Neil Armstrong 1st man on the moon, Died.

Saturday, 25 August 2012

Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 11 astronaut who became the first human being to set foot on another world, has died. He was 82.

In a statement his family said Armstrong had passed away following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures. The family described him as a loving husband, father, grandfather, brother and friend, and also as "a reluctant American hero who always believed he was just doing his job."

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

When Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, he fulfilled the goal that had been set by President John F. Kennedy just eight years earlier. It was a long, long way from Armstrong's birthplace near tiny Wapakoneta, Ohio in 1930. Armstrong's fascination with airplanes began with his first flight at age six, and that fascination never abandoned him. He left Purdue University in 1950 when the Korean War broke out, and flew 78 combat missions as a naval aviator.

The preparation for the moon landing included learning how to fly the ungainly lunar module, which would descend vertically to the moon's surface. Armstrong had another brush with death when the training vehicle rolled to its side, and he was forced to eject just two hundred feet from the ground.

And then, finally, after years of training, the moment arrived: On July 16, 1969, a giant Saturn V rocket lumbered off the pad at the Kennedy Space Center, carrying the thirty-eight-year-old Armstrong and crewmates Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins.

Armstrong later said that the landing itself was the high point of the mission for him. He coaxed the lunar module past craters and boulders as Aldrin called out speed and altitude.

"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

"In my own view, the important achievement of Apollo was a demonstration that humanity is not forever chained to this planet, and our visions go rather further than that, and our opportunities are unlimited," Armstrong said.

Mike Collins flatly stated what so often was said about his reticent and self-effacing commander: "I can't offhand think of a better choice to be the first man on the moon."

Armstrong's family said, "While we mourn the loss of a very good man, we also celebrate his remarkable life and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.

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Wedding set for Bahrain and Saudi royal families

Thursday, 11 August 2011

MANAMA: Friends become relatives, that is what has happened to the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. The son of Bahrain’s king and the daughter of Saudi Arabia’s monarch have gotten engaged

According to the official news agency of Bahrain, the king’s fifth son Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad has gotten engaged to Saudi King Abdullah’s daughter. She is the 15th daughter of the King and her name was not given by the news agency.

The engagement comes at a time when protests have taken place in Bahrain calling for a political change and the country’s forces have been helped by Saudi forces to quell those protests.

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Does sleep loss up weight by lowering energy use?

NEW YORK: Sleep deprivation makes the day drag and appears to put a drag on metabolism, causing the body to use less energy, European researchers found in a small study.

The results, which appear in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, add to evidence that a lack of shut-eye can promote weight gain -- not just by boosting hunger, but by slowing the rate at which calories get burned.

The study suggests that getting plenty of sleep might prevent weight gain, said Dr. Christian Benedict of the Uppsala University in Sweden, who led the new work.

Approximately 50 to 70 million Americans - including a significant number of shift workers -- suffer from chronic sleep loss and sleep disorders, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Previous studies have linked sleep deprivation with weight gain, and shown how disrupted sleep also disrupts levels of stress- and hunger-related hormones during waking hours.

To help identify the exact mechanisms by which a lack of sleep might pack on the pounds, Benedict and his colleagues put 14 male university students through a series of sleep "conditions" - curtailed sleep, no sleep, and normal sleep - over several days, then measured changes in how much they ate, their blood sugar, hormone levels and indicators of their metabolic rate like oxygen use.

The team found that even a single night of missed sleep slowed the volunteers' metabolisms the next morning, reducing their bodies' energy expenditure for tasks like breathing and digestion by 5 to 20 percent, compared with the morning after a good night's sleep.

The young men also had higher morning levels of blood sugar, appetite-regulating hormones like ghrelin, and stress hormones like cortisol after sleep deprivation. Still, the sleep loss did not boost the amount of food the men consumed during the day.

A number of studies have observed that people who snooze five hours or less are more prone to piling on weight and developing weight-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes.

But those studies do not prove that sleep loss causes weight gain.

"It is not clear that sleep deprivation leads to obesity," Dr. Carol Everson, who was not involved in the German study, told Reuters Health by email.

Factors such as lifestyle and diet may also add to obesity risk, said Everson, a sleep expert at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

It's tempting to link sleep health and obesity but sleep deprivation is complicated, added Dr. Sanford Auerbach, who heads the Sleep Disorders Center at Boston Medical Center. For instance, medications and other conditions may influence sleep, he said.

The new findings, Auerbach noted in an email, should be kept in context. "They showed that we adapt to sleep deprivation and that some of these adaptations could theoretically contribute to obesity." On the other hand, it's not clear how chronic sleep loss influences hormone levels, he said.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends that adults get about seven to nine hours of sleep each night.

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Imran links terror elimination to sincere leadership

LAHORE: Chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Imran Khan Thursday said elimination of terrorism, corruption and supremacy of law and order could be ensured in just 90 days only if the leadership was sincere and then no one could stop investment from flowing in, Geo News reported.
He expressed these views while addressing a seminar of International Federation of Medical Students here.

Imran Khan said PML-N and PPP’s bickering was nothing but a charade.

“An MNA alleged that ISI was behind my coming to the fore as a leader, although the nation is well aware which test-tube leader the ISI created and where that leader is these days,” he said.

Imran Khan said the Lotas (turncoats) had no ideology of their own, they can always be found trailing toward a party which is in power.

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China's population grows older and more urban

BEIJING: Half of China's 1.34 billion population live in cities and towns, according to a census on Thursday that pointed to the daunting tasks ahead for policymakers as the labor market shrinks and the nation grows older.

The census, which showed overall population growth slowing sharply in the decade to 2010, revealed fewer Chinese than some demographers had expected and could spur calls for China's tough family planning policies to be relaxed.

China remains the world's most populated country but the rise of 5.8 percent was almost half the pace recorded in the last census a decade earlier. Some experts had expected China's population to reach 1.4 billion.

"China is for the first time crossing a historical landmark from a country that's dominated by people engaging in agriculture, living in the countryside, to an urbanized society," said Wang Feng, a demographer who is director of the Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in Beijing.

The mammoth task of counting China's population required six million workers and revealed a population that in a single decade increased by 75 million, more than the number of people in Britain.

The census showed the proportion of young Chinese shrinking as the elderly population grows. Many demographers have said China's choke on family size threatens the future of the world's fastest-growing major economy as fewer people are left to pay and care for a graying population.

The report points to pressure for wage levels to rise as the working-age population shrinks, a need for social safety nets to support a graying nation and stress on urban infrastructure as rural migrants flood to cities such as Beijing and Chongqing.

"The data from this census show that our country faces some tensions and challenges regarding population, the economy and social development," Ma Jiantang, the head of the National Bureau of Statistics, told a news conference.

The census also highlighted stark differences between China and the rival emerging economy of India, which reported its own population tally on March 31. India's population grew three times faster than China's over the past decade and is far younger.

The proportion of mainland Chinese people aged 14 or younger was 16.60 percent, a fall of 6.29 percentage points from the number in the 2000 census.

Those aged 60 or older increased to 13.26 percent of the population, up 2.93 percentage points.

Such figures could encourage the government to relax family planning restrictions that limit nearly all urban couples to one child, while rural families are usually allowed two, said Du Peng, a professor at the Population and Development Studies Center at Renmin University in Beijing.

"The total population shows the general trend toward slowed population growth and as well an older population, and in the next five years or longer that will be an important basis for population policy," said Du.

"The aging of the population appears to be faster than was expected," he said. (Reuters )

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