Despite the protestations of those opposed to the use of animals in research, the fundamental differences between people over the treatment of animals seems to lie with the weight that we are prepared to give to animal suffering and death i…

The struggle against child porn goes on. An Australian judge has ruled that a cartoon showing a character from The Simpsons engaged in sexual activity is child pornography. Australia is also trying to implement Internet filtering for the wh…

Last Sunday, 30th of November, Switzerland, by a narrow majority, approved a constitutional modification doing away with any statute of limitations for paedophile crimes. The initiative proposing that modification had been opposed by the go…

Nicholas D. Kristof reveals a plan to massively boost intelligence worldwide using a chemical additive.The additive is iodized salt. About 2 billion people worldwide suffer insufficient iodine intake, making it the most common cause of prev…

On April 16 2007  a solitary gunman, Cho Seung-Hui, killed 32 of his fellow students at Virginia Tech, and injured many more http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/index.html .  This came to mind again as I was listening …

Last Thursday, anti-terrorism police in the UK arrested the opposition minister for immigration, Damian Green (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/nov/29/whitehall-damian-green-civil-servant). He is suspected by the police of ‘conspirac…

In a paper published in the Lancet yesterday, a group of WHO scientists have suggested that a radical change to HIV testing would be necessary to combat the epidemic. The authors published details of a mathematical model of “universal volun…

Viagra may not just be a performance enhancer in the bedroom, but also on the sports arena. Researchers are studying whether it helps dilate athlete’s blood vessels and improve their oxygen-carrying capacity. If it is found to improve…

While the right to die has been a prominent topic of discussion in the UK, it has also been exercising Italian courts and media. Eluana Englaro entered in an irreversible vegetative state seventeen years ago, after a car crash.

Scientists have been able to create a new windpipe using stem cells. They took a windpipe from a dead patient, removed all the cells, and placed stem cells from a patient onto the remaining scaffolding to create what was in effect a new win…