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By William James and Sarah YoungLONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister David Cameron pledged on Friday to cut energy bills by reducing green levies but denied a BBC report that he had asked the country’s biggest gas and energy companies to hold prices steady until the 2015 election.In an unusually sharp reprimand for the publicly funded British Broadcasting Corporation, a spokesman for Cameron’s office said the report which cited unidentified industry sources was utterly misleading....

A viral outbreak has killed more than 6,500 children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and is still spreading through the country. The foe isn’t the feared coronavirus, which has only just reached the DRC. It’s an old, familiar and underestimated adversary: measles. Cases began to spike here in October 2018. Children became weak, feverish and congested, with red eyes and painful sores in their mouths, all with the telltale rash of measles....

Research Report by Climate Central Hearing about climate change may bring heat waves and sweltering summers to mind, but in most regions in the U.S., winter temperatures are also on the rise. In spite of last year’s East Coast blizzard and polar vortex, winters have, on average, been getting warmer since the 1970s. One of the starkest examples of this is the overall drop in the number of nights below freezing in most cities....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In March 1715, Louis XIV of France (r. 1643-1715) issued a declaration stating that all subjects of the king were also subjects of the Catholic Church. In defiance of the king’s decree, Antoine Court (l. 1696-1760) gathered a small group of believers to lay new foundations for Reformed churches in France....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Wars of the Roses (1455-1487 CE) was a dynastic conflict where the nobility and monarchs of England intermittently battled for supremacy over a period of four decades. Besides the obvious consequences of Lancastrian and Yorkist kings swapping thrones several times and the establishment of the House of Tudor at the end of it all, the wars killed half the lords of the 60 noble families of England, established a much more violent political environment, and saw first a boost to the power of the nobility and then a swing back in the favour of the Crown....

Three-dimensional television got a major marketing push nearly two years ago from the consumer electronics and entertainment industries, yet the technology has one major limitation: viewers need special eyeglasses to experience the 3-D effect. Now the marketing experts say that the technology will never catch on in a big way unless viewers can toss the glasses entirely. Although 3-D technology sans specs is available for small screens on smartphones and portable gaming devices, these devices use backlit LCDs, which can be a big battery drain and limits how small the gadgets can be made....

Already home to some of the most environmentally vulnerable populations on the planet, Africa looks to increasingly feel the sting of climate change through more frequent, widespread and intense heat waves. Extreme heat that would be considered unusual today could become a yearly occurrence there by mid-century, one new study suggests, and the trend will emerge earlier there—and in the rest of the tropics—before it does in more temperate areas, another finds....

It’s no surprise for scientists that the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island, was the choice for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), one of a handful of next-generation optical telescopes that aims to propel ground-based astronomy in the 21st century. For professional astronomers, rarified air and dizzy spells are a small price to pay for Mauna Kea’s front-row seat on the cosmos. And it is no mystery why it is home to one of the world’s largest collections of observatories, with 13 operated by scientists from 11 countries....

Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, provides this answer. Virtual particles are indeed real particles. Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested. Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there....

The thought of birth defects caused by rubella, rows of iron lungs housing children crippled by polio, or the horrific sound of a baby struggling with whooping cough can still evoke dread among people who have seen firsthand the damage inflicted by these and other vaccine-preventable diseases. Fortunately, those scourges are virtually unknown to modern generations that have had access to vaccines all their lives. For more than 200 years vaccines have proved to be one of the most successful, lifesaving and economical methods of preventing infectious disease, second only to the sanitization of water....

SACRAMENTO—Only two weeks after California voters turned back an effort to suspend the state’s program to combat climate change, a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas emissions saw its first trade, a swap of a climate-change pollution permit for 2012. “While our federal government is sitting on its hands, California is moving full speed ahead to a clean-energy future,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in his weekly address on November 19. “We are creating a consistent, long-term energy policy—something that has eluded Washington for decades....

A DOCTOR tells her patient to lose weight, and the patient thinks: “If my doctor really believed that, she wouldn’t be so fat.” A movie aficionado pans the latest Tom Cruise flick because Cruise is a Scientologist. A homeowner ignores a neighbor’s advice on lawn care because the neighbor is a … you name it: Democrat, Republican, Christian or atheist. These examples illustrate classic uses of ad hominem attacks, in which an argument is rejected, or advanced, based on a personal characteristic of an individual rather than on reasons for or against the claim itself....

In 1983 the Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution enshrined an abortion ban that had prevailed in the nation for more than a century. Public opinion on the issue shifted in the new millennium, however, and by 2016 it was clear that a real debate could no longer be avoided. But even relatively progressive politicians had long steered clear of the controversy rather than risk alienating voters. Who would be trustworthy and persuasive enough to break the deadlock?...

By Siva Govindasamy SURABAYA, Indonesia, Dec 31 (Reuters) - Radar data being examined by investigators appeared to show that AirAsia Flight QZ8501 made an “unbelievably” steep climb before it crashed, possibly pushing it beyond the Airbus A320’s limits, said a source familiar with the probe’s initial findings. The data was transmitted before the aircraft disappeared from the screens of air traffic controllers in Jakarta on Sunday, added the source, who declined to be identified....

Neuroscientists have always presumed that learning and memory depend on strengthening or weakening the connection points between neurons (synapses), increasing or decreasing the likelihood that the cell is going to pass along a message to its neighbor. But recently some researchers have started pursuing a completely different theory that does not involve changing the strength of synaptic transmission; in fact, it does not even involve neurons. Instead other types of brain cells, called glia, are responsible....

Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who studies the earth’s rotation, explains. Scientific American: Did the undersea earthquake affect the earth’s rotation? Models predict that the earthquake should have affected rotation of the earth by shortening the length of a day by about three microseconds, or three millionths of a second. This happens because during the earthquake one of the tectonic plates [the India plate] subducted down beneath another plate [the Burma plate]....

Imagine suffering from the crushing weight of major depression, then finally getting diagnosed and starting treatment with a drug—only to realize after two months that the medication, despite its unpleasant side effects, is not alleviating your depression. Unfortunately, this experience is far from rare: more than two thirds of patients with depression have no luck with the first medication they are prescribed and must also endure the withdrawal effects that come with discontinuing a drug before trying a new one....

Like plants that grow toward the sun, dark fungi, blackened by the skin pigment melanin, gravitate toward radiation in contaminated soil. Scientists have observed the organisms—somewhere between plants and animals—blackening the land around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine in the years since its 1986 meltdown. “Organisms that make melanin have a growth advantage in this soil,” says microbiologist Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City....

Britain’s fertility regulator on Thursday granted doctors the first UK license to create babies using a three-parent IVF technique designed to prevent inherited genetic diseases. The license, granted to a team of doctors in Newcastle, northern England, means the first child created in Britain using the mitochondrial pronuclear transfer technique could be born before the end of this year. Critics of the treatment say it is a dangerous step that will lead to the creation of genetically modified “designer babies”....

Jeremy Barnes, an associate professor of health management at Southeast Missouri State University, explains. Regular exercise leads to numerous and varied physiological changes that are beneficial from a health standpoint. They include improved cardio-respiratory function and skeletal muscle function; higher levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (the so-called “good” cholesterol); improved blood pressure, body composition, and bone density; decreased insulin need and improved glucose tolerance; enhanced performance of work, recreational and sport activities; and many positive psychological benefits....