27 March 2010 | NewScientist | 7

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FP/G

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Y

Drugs go personal

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War on water

Dirty water kills more people

each year than violence and war,

according to a report by the UN

Environment Programme. Clearing the Waters was published on

Tuesday to mark world water day. It

states that unsafe water leads to 1.7

million deaths worldwide each year –

or about 3.1 per cent of all deaths.

Super-size Jesus

Over the past 1000 years, Christ and

his disciples have been enjoying an

ever bigger Last Supper, an analysis

of 52 paintings has shown. Portion

size, plate size and bread size have

grown respectively by 69, 66 and 23

per cent (International Journal of Obesity, DOI: 10.1038/ijo.2010.37).

Windpipe dream

A 10-year-old boy has become the

world’s first recipient of a complete

windpipe transplant. Taken from a

30-year-old Italian woman, the

trachea was stripped of all native

cells and re-surfaced with stem cells

from the boy’s own bone marrow

just before the transplant. The

operation, carried out at University

College London, builds on a 2008

partial trachea transplant.

NASA, ESA, UKSA

From 1 April the UK will have its

own space agency. The UKSA will

take over responsibilities on space

policy and budgets that were

previously split between several

government organisations.

‘Miaow-miaow’ test

Psychologists are to investigate the

feelings of 50 students under the

influence of the drug mephedrone,

the legal high linked to a number of

UK deaths. The research, at

Liverpool John Moores University,

UK, has been attacked as “pretty

unethical” by the government’s chief

drugs adviser. The researchers say

the students would be taking

mephedrone anyway, and previous

studies have only asked people to

recall the effects of the drug.

–Teenage vice–

US tobacco curbs

Perelman’s prize

“Doctors and scientists are eager to extend drug personalisation to a wider range of treatments”

“It will become a federal crime to sell cigarettes to people under 18 in the US from 22 June”

60 SECONDS

–You ain’t seen nothing yet–

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