12-25-2015, 12:21 AM
An unemployed Senegalese man who was rescued by the Spanish coastguard after making a risky journey from Morocco eight years ago on a packed wooden boat won 400,000 euros ($437,000) in Spain’s annual Christmas lottery, local media reported Wednesday.
Rescued Senegalese migrant wins €400,000 in Spain’s Christmas lottery | World news | The Guardian
Although pooling common funds, giving Brussels tax and spending powers, and creating a banking union were "essential" reforms, they would still not make the "euro function smoothly even in the best of cases", said the Frenchman. Any mechanism to transfer funds from strong to weak nations - which has been fiercely resisted by Germany - would only mask the fundamental competitiveness problems that will always plague struggling member states, he said. "Fiscal transfers will help you go through the tough spot, but at the same time, it will decrease the urge to do the required competitiveness adjustment."
Fiscal union will never fix a dysfunctional eurozone, warns ex-IMF chief Blanchard - Telegraph
The year has been chock-full of scientific breakthroughs, but the University of Colorado is determined to finish 2015 with a bang. Its researchers have created what they say is the first full-fledged processor to transmit data using light instead of electricity. The design isn't entirely photonic, but its 850 optical input/output elements give it the kind of bandwidth that make electric-only chips look downright modest -- we're talking 300Gbps per square millimeter, or 10 to 50 times what you normally see. The key was finding a way to reuse existing conventional processes to put optics in places where regular circuitry would go.
Researchers show off a working light-based processor
A high school world geography teacher in Augusta County, Virginia, gave her students what seemed like a standard assignment: a worksheet on Islam as part of a curriculum on world religions. The backlash was so fierce that schools in the county, which is just west of Charlottesville, are closed today after a barrage of threatening phone calls and emails from people angry about the homework assignment.
When a school assigned homework on Islam, it drew so many threats the district shut down - Vox
One of the earlier studies drawing a link between alcohol consumption and health was performed by the late, great Archie Cochrane; the godfather of evidence-based medicine. In 1979, Cochrane and two colleagues tried to work out what exactly was responsible for the differing rates of death from heart disease across 18 developed countries, including the US, UK and Australia.
BBC - Future - Is alcohol actually bad for you?