Wednesday, February 12

Day: December 28, 2017

You can now buy bananas with edible skin but they cost £4 each
ENGLISH, Featured, United Kingdom

You can now buy bananas with edible skin but they cost £4 each

The Mongee Banana costs £4.20 (Pic: D&T Farm) Gone are the days of going through the tiring chore of actually peeling a banana - farmers in Japan have successfully grown completely edible fruits thanks to a DNA method mimicking the Ice Age. Named the Mongee Banana, which translates to “incredible” in Japanese, the new and improved banana is the result of the freeze thaw awakening” method. The method, which is being used by D&T Farm in Japan’s Okayama Prefecture, recreates temperatures and growing conditions of the ice age, resulting in bananas that are much sweeter - and fully edible. To mimic the growing methods of plants from 20,000 years ago, and create Mongee bananas, farmers at D&T Farm freeze banana saplings to -60°C, before replanting them once they thaw. This temp...
NHS hospitals made £174m from car park charges this year
ENGLISH, Featured, United Kingdom

NHS hospitals made £174m from car park charges this year

Some hospitals defended the charges, saying some or all of the money was put back into patient care or was spent on site maintenance. NHS hospitals made a record £174m from charging patients, visitors and staff to park in 2016/17, up 6% on the previous year. Data from 111 hospital trusts across England shows that as many as two-thirds are making more than £1m a year. More than half of trusts now charge disabled people to park. Some trusts defended the charges, saying they were essential to pay for patient care. But opposition parties and patient support groups were critical, with one group saying they were “cynical” but blaming the state of NHS finances rather than the trusts themselves. The Liberal Democrats condemned the charges as a “tax on sickness” while Labour said it was commi...
World’s most sensual dance Kizomba ever (video)
ENGLISH, Featured, Life Style

World’s most sensual dance Kizomba ever (video)

Characterised by sensually swaying hips and couples clutching each other’s bodies, kizomba has been described as the sexiest dance in the world - and it is exploding in popularity outside of its native Angola. But some Angolans are worried that kizomba is wrongly earning a reputation as sexually suggestive, and have urged that it is in a fact a family-friendly dance. What is Kizomba? The word means ‘party’ in Kimbundu, one of Angola’s most widely spoken languages, and describes a type of music and dance. The music originated in the late 1970s as a combination of Caribbean zouk and Angolan semba music. As a dance, kizomba sees the traditional Angolan moves of semba performed to this genre of music, reports the International Business Times. Singer Eduardo Paim is considered to have po...
Best friends of 60 years discover they are brothers
America, ENGLISH, Featured

Best friends of 60 years discover they are brothers

The smile of a family reunited after sixty years after a friendship that started at school Lifelong pals Alan Robinson and Walter MacFarlane have been best mates for 60 years, ever since they played football together at prep school in Hawaii. So the pair have been left "overwhelmed" after discovering that they are not just friends, but brothers too. The men learned of their sibling bond after separately taking DNA tests to trace details about their ancestry. Mr MacFarlane never knew his father, while Mr Robinson was adopted, Honolulu news station KHON-TV reported. After using DNA-matching websites following unsuccessful searches on social media and other sites, Mr MacFarlane found a top match - someone with identical X chromosomes - with the username Robi737. Mr Robinson, who flew ...
Obama beats Trump again as most admired American man in poll
America, ENGLISH, Featured

Obama beats Trump again as most admired American man in poll

Obama has topped the survey for 10 straight years, since 2008 when he was first elected to the White House. Wednesday brought bad news for Donald Trump: Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are still the man and woman most admired by Americans, according to the results of an annual Gallup poll. The current president, who is suffering brutally low approval ratings as his first year in the White House comes to a close, was second to Obama, polling 14% to 17% for his predecessor. In 2016, Obama led Trump by 22% to 15%. Clinton, who lost the presidency to Trump in the electoral college despite beating him in the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, was named as most-admired American woman by 9% of Gallup respondents. © Associated Press US President Donald Trump. That was enough to ...