Canada Bans Niqab and Burka at Citizenship Oath Muslim women hoping to become Canadian citizens will have to remove their face coverings when taking the citizenship oath, according to Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney. Speaking to reporters, Kenney noted that “the citizenship oath is a quintessentially public act. It is a public declaration that you are joining the Canadian family and it must be taken freely and openly” (source: Globe and Mail). What Are Canadian Values? An editorial in the Globe and Mail noted the conflict between the supposed Canadian values extolled by Kenney and the actual Canadian values enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The oath of citizenship “an oath to the Queen and her successors, and to obey the laws of Canada, and fulfill the duties of being a citizen” should be taken seriously. Kenney’s complete disregard for freedom of religious expression is particularly interesting given his focus on wooing “the ethnic vote” during the Spring election.
Project Utopia breaks the naval architectural mould The concept of a floating island is not new, having first surfaced in Homer's Odyssey and making countless appearances in literature from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, C. S. Lewis' science fiction trilogy Perelandra, Hugh Lofting's The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle (1922) and the first artificially-constructed floating island makes an appearance in an 1895 novel by the father of science fiction, Frenchman Jules Verne. View all Illustration from the Illustrated Jules Verne Since Verne's first imaginings 120 years ago, activity has been quite on the man-made island front, with the first sign of new thought emerging four years ago in the form of WallyIsland from Italian yacht builders Wally. Everything prior to now though, has a yacht as its basis, with a design theme superimposed on a traditional naval architecture. That's where the company's latest concept, Project Utopia, is so very different. There's also an observatory deck 213 ft (65 m) above sea level with 360 degree views.
Ikea Shames the TV Industry | DisplaySearch Blog The announcement that Ikea will launch a TV range shows what is so wrong and right with the industry. It’s a cliché to say that the TV is more than a gadget but also a piece of furniture, but Ikea has really proved it. The TV will be available in a variety of screen sizes, with a base unit incorporating a receiver module and disk player. As several screen sizes are available, it is likely that the screen part is a dumb HDMI monitor. Reportedly, TCL will be manufacturing the electronics. That highlights what is wrong with the industry. Coolest New Businesses San Francisco UQM 5 Years : From Apr 2009 to Apr 2014 UQM TECHNOLOGIES, INC. (NYSE Amex: UQM), a developer of alternative energy technologies, announced today that the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, will be speaking at the Company’s new manufacturing facility on Friday, April 30, 2010. Also speaking at the event will be UQM Technologies’ President and Chief Executive Officer, William G. Rankin, Congresswoman Betsy Markey and Colorado Governor Bill Ritter. Vice President Biden will highlight the positive impact the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act has had on small businesses, by featuring UQM’s technology leadership in electric propulsion systems, generators and electronic products for the developing markets for all-electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. “We are honored to have Vice President Biden speak at our facility to highlight our company’s accomplishments and leadership role in developing advanced electric propulsion systems.
Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay First-time Visitors: Please visit Site Map and Disclaimer. Use "Back" to return here. The Drying of the Mediterranean The Middle East The Collision of India and Eurasia Return to Plate Tectonics PageReturn to Physical Geology Class Notes IndexAccess Crustal Movements Notes IndexReturn to Professor Dutch's Home Page prions For nearly 30 years, researchers have gathered evidence that a group of bizarre, fatal brain diseases—including mad cow and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—are caused not by a virus or bacterium but by an abnormal form of a protein, called a prion. New studies lend the strongest support yet to this once-controversial idea and are also starting to reveal the beneficial natural functions these proteins perform before they go bad. Molecular biochemist Jiyan Ma at Ohio State University and colleagues were able to transform a normal protein produced by E. coli bacteria into a prion whose properties match those of the infectious version: It forms clumps, resists being cut by enzymes, and converts other normal proteins into the aberrant form. When the prion was injected into the brains of mice, the brains became spongy and riddled with holes, the telltale signs of prion disease.
prions Therapeutic antibodies can be an efficient alternative when common drugs do not work anymore. However, antibodies obtained from blood of animals such as mice could not be used: The human immune system recognizes them as foreign and rejects them. In an international cooperation, scientists from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany have now succeeded in developing a promising approach to solve this problem; with the help of human stem cells they generated mice with a human immune system, which were then vaccinated to produce human monoclonal antibodies. These fully human antibodies could help in the research and therapy of human diseases. Their results have now been published in the current online issue of the scientific journal PLoS One. Antibodies are small proteins, produced by B cells during an immune response. To validate the new approach, mice with a human immune system were vaccinated against Hepatitis B or Tetanus.
Scientists discover new mammal species in Madagascar marshes A new carnivore species has been discovered in the marshes of the Lac Alaotra wetlands in central eastern Madagascar. The small, cat-sized, speckled brown mammal has been named Durrell’s vontsira (Salanoia durrelli) by scientists. The discovery, announced in the latest issue of the taxonomic journal Systematics and Biodiversity, was made by researchers from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the Natural History Museum, London, Nature Heritage, Jersey, and Conservation International. The future of the species is uncertain since the marshes in which it lives is under threat from agricultural expansion. Read more... The carnivore was first seen swimming in a lake by researchers who were on a field trip surveying bamboo lemurs (Hapalemur griseus alaotrensis) in 2004.
Sci-Fi writers of the past predict life in 2012 As part of the L, Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future award in 1987, a group of science fiction luminaries put together a text “time capsule” of their predictions about life in the far off year of 2012. Including such names as Orson Scott Card, Robert Silverberg, Jack Williamson, Algis Budrys and Frederik Pohl, it gives us an interesting glimpse into how those living in the age before smartphones, tablets, Wi-Fi and on-demand streaming episodes of Community thought the future might turn out. Written during the Cold War, many of the predictions reflect the anxiety of a time when universal nuclear armageddon was still a daily threat. In fact, Isaac Asimov began his prediction with what was a standard preamble of the time. “Assuming we haven't destroyed ourselves in a nuclear war, there will be 8-10 billion of us on this planet – and widespread hunger.” Meanwhile, Gregory Benford predicted that the population would never reach 10 billion, with negative consequences.