Small steps go a long way
The bottom line is this: when it comes to sustainability, little changes can lead to a big impact. Rethinking your use of plastic products and making sure they are used sensibly, whilst keeping in mind the three Rs – reduce, reuse and recycle – can go a long way towards cutting down on landfill waste, marking an important step in the right direction for all of us.
Lab rats are overwhelmingly male, and that's a problem
Improving human health and well-being is the ultimate goal of biomedical sciences.
We need to prevent and cure diseases to allow people of all ages to not only live longer, but also live better. Scientific research shows that health, aging and well-being are influenced by a combination of individual factors, linked to a person’s genetics, and external factors, such as lifestyle and the environment in which we live.
Traditional approaches to disease treatment based on the analysis of symptoms and focused on individual organs are no longer considered sufficient.
Finland was chosen as the happiest place to live according to UN’s World Happiness Report 2021. Fort the fourth time in a row, Finland received top marks. All Nordic countries were among the top eight countries.
The Nordic way of life and a high level of welfare have become even more important during the COVID-19 crisis.
For many people right now, Finland could be desirable place to live.
The Renaissance typically refers to a period in European history approximately between 1400 and 1600. Many historians assert that it started earlier or ended later, depending on the country.
It bridged the periods of the Middle Ages and modern history, and, depending on the country, overlaps with the Early Modern, Elizabethan and Restoration periods.
The Renaissance is most closely associated with Italy, where it began in the 14thcentury, though countries such as Germany, England and France went through many of the same cultural changes and phenomena.
Facing a storm of criticism on social media,
a chemistry journal in Germany has suspended two editors who handled a controversial essay that it said “highlights the bias displayed in our field and many others” to women and minority researchers. And the 16 members of the journal’s international advisory board — which includes Nobel Laureates — resigned while denouncing the essay. The article, “Organic synthesis-where now?’ Is thirty years old.
A reflection on the current state of affairs,” by Tomas Hudlicky, of Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, had appeared in Angewandte Chemie, the flagship publication of the German Chemical Society. Hudlicky’s argument included several statements that suggested a hostility to efforts on university campuses to promote diversity.
Extensive Chemical Safety Fraud Uncovered at German Testing Laboratory
The case of an animal rights activist who infiltrated an independent German chemical testing laboratory has triggered the discovery of an apparently extensive chemical testing fraud.
LPT Hamburg, with around 175 employees, is one of the largest contract laboratories in Germany. It is a family owned private company. It prepares regulatory studies on behalf of the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries and has three locations: Mienenbüttel in Lower Saxony, Neugraben in Hamburg and Wankendorf in Schleswig-Holstein. An initial case of fraud was reported in 2019 by the German magazine FAKT, which worked with the animal rights organisations Cruelty Free International and SOKO-Tierschutz to expose the findings of the undercover employee. The disturbing irregularities they discovered included the death and replacement of animals without this being reported to authorities.
China has long been known to have a problem with firms selling papers to researchers, says Xiaotian Chen, a librarian at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.
As far back as 2010, a team led by Shen Yang, a management-studies researcher then at Wuhan University in China, warned of websites offering to ghostwrite papers on fictional research, or to bypass peer-review systems for payment.
In 2013, Science reported on a market for authorships on research papers in China. In 2017, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) said it would crack down on misconduct after a scandal in which 107 papers were retracted at the journal Tumor Biology; their peer reviews had been fabricated and a MOST investigation concluded that some had been produced by third-party companies.
Physicians in China are a particular target market because they typically need to publish research articles to gain promotions, but are so busy at hospitals that they might not have time to do the science, says Chen. Last August, the Beijing municipal health authority published a policy stipulating that an attending physician wanting to be promoted to deputy chief physician must have at least two first-author papers published in professional journals; three first-author papers are required to become a chief physician. These titles affect a physician’s salary and authority, as well as the surgeries they are allowed to perform, says Changqing Li, a former senior physician and gastroenterology researcher at a Chinese hospital who now lives in the United States.
Italy's ongoing political crisis and corruption scandal have taken on tragic overtones, as two of the country's leading industrialists linked to the chemical industry have committed suicide.
The former head of ENI, the Italian government-owned energy and petrochemicals company, Gabriele Cagliari, 67, committed suicide in Milan's San Vittore prison on July 20.
He had been in custody for 133 days and had told Italian magistrates that ENI paid kickbacks—including funds from its Enimont venture—to political parties. He charged in a suicide note to his family that the magistrates would not grant him bail unless he implicated more people.
Just three days after Cagliari's suicide, Raul Gardini, 60, the flamboyant former head of the Italian holding group owned by the Ferruzzi family, shot himself.
In all of Italy it is one revolt of parents and students. Mothers hang out the surgeries as if they were (smelly) laundry cloths.
They use them for dusting. If they are in a good mood, they wear them just a few minutes to run to the gate to collect the courier’s package, “but on the way back the elastic has already broken”.
Packs of untouched masks are posted in the most remote drawers of the house. Nicola Penta, father of a child who goes to third grade, has begun to return them. “The first thing that strikes you, as soon as you open the package, is the unpleasant smell. My son also had difficulty wearing them anyway. He had because we used them three times and never again.
The rubber bands were a torment. The last ones came just a few weeks. ago, the same bad smell as plastic, something chemical … Today we buy them. Traditional surgical, sealed one by one. Not like these which are packed all together, in a single bag.
Recently at school they have received masks for adults, it was written right on the package. But you can’t give little ones the protections when they grow up. Apart from the size they were the same, the same smell. So we sent them back. I’m honest, at first I threw them. ” There are those who have recently received a different type, with the underwire. Better? No, it caused skin rashes. A torment. Also because children, with long hours, must wear a mask for at least eight hours
The fallout from a significant Massachusetts drug lab scandal that has caused tens of thousands of drug cases to be tossed out because of misconduct by two former chemists, Annie Dookhan and Sonja Farak, could potentially affect thousands more criminal drug cases today.
Newly released emails from a forensic consultant suggest even more chemists responsible for testing drugs for evidence should have been investigated and more cases thrown out.
https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/07/17/massachusetts-drug-lab-testing-scandal-new-developments
Honey is one of the most faked foods in the world, and the US government isn't doing much to fix it
Chemical cosh' scandal': Thousands of patients with no history of mental illness needlessly given cocktail of anti-psychotic drugs
You may recognise the name of the medieval Welsh bard, Dafydd ap Gwilym, and that of his famous poem, Cywydd y Gal or Ode to the Penis.
What you may not know is that medieval poet, Gwerful Mechain, wrote a response to his poem nearly a century later. Cywydd y Cerdor is an ode to the vagina, praising it and condemning the men who ignore it in favour of a woman’s more acceptable features: “Lovely bush you are blessed by God above”.
It is one of her most well-known verses and encapsulates the themes and values that her poetry embodies. Gwerful Mechain (c.1460-c.1502) wrote about female sexuality and domestic issues during a time when women’s rights were non-existent.
Her poetry has been brought to a modern English-speaking readership through translations by academics. Most notably by Katie Gramich in her 2018 anthology of The Works of Gwerful Mechain.
Life is an adventure