vCJD THREAT RECEDES
As few as 40 people could die over the next 80 years from vCJD caused by eating infected meat during the epidemic of BSE or 鈥渕ad cow disease鈥� in Britain鈥檚 cattle during the late 1980s and 1990s.
Previous predictions of human fatalities by Azra Ghani and colleagues at Imperial College in London have run into thousands. But as the number of cases of the fatal brain disease has remained low 鈥� there were only 17 recorded in Britain last year 鈥� their analysis now suggests that only between 40 and 540 people will contract vCJD between now and 2080. There have so far been 129 cases of vCJD in Britain. The numbers do not apply to people infected by contaminated surgical instruments, or infections abroad caused by BSE-infected meat exported from Britain.
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CHINESE DUST
Sand from a huge dust storm in western China in March 1990 travelled as far as the French Alps. It went the long way round, being blown 20,000 kilometres across the Pacific, North America and Atlantic. The journey, which took 11 days, came to light when researchers used satellite data to track the source of red dust that has fallen on the Alps over the past 20 years (Geophysical Research Letters, vol 30, p 1277).
virtual EINSTEIN
Although he died nearly half a century ago, Albert Einstein remains one of the world鈥檚 most famous scientists.
Now Einstein has gone online, or at least his words have, in the form of digitised images of more than 900 manuscripts he wrote, mostly in German.
The extensive database also lists the location of more than 40,000 documents written by, sent to, or about Einstein that are stored in the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in the files of the Einstein Papers Project of the California Institute of Technology ().