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Handsome men finish first, study finds

This content was published on Feb 5, 2014 Erik Postma, a professor of evolutionary biology, used photos of 80 Tour de France racers’ heads and shoulders and asked an online pool of about 800 participants to rate their attractiveness on a scale of one to five. In the end, he found that those athletes that were ultimately the most successful in the 2012…

Documenting the sectarian violence

This content was published on Feb 4, 2014 Their ten-month reign was marked by widespread human rights abuses and deepening divisions between the country’s Muslim minority and Christian majority. Bitter hatred over their rule has led to mobs carrying out public killings and lynchings of anyone perceived as being part of Séléka. Almost one million people, or a quarter of the population, have…

Will new research rules improve transparency?

This content was published on Feb 3, 2014 Governments around the world are stockpiling billions of dollars’ worth of Roche’s antiviral drug Tamiflu to fight a potential influenza epidemic. But doctors cannot be sure that the therapy works to prevent outbreaks because the company has for years refused to disclose study data. The common industry tactic of sweeping undesirable results under the carpet…

Rosetta spacecraft phones home

This content was published on Jan 20, 2014 “Hello World” was the message received by scientists shortly after 7 p.m. Swiss time (1800 GMT) on Monday. “It was a little bit late, about half an hour or so, but if you sleep for 2 ½ years that’s understandable,” said Peter Wurz, a co-investigator on the Rosetta mission for the University of Bern. “It was…

Art brut joins the market frenzy

This content was published on Jan 17, 2014 “First of all, art brut is not an art movement, with a beginning and an end,” explains Sarah Lombardi, who heads the Collection de l’Art Brut, the first of its kind and the largest in the world. The Lausanne museum was founded in 1976 on the basis of the collection of French painter Jean Dubuffet,…

Scientists make progress in typhoid fever battle

This content was published on Jan 16, 2014 The findings, by the research group led by Dirk Bumann at the university’s Biozentrum, its centre for molecular life sciences, are published in the scientific journal Cell Host & Microbe. Bumann told swissinfo.ch that the team’s work was a “further step” in understanding how the infection works. Typhoid fever usually occurs in countries with poor…

Wolf killer bounty shows divisions over conservation

This content was published on Jan 11, 2014 Wolves had not been seen in Switzerland for around 120 years until small numbers started to reappear in the mid-1990s. They are now a strictly protected species under the Bern Convention, an international agreement on wildlife conservation. The animals attract a great deal of attention in the media when they are spotted or suspected of…

Cricket campaigns for biodiversity

This content was published on Jan 6, 2014 Pro Natura also describes its choice more flatteringly as the “first violin in the meadow orchestra”: it says most people will only know it by the loud chirp of the males in summer meadows, which can be up to 100 decibels and can be heard as far as 100 metres away. The organisation explains that…

Research finds that fibre fights asthma

This content was published on Jan 6, 2014 According to researchers at Lausanne University Hospital, there’s a connection between the increase in asthma incidence over the past 50 years and a change in dietary habits that has people consuming fewer portions of fibre-rich fruit and vegetables. In experiments with mice, the team found that the lack of fermentable fibres in people’s diets paves…

Opinions remain divided over nuclear waste

This content was published on Jan 6, 2014 Edgar Hagen’s critical film, Journey to the Safest Place on Earth, on how to deal with nuclear waste easily won over the audience consisting largely of nuclear sceptics during a recent showing in Bern. And it wasn’t hard to understand why: the documentary plays on emotions and uses punchy simplifications to outline historical failures and…

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Handsome men finish first, study finds

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Documenting the sectarian violence

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Will new research rules improve transparency?

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Rosetta spacecraft phones home

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Art brut joins the market frenzy

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Scientists make progress in typhoid fever battle

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Wolf killer bounty shows divisions over conservation

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Cricket campaigns for biodiversity

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Research finds that fibre fights asthma

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Opinions remain divided over nuclear waste

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