Congenital analgesia: The agony of feeling no pain. 16 July 2012Last updated at 20:11 ET Steven (right) with his brother Chris in 1983 Steven Pete and his brother were born with the rare genetic disorder congenital analgesia. They grew up - in Washington state, US - with a sense of touch but, as he explains in his own words, without ever feeling pain. It first became apparent to my parents that something was wrong when I was four or five months old. I began chewing on my tongue while teething. They took me to a paediatrician where I underwent a series of tests. At first they put a cigarette lighter underneath my foot and waited for my skin to blister. By which point, I had chewed off about a quarter of my tongue through teething. Continue reading the main story What is congenital analgesia?
We grew up on a farm. So during my early childhood I was absent from school a lot due to injury and illness. There was one time, at the roller-skating rink. When I was five or six years old, I was taken away from my home by child protective services. Latvia midsummer: Songs, flowers and running around naked. 30 June 2012Last updated at 07:03 ET By Damien McGuinness BBC News, Riga Latvia's most important national holiday is arguably not Christmas but the summer solstice celebrations of Ligo (pronounced "leegwa") - a pagan tradition when Latvians celebrate the shortest night by staying up to greet the rising sun. As the sun slowly sets about an hour and a half before midnight, it peeks out briefly from behind the clouds. We all run out excitedly. Five minutes later, it is gone. For a festival which is all about celebrating the sun, the sun itself is being remarkably coy.
The weather has been poor all day but this is a beautiful, if fleeting, moment. In this far northern land, winters are long, dark and snowy, with the temperature regularly falling below -30C, so you can understand why the arrival of the long summer days is greeted by something approaching national hysteria. It is not a complicated festival. Wearing oak-leaf wreaths is a traditional element of the festival “Start Quote End Quote. Who, What, Why: Why does a cabbage cost $28 in Canada? 14 June 2012Last updated at 11:29 GMT Would you pay C$28 (US$27; £18) for a cabbage? $65 for a bag of chicken? $100 for 12 litres of water? That's not the cost of a meal at a world-class restaurant, but the price of basic foodstuffs at supermarkets in the territory of Nunavut, in northern Canada. Residents in Iqaluit, the territorial capital, and Arctic Bay, Pond Inlet and Igloolik, and sympathisers in the national capital, Ottawa, have been protesting in a bid to raise awareness of the high cost of food in remote communities.
Nunavut is as large as Western Europe and covers most of the Canadian Arctic, with a population of more than 30,000, mostly Inuit. Continue reading the main story The answer The Arctic climate means there is no local agriculture industry All fresh produce has to be flown in daily, or less often in more remote communities Stores have higher running costs Prior to the arrival of Europeans, indigenous people in the area survived by hunting, fishing and gathering.
Bump and mend: The apps helping fix city streets. 11 June 2012Last updated at 19:01 ET By Ian Hardy BBC News, New York Broken traffic light on your road? There is, of course, an app for that Smartphones are well-established social hubs, loaded with software used to send and receive photographs, appointments, news and invites. Corporations and large organisations have been there from the start, thrilled at finding new ways to push and promote products and services. Now governments around the world now want to join the party. In the US, cities and states have realised that a combination of neighbourhood goodwill, a well-thought-out app and an army of smartphones can revolutionise the way they do the peoples' business. It is called urban crowd sourcing: allowing the public to report problems on the spot from a mobile device and then get real time feedback as they get resolved. Millions of people own phones with excellent GPS capabilities, accelerometers and high resolution camera lenses.
The scheme is being copied across the US. Trawling Twitter. Glass Beach – The Dump You’ll Want to Visit. Before you say anything about the content of this article, I hate people who litter. I’ll judge you if I think you’re too lazy to recycle. I hate pollution and the death of our fragile ecosystems and all the rest.
But- with that disclaimer out of the way- Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, California is the incredible result of human wastefulness and the resilience of nature. It’s like a little Inuksuk… I’ve been trolling around for lesser known landscapes to road trip to and explore, and stumbled across this chunk of multicoloured west coast paradise. These days, Glass Beach is a protected part of MacKerricher State Park, but in 1949, it was the site of an unrestricted dump. Eventually, California realized that dumping automobiles, appliances, toxic substances and razor sharp shards of glass into the water was probably a bad idea, and looked elsewhere for a dumping site. The beaches under the cliffs lay polluted, cluttered and ruined, and were basically treated as a forgotten ‘mistake.’ Swiss Army knife adapts to remain a cutting-edge tool. 16 May 2012Last updated at 19:26 ET By James Melik Reporter, Business Daily, BBC World Service The original cutlery factory, located at Ibach in Switzerland, was opened by Karl Elsener in 1884 Few products are as inexorably linked to their country of origin as the Swiss Army knife.
The multifunctional pocket knife from Switzerland has been recognised worldwide for almost 130 years after Karl Elsener, and his mother Victoria, began a cutlery company to handle an order for the Swiss army. Mr Elsener worked on a revolutionary idea - a knife that offered as many practical functions as possible in a compact form. In 1897 he patented the Swiss Officer's and Sport Knife - later marketed as the Swiss Army knife. He also formed the company Victorinox, amalgamating his mother's name with inox - short for acier inoxydable, the French term for stainless steel.
The company has supplied the Swiss army for more than 125 years and also supplies knives to the German and 10 other armies. Broader brand Tough times. EAP Vocabulary. EAP vocabulary: Exercises Academic Word List The words in the Academic Word occur in all subjects. All the words in the Academic Word List are included in these exercises. If you want to learn all the words, you will need to do all the exercises.
Exercise 1: The Motor Car Exercise 2: Introduction to Computers Exercise 3: Measurement of Current Exercise 4: An Experiment in Chemistry Exercise 5: The History of Life on Earth Exercise 6: Cells Exercise 7: Alternatives to the Concept of a Body Clock Exercise 8: Charles Darwin Exercise 9: Natural Selection Exercise 10: Malaria: Discovery by Committee Exercise 11: Causes of Cancer Exercise 12: Attempted Suicide Exercise 13: Indications for Psychiatric Inpatient Care Exercise 14: Aerospace Medicine Exercise 15: The Immune System Exercise 16: The Concept of Number Exercise 17: Carbohydrate and Fibre Exercise 18: Affluence and Inequality Exercise 19: The Travelling Salesman Exercise 20: Stocks Exercise 21: Business Cycle Exercise 22: Banking Exercise 23: Globalisation.