insect Week in the UK. Now that England are out of the World Cup we might all be spending a bit more time in our gardens! So I thought I’d finish the week by letting you know how you can get involved in helping conserve our creepy crawlies…
Entomotherapy: Revolting Recipes or Marvellous Medicine?
During our daily job of searching through journals for articles to add to CAB Abstracts database we came across an article all about entomotherapy (use of insects for medicinal purposes) in tribal communities in Arunachal Pradesh, India. So I’d like to add entomotherapy to the long list of benefits of insects in my blog on…