Danger -- hot tea

Drinking steaming hot tea has been linked with an increased risk of oesophageal (food tube) cancer, Iranian scientists have found.

The British Medical Journal study found that drinking black tea at temperatures of 70C or higher increased the risk.

From the BBC.

Driving like the wind

A British engineer from Hampshire has broken the world land speed record for a wind-powered vehicle.

Richard Jenkins reached 126.1mph (202.9km/h) in his Greenbird car on the dry plains of Ivanpah Lake in Nevada.

From the BBC.

Putting photos on an iPod Touch (or iPhone 3G)

Apple products easy and intuitive? Hah!
It took me far too long to figure out how to load photos onto my 2nd generation iPod Touch from my Windows XP notebook, and now friends who are new iPod owners are asking me how it's done. It's sufficiently nonintuitive that I'm having to walk though it each time, so this note is as much more myself as for anyone else.

Open iTunes without the iPod or iPhone attached, and you won't see a Photos tab. With the iPod attached and highlighted in iTunes in the left column, you'll have access to a Photos tab at the top of the iTunes main window. Click it, and the setup should be pretty easy to figure out. What you have to keep in mind, however, is that iTunes doesn't just load pictures onto your device, it insists on synchronization. So what you'll first want to do is set up a special directory just for images to be loaded onto your iPod, with the images grouped in subdirectories to keep things decently organized. Short subdirectory names are a good idea, otherwise you won't be able to see what they are when scrolling around the iPod's small screen. Once this is all set up and the directory selected in iTunes under the aforementioned Photos tab, the photos should get loaded onto the iPod on the next sync. Remember, though, that if you remove, rename, or move any of the picture files on your computer, the same will be done to your iPod images on the next sync as well.

Look what the UPS man brought!

Marine biology teacher Rob Yeomans has been teaching his students at Newburyport High School about the aggressive, predatory sea creature of the Pacific known as the giant Humboldt squid for some time. But situated here on the Northeast coast, he never imagined he'd get to show them one up close.

Thanks to the generosity of professor Bill Gilly of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, Calif., Yeomans won't have to depend on the Discovery Channel to introduce his students to the squid this year.

Gilly, whose life's work is studying the cannibalistic West Coast creature, recently sent Yeomans a 6-foot long Humboldt squid. It arrived packed in dry ice and has been sitting in Yeomans' freezer at home ever since, awaiting dissection by his marine biology class.

Full article here. Lucky students -- though I myself had a pretty amazing elementary school biology teacher who kept a salt-water aquarium in his classroom, and who once brought in a dead seal for dissection.

Boosting the birth rate: you gotta have faith . . .

Two years after having one of the lowest birth rates in the world, Georgia is enjoying something of a baby boom, following an intervention from the country's most senior cleric.

At the end of 2007, in a move to reverse the Caucasian country's dwindling birth figures, the head of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Ilia II, came up with an incentive. He promised to personally baptise any baby born to parents of more than two children.

There was only one catch: the baby had to be born after the initiative was launched.

The results are, in the words of the Georgian Orthodox Church, "a miracle".

From the BBC.

Babylon exhibition: rethinking fashionable anti-Hellenism

The current Babylon show is big, but what does it say about ancient Mesopotamia?

One wonders about the motives behind the exhibition itself. Topically, they plainly had to do with current events in Iraq and at the Baghdad Museum -- a concluding chapter in the British Museum's English-language catalogue says as much. But they also go deeper than that. For much of the past 30 years admirers of classical Greece have been on the defensive, while easternizing admirers of Mesopotamia -- which includes the Assyrians, the 6th century BC Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, and the Persians who took over under Cyrus in 539 BC -- have been on the attack. Darius and Co. have been talked up; Pericles and Herodotus and Co. have been talked down.

That distinguished and venerable classicist Peter Green apologised for having been too keen for freedom in his 1970 book Xerxes at Salamis. Revising it in 1996 under the new title The Greco-Persian Wars, he regretted embracing so enthusiastically "the fundamental Herodotean concept of freedom-under-law (eleutheria, isonomia) making its great and impassioned stand against Oriental Despotism." What he called "the insistent lessons of multiculturalism" had forced all classical scholars "to take a long hard look at Greek 'anti-barbarian' propaganda, beginning with Aeschylus's Persians and the whole thrust of Herodotus's Histories."

But if it is a good thing to step back and take a look at both sides, it is no improvement to simply exchange one prejudice for its inverse. When all is said and done, Hellas and Mesopotamia were radically different -- and with all romantic idealization set aside, there can be little doubt about where our civilization comes from. Full article here.

Double unlucky

Japan has certified a man aged 93 as the only known survivor of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both hit by atomic bombs towards the end of World War II.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on 6 August 1945 when a US plane dropped the first atomic bomb.

He suffered serious burns and spent a night there before returning to his home city of Nagasaki just before it was bombed on 9 August.

From the BBC.