Posts Tagged ‘Copenhagen’
Written by admin on 27 October 2012
Copenhagen, Oct 27 (IANS) Kabaddi Federation of Denmark is vying to host the Kabaddi World Cup here in the near future.
Federation head Allan Bo Jakobsen aims to host the World Cup and hopes to get financial support from National Olympic Committee and Sports Confederation of Denmark for development and promotion of this sport.
“I was glad to note the vision of Sukhbir Singh Badal (deputy chief minister of Punjab) for development of this sport and under his vision and extensive cooperation of Puneet Singh Chandhok, an international promoter of this sport, we were able to take this goal forward,” Jakobsen said Friday.
Punjab is set to host the third edition of the international cycle Kabaddi World Cup Dec 1 to 15.
During Jakobsen’s visit to Punjab during the tournament, he is expected to hold talks with all participating countries to form an international road-map for the development of Kabaddi.
Denmark is scheduled to participate in the World Cup.
The first two editions of the tournament were also held in Punjab, with India winning both times.
Tags: Copenhagen, Denmark
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Written by admin on 19 October 2012
Copenhagen, Oct 19 (IANS) A cancer diagnosis doesn’t make young people turn to religion if they are not religious. But it can strengthen beliefs in those who are already religious, says a new study.
“My research shows that young cancer patients’ views on existential issues show consistency before and after the diagnosis: Their faith and their religious practices remain the same,” said Nadja Ausker, sociologist of religion from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
“However, the beliefs they already had could be confirmed and strengthened – this applies both to religion and science,” Ausker added.
It has been a theoretical staple of sociology of religion that major religious conversions are preceded by personal crises; a person’s feelings toward religion are significantly altered when confronted with an existential crisis like cancer diagnosis, a Copenhagen statement said.
Ausker, however, challenges this theory. In her thesis, she interviewed a group of young cancer patients about the religious consequences of life crises – both shortly after the diagnosis and during treatment.
Ausker said a cancer diagnosis did not make young people lose their religion, just as atheists do not become religious.
“The cancer patients do contemplate existential issues, but that does not mean that they suddenly start praying or going to church if these religious practices were not already part of their lives,” the sociologist said.
“Several patients said it would be hypocritical of them to change practice and faith because of the diagnosis,” Ausker added while defending her thesis Oct 12 at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen.
Tags: Copenhagen, Denmark
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Written by admin on 11 October 2012
Copenhagen, Oct 11 (IANS) A Viking-era treasure of silver coins, buried around the year 854 A.D., has been discovered on Denmark’s Bornholm island in the Baltic sea, Danish officials said Thursday.
The 152 Arab and Persian coins were made in different parts of the Middle East, and represent the single-biggest collection of Arab coins dating from the 8th century to be found in Denmark, Xinhua quoted the Bornholm Museum as saying.
The first coins in the treasure were found by an amateur archaeologist in September, with the museum conducting future excavations, the museum said.
Archaeologists said the treasure was hidden in a house in an early Viking-era settlement, and reflect a tendency at that time to safeguard treasures by burying them under floors of houses.
Only around 20 coins are intact, while most of the rest are cut into pieces, as the Vikings used them as a unit of payment based on the weight of the silver.
Most of the coins are very thin and worn out, and weigh three grams each on average.
Although the total weight of the treasure is just 250 grams, that would have represented a fortune in Viking times, the museum said.
The Vikings were Nordic warriors, merchants, raiders and explorers who roamed and settled in various parts of Europe and the North Atlantic between the eighth and 11th centuries.
Tags: Copenhagen, Denmark
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Written by admin on 03 October 2012
Copenhagen, Oct 3 (IANS) Chloroquine, an efficacious old drug, is once again beginning to work against malaria, one of scourges most widespread in the world.
Scientists and doctors fear that the malaria parasite will develop resistance to the current frontline treatment against malaria, Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (ACTs). Resistance (to drugs) monitoring at the University of Copenhagen shows that in several African countries, malaria parasites are succumbing to chloroquine, the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene reports.
“Seventy percent of the malaria parasites we found in Senegal are reacting once again to chloroquine,” explains Michael Alifrangis, associate professor at the Centre for Medical Parasitology at the University of Copenhagen.
“This is a trend we have also seen in Tanzania and Mozambique, and which other researchers have found in Malawi,” says Alifrangias, according to a Copenhagen statement.
“Our choice of drugs against malaria is limited and related, so when the malaria parasite once again reacts to a substance, it influences several treatment methods,” adds Alifrangias.
He and Magatte Ndiaye, doctoral student at Universite Cheikh Anta Diop in Senegal, are keeping an eye on the malaria parasite’s sensitivity to drugs by analyzing the parasites’ DNA.
“Chloroquine costs only 25 US cents for a four-day cure, while the current and corresponding ACTs cost two dollars,” explains Ib Bygbjerg, professor at Copenhagen.
“Chloroquine was a fantastic malaria drug that lasted for 50 years. However, it was misused for malaria prevention and ordinary fever, and even mixed with cooking salt, so it can come as no surprise that the malaria parasite became resistant to the active ingredient,” says Bygbjerg.
Tags: Copenhagen, Denmark
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Written by admin on 03 October 2012
Copenhagen, Oct 3 (IANS) Defending champions Chelsea beat Danish side FC Nordsjaelland 4-0 to win their first Champions League group stage match at the Parken Stadium here.
Juan Mata scored twice in the 33rd and 82nd minutes, while David Luiz found the back of the net with a free kick in the 79th minute, and Ramires tapped in the fourth goal one minute before the end of full time Tuesday, reports Xinhua.
Earlier, FC Nordsjaelland overcame a shaky start to come close to equalizing on a few occasions following the first Chelsea goal. Their fluid passing made the visitors work hard for ball possession, but their defence was never in good shape.
Although FC Nordsjaelland threatened Chelsea throughout the match, the English side put the result beyond doubt by scoring the last three goals in a span of just ten minutes.
The victory took Chelsea to the top of Group E with four points, while FC Nordsjaelland are at the bottom of the group without points.
Tuesday’s clash was the first time FC Nordsjaelland were playing Chelsea at a home game in the Champions League. The Danish side won their first and only national title in 2011.
Tags: Copenhagen, Denmark
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Written by admin on 27 September 2012
Copenhagen, Sep 27 (IANS) Surprisingly, your gut bugs can reveal whether you are suffering from the Type-2 diabetes, whose numbers have globally gone up. Many could be suffering from it without ever realising, fear scientists.
The research also demonstrated that people with Type-2 diabetes have a more hostile bacterial environment in their intestines, which can increase resistance to different medicines.
“We have demonstrated that people with Type-2 diabetes have a high level of pathogens in their intestines,” says Jun Wang, professor of biology from the University of Copenhagen, who worked with the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), the journal Nature reports.
The 1.5 kg of bacteria that we each carry in our intestines have an enormous impact on our health and wellbeing. The bugs normally live in a sensitive equilibrium but if this equilibrium is disrupted our health could suffer, according to a Copenhagen statement
Scientists examined the intestinal bacteria of 345 people from China, of whom 171 had Type-2 diabetes. They managed to identify clear biological indicators that someday could be used in methods that provide faster and earlier diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, according to a Copenhagen statement.
Similar studies carried out on sufferers of Type-2 diabetes in Denmark also discovered a significant imbalance in the function of their intestinal bacteria and composition. Future Danish studies will examine whether intestinal bacteria is already abnormal in people that are deemed to be at risk of developing diabetes.
“We are going to transplant gut bacteria from people that suffer from Type-2 diabetes into mice and examine whether the mice then develop diabetes,” says one of the scientists behind the project, Oluf Borbye Pedersen, professor from the University of Copenhagen.
Scientists working on the EU research project MetaHIT have uncovered more than 3.3 million genes from gut bacteria found in people from Spain and Denmark. These genes could play a key role in understanding and treating a range of serious illnesses.
According to Karsten Kristiansen, professor of biology from Copenhagen, the recent discovery is an important step in the comprehensive international research that is currently underway to investigate the interplay between intestinal bacteria and health.
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Written by admin on 10 September 2012
Copenhagen, Sep 10 (IANS) Former world number one Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark has dropped out of the list of top-ten women tennis players for the first time in three years, the latest WTA ranking showed Monday.
Wozniacki is now ranked 11th, down from an earlier ninth place, marking the first time since June 2009 that the 22-year-old star has not made the top ten list, reports Xinhua.
France’s Marion Bartoli precedes the Dane in 10th place, while Belarus’ Victoria Azarenka and Russia’s Maria Sharapova hold first and second spots respectively, the WTA ranking shows.
The result reflects a steep decline in Wozniacki’s career, given that she ended 2011 as world number one after having won six WTA tournaments last year.
The latest drop follows Wozniacki’s first-round exit at the recent US Open, which means she lost the points she had earned at the same tournament last year. Earlier this summer, Wozniacki bowed out in the first round at Wimbledon.
Wozniacki is yet to win a grand slam tournament in her career, and has so far not won any titles in 2012, although she said she was less concerned about WTA rankings and was concentrating instead on winning a grand slam title earlier this year.
Only the top eight players in the world list will participate in the year’s final WTA tournament in Istanbul, but as of now 1,300 points separate Wozniacki from China’s Li Na, who is currently ranked eighth.
Wozniacki does, however, have the opportunity to make up points and rise in the table if she performs well at upcoming WTA tournaments in Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing later this year.
Tags: Copenhagen
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Written by admin on 09 September 2012
Copenhagen, Sep 9 (IANS) The Danish national football team drew 0-0 with the Czech Republic in the first round of the qualifiers for the FIFA World Cup Brazil 2014, at Parken stadium here.
The first half ended 0-0 in spite of constant Danish pressure on the Czech goalkeeper Petr Cech Saturday, reports Xinhua.
The Czech team seemed to find energy and came out after the break taking the initiative. They created a few good chances, before Denmark again dominated play.
But in spite of the numerous chances the Danes had in the second half, especially from midfielder Lean Andreasen, the match ended in a draw 0-0.
Italy and Bulgaria drew 2-2 Friday while Armenia beat Malta 1-0, which means Armenia currently top pool B.
Tags: Copenhagen
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Written by admin on 30 August 2012
Copenhagen, Aug 30 (IANS) An earthquake measuring 6.6 on the Richter scale rocked the sea area off the eastern coast of Greenland Thursday, said the US Geological Survey, reported Xinhua.
The epicentre, with a depth of 8.6 km, was 428 km off the north-eastern coast of Greenland. The quake occurred at 1.43 p.m. GMT.
The earthquake was initially measured at 7.0 on the Richter scale, said Danish broadcaster TV2 citing the US Geological Survey.
Greenland is a self-governing territory of Denmark located within the Arctic Circle.
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Written by admin on 23 August 2012
Copenhagen, Aug 23 (IANS) Thirty minutes of daily exercise provides an equally effective loss of weight and body mass as does a 60-minute routine, according to a Danish research.
Forty percent of Danish men are moderately overweight.
For 13 weeks, a research team at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences of the University of Copenhagen followed 60 heavy but healthy men in their efforts to get into better shape.
Half of the men were set to exercise for an hour a day, wearing a heart-rate monitor and calorie counter, while the second group was to exercise for 30 minutes, the American Journal of Physiology reports.
Research results showed that 30 minutes of exercise hard enough to produce a sweat was enough to turn the tide on an unhealthy body mass index, according to a Copenhagen statement.
On average, the men who exercised 30 minutes a day lost 3.6 kilo in three months, while those who exercised for a whole hour only lost 2.7 kg.
The reduction in body mass was about 4 kg for both groups, reports Mads Rosenkilde, doctoral student from the Department of Biomedical Sciences.
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Written by admin on 24 July 2012
Copenhagen, July 24 (IANS) The greatest climate change ever recorded by the world over the last 100,000 years has been the transition from the ice age to the warm interglacial period.
New research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen indicates that, contrary to previous opinion, the rise in temperature and the rise in the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) follow each other closely in terms of time.
In the warmer climate, the atmospheric content of CO2 is naturally higher. CO2 is a green-house gas that absorbs heat radiation from the Earth and thus keeps the planet warm. In the shift between ice ages and interglacial periods the atmospheric content of CO2 helps to intensify the natural climate variations, the journal Climate of the Past reports.
It had previously been thought that as the temperature began to rise at the end of the ice age approximately 19,000 years ago, an increase in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere followed with a delay of up to 1,000 years, according to a Copenhagen statement.
“Our analyses of ice cores from the ice sheet in Antarctica shows that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere follows the rise in Antarctic temperatures very closely and is staggered by a few hundred years at most,” explains Sune Olander Rasmussen, associate professor and centre coordinator at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
The research, which was carried out in collaboration with the University of Tasmania, Australia, is based on measurements of ice cores from five boreholes through the ice sheet in Antarctica. The ice sheet is formed by snow that doesn’t melt, but remains year after year and is gradually compressed into kilometres-thick ice.
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Written by admin on 10 July 2012
Copenhagen, July 10 (IANS) A third of the world’s population, living in developing countries, carry a dormant tuberculosis (TB) bug, which remains a lifelong risk. But the risk of TB breaking out is four times as likely if a person also suffers from diabetes, says recent research out of the University of Copenhagen.
As a diabetic, a person is five times as likely to die during tuberculosis treatment. The growing number of diabetics in Asia and Africa increases the likelihood that more people will succumb to and die from tuberculosis in the future.
University of Copenhagen researchers have just completed a major research project in Tanzania in which they have documented that diabetes is far more widespread than previously thought, according to a Copenhagen statement.
The risk of dying from tuberculosis is increased if a person also has diabetes. In the past, diabetes was most commonly tied with the Western world while tuberculosis was more widespread throughout the developing world.
“Our studies show, firstly, that diabetes is hastily advancing in developing countries, not just in Asia, but in Africa as well. And secondly, that as a diabetic one is four times more at risk of developing tuberculosis and five times as likely to die under tuberculosis treatment,” reports doctoral student and physician Daniel FaurholtJepsen, who has based his dissertation on the study.
The results of the study demonstrate that diabetes is a severe threat to the control of tuberculosis. “Tuberculosis kills more than a million people each year. The figure may be much higher in the future if nothing is done now,” he said.
“We should develop better international guidelines for a combined treatment of diabetes and tuberculosis patients as well as better diagnostic methods, which can cheaply and effectively diagnose diabetes among tuberculosis patients,” emphasises FaurholtJepsen.
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