TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Turtle egg rescue at space center billed success By MARCIA DUNN 2010-09-08T20:03:09ZCAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- The unprecedented turtle rescue effort at NASA's Kennedy Space Center is winding down.... hosted.ap.org |
Personal Health: Parents, Relax. Don’t Keep Them From School. It’s Just Lice. Besides a sometimes itchy scalp from an allergic reaction to their saliva, scientists say, lice cause no physical distress and transmit no diseases. feeds.nytimes.com |
Video: Manchester University scientists celebrate Nobel physics prize Andre Geim calls award 'life-changing' after he and Konstantin Novoselov won for their creation of graphene using a block of carbon and some sticky tape guardian.co.uk |
TV review: Whitechapel, Horizon and A History of Horror With Mark Gatiss With its daft storylines and waste of a good cast, Whitechapel is a crime against TV dramaThere's a fine line between a script that makes you work hard to follow what's going on and one where you very quickly stop bothering as you've long since ceased to care. Whitechapel (ITV1) more often than not steps on the wrong side. The first series with its vaguely noirish, paranormal overtones had a kind of novelty value, but the second feels like a formulaic repeat the only difference being that this time round DI Chandler (Rupert Penry-Jones) et al are chasing copycat Kray twins around the East End rather than a copycat Jack the Ripper.By midway through last night's second episode some kind of vaguely comprehensible plotline had begun to emerge though sadly not one that passed any basic credibility test. We were asked to believe that while in prison, Ronnie Kray had donated his sperm to a woman who happened to be a dead ringer for Violet Kray, his mother who had subsequently given birth to two more Kray twins, Jimmy and Johnny. If that wasn't a big enough stretch of the imagination even for scriptwriters scrabbling around for material for their East End theme park we were also supposed to accept that while Jimmy and Johnny's existence had long been common knowledge on the streets of Whitechapel, not least because they both exhibited the same psychopathic and criminal tendencies as their father and uncle, they had failed to come to the attention of the police for the best part of 30 years.It was all a bit of a waste of a good cast and Penry-Jones, Phil Davis and Steve Pemberton never seemed entirely sure whether to play it straight or ham it up for laughs. Then again, you can't really blame them for their indecision with a storyline as flawed as this. One moment they are in a pub being machine-gunned, the next their car is being stolen from the police station and replaced by a donkey; or DI Chandler is being kidnapped and beaten unconscious before coming round in Epping Forest hours later with barely a scratch.Whitechapel is going to have to pull off some kind of masterstroke next week to wrap this one up in any way that's remotely convincing . During one of the many moments when I drifted off I found myself trying to come up with any other iconic Whitechapel crimes that might give the producers an excuse for a third series. Happily, I couldn't.Horizon (BBC2) was just as mystifying, though rather more stimulating. The populist science strand this week asked whether "seeing is believing". Three scientists helpfully provided the answers of yes, no and maybe at the top of the programme and things didn't get too much clearer from then on in.First we met psychologists Janice Spencer and Justin O'Brien who had spent five years proving well, as far as you can with sproglets who can't actually talk that babies are hotwired to see an illusion of a face. Five years . . . and still no explanation that I could see of why this information is so important. Even more bewildering was the team of scientists from Osnabr端ck in Germany who had persuaded volunteers to wear a belt that allowed them to feel the Earth's magnetic field for 12 weeks and enabled them to navigate a course blindfold at the end of it. Just why this particular skill was so useful was again unclear, but the overall point was that we may have rather more senses than we imagine and in time might harness them productively. Though it's a long shot to imagine we will ever find a sense to make sense of Whitechapel.There was also an unanswered question in the second part of Mark Gatiss's thoroughly enjoyable trawl through the History of Horror (BBC4). Last night Gatiss moved on to the British contribution to the genre, from Hammer to "folk horror" such as The Wicker Man. He made a convincing case for Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as underrated talents and a rather less convincing case for it to be taken seriously, rather than as tongue-in-cheek high camp. Certainly that's the way most of the directors, screenwriters and actors who worked at Hammer and who Gatiss interviewed seemed to view it. But then this series is a labour of love for Gatiss and we always tend to take the things we love more seriously than we perhaps should. Which brings us back to that unanswered question. What on earth was going on in the mind of the 12-year old Gatiss that made Frankenstein, Dracula, Kensington gore and heaving bosoms such a formative part of his adolescence?TelevisionWhitechapelCrime dramaHorrorJohn Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
'Old maid' butterflies fly more Older female butterflies spend over 12 hours a day flying in order to catch the attention of a mate, scientists have found. news.bbc.co.uk |