“It was in the attic for around 50 years, but we just came across it about three years ago. It was only the size of an A4 sheet and it could easily have been thrown out.”It’s been hidden for almost 100 years, but there probably are other copies in other people’s houses,” explained Fergus Curran.”We had great pleasure trying to name everyone. It really was a detective story. We started about three years ago and we made a certain amount of progress, but we were at a loss to know where the picture was taken.
“But we had a breakthrough earlier this year when we discovered it was Galway.
“We’ve only identified about 72 of the people pictured and there are still 99 left, so we hope to get some more names,” he added.
Irish historian Prof Gearoid O Tuathaigh, described the picture as showing a family on the brink of disintegration.
“The important thing about it is, within a decade, if you were to run forward from July of 1913, you see the huge and bitter divisions that have been building up and were already coming to a head. There is a sense of melancholy about this assembly,” he said.
He pointed to the mix of those involved, from those simply interested in the literary side of the movement, to others heavily involved in the conspiracy side which would lead to the Easter Rising.
“There is in this assembly, when you look across the spectrum at all of them with their different ambitions and different subgroups, there is a quite extraordinary assembly here which we can absolutely say with certainty, would never be seen again together,” he added.
The photograph will remain on permanent display at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway.
Aldi sues Dunnes Stores over a misleading lower price claim
A case over a cost comparison dispute is to be fast-tracked to Commercial Court.
Supermarket giant Aldi has sued Dunnes Stores over a comparative advertising campaign involving allegedly misleading commercial practices and trademark infringement.
Aldi alleges Dunnes put up banners and labels in several stores around the country conveying what it says is the “completely misleading impression” that various Dunnes products are cheaper than the equivalent Aldi products.
It also alleges Dunnes compared a series of products which were not comparable on grounds including that the weights or quality differed.
Mr Justice Peter Kelly yesterday granted an application by Michael McDowell, for Aldi, to fast-track the action in the Commercial Court. Michael Howard, for Dunnes, consented to that and the judge adjourned after making directions for exchange of legal documents between the sides.
Mr McDowell said there had been “a history of skirmishing” between the companies over the matter but a stage had been reached where banners were being used by Dunnes stating “Lowest Price Guaranteed” which was “untrue and misleading”.
‘Brush-off’: While Aldi had written to Dunnes about its concerns, it “just got the brush off”, counsel added.
The proceedings have been brought by Aldi Stores (Ireland) Ltd and Aldi GmbH & Co. Kg against Dunnes Stores.
In its claim, Aldi alleges the banners displayed by Dunnes as recently as last month failed to comply with the Consumer Protection Act 2007 and the European Communities (Misleading and Comparative Advertising) Regulations 2007 on grounds including they failed to objectively compare one or more of the relevant and verifiable features of the Dunnes’ products with those of Aldi Ireland.
The banners also conveyed the impression that Dunnes’ products generally, or its “Family Essentials” range, were cheaper than those of Aldi Ireland when there was “no basis” for such a claim, Aldi contends.
Last June, solicitors for Aldi wrote complaining to Dunnes on a number of occasions but Dunnes had not made any attempt to explain or justify its conduct, Aldi said.
The proceedings were initiated after Aldi became aware of other banners being displayed in Dunnes’ outlets relating to the “Family Essentials” range and featuring the words “Lower Price Guarantee”.
Researchers find a new method of calculating LDL
Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a more accurate way to calculate low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. If confirmed and adopted by medical laboratories that routinely calculate blood cholesterol for patients, the researchers say, their formula would give patients and their doctors a much more accurate assessment of LDL cholesterol.
“The standard formula that has been used for decades to calculate LDL cholesterol often underestimates LDL where accuracy matters most — in the range considered desirable for patients at high risk for heart attack and stroke,” says Seth S. Martin, MD, a cardiology fellow at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease. Martin is first author of the study detailed in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Since 1972, a formula called the Friedewald equation has been used to gauge LDL cholesterol. The Friedewald equation estimates LDL cholesterol with the following formula: total cholesterol minus HDL cholesterol minus triglycerides divided by five. The result is expressed in milligrams per decilitre. That equation, the researchers say, applies a one-size-fits-all factor of five to everyone; a more accurate formula would take specific details about a person’s cholesterol and triglyceride levels into account.
Using a database of blood lipid samples from more than 1.3 million Americans that were directly measured with a widely accepted technique known as ultracentrifugation, the researchers developed a different system and created a chart that uses 180 factors to calculate more accurately LDL cholesterol and individualise the assessment for patients.
The authors say that many people may have a false sense of assurance that their LDL cholesterol is at an ideal level. Instead, they may need more aggressive treatment to reduce their heart disease risk.
Mars water crater may have supported microbial life forms
Curiosity rover uncovers evidence of a past lake on Mars that had the kind of chemicals that could have supported life.
NASA’s robotic rover on Mars has found signs that a vast and hospitable lake once spread over the now-desolate Martian surface, providing a potential home to past life for centuries or longer.
The shallow water body was roughly the size of one of New York’s Finger Lakes, though not nearly so deep. Its waters boasted low salinity, just the right acidity and all the chemicals needed to support living organisms. Other than on Earth, the lake was the most life-friendly place in the solar system, according to a study published in the journal Science and announced Monday at American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco.
“Is this the smoking gun that says there was life on Mars? No,” says NASA soil mineralogist Douglas Ming, who took part in the new research. “Is this a smoking gun that this was a habitable environment? There’s pretty good evidence for that. We have an environment that is very much … like on Earth.”
Despite the difficulties of finding evidence of past life on Mars, “I’ve always been an optimist that we will find it someday,” says astrobiologist Clark Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved with the study. “This is a wonderful step forward.”
After its triumphant arrival on the Red Planet in August 2012, Curiosity trundled only a quarter-mile from its landing spot to a tantalizing depression named Yellowknife Bay. There it didn’t take long for the rover’s instruments to reveal an expanse of thick, fine-grained rock, the footprint of an ancient lake. Tests showed the rock, a type known as a mudstone because it’s formed from mud, is similar to 10-million-year-old rocks in Southern California. This single lake probably covered tens of thousands of acres, and there were probably at least several other lakes nearby, says Caltech’s John Grotzinger, project scientist for Curiosity.
Veins of mineral in the rocks show that even after the lake dried out, water still flowed across the site. That extra water could have allowed life to persist at the site long after the lake’s disappearance, perhaps for tens of millions of years, according to the study in the current issue of Science . Adding to the appeal of this watery real estate, a rock sample collected by Curiosity and analyzed in the rover’s on-board laboratories showed a wide array of chemicals needed for life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and others.
What Curiosity didn’t find beyond a doubt were hydrocarbons, carbon-containing molecules that can serve as an energy source for life and a potential signature of life. The rover did detect hydrocarbons, but at least some of them came from solvents that leaked out of a storage container on the rover itself. The scientists think the hydrocarbon levels measured by Curiosity are too high to be accounted for just by the solvents, but they readily acknowledge they haven’t closed the case.
“Most of us feel there is a good chance that there’s something there,” Grotzinger says. “It’s just that we haven’t been able to tease it out at the level of confidence we’d like.”
Grotzinger and his team argue that even without hydrocarbons, the lake could’ve supported life, though not the little green men of popular imagination. The obvious candidates are bacteria and other microscopic creatures that make their living off chemicals rather than sunlight. Such microbes are found at Earthly hot springs on both land and the ocean floor, some living under extreme conditions that would be lethal for many other forms of life.
Other scientists find most of the new results generally convincing, though they are skeptical that Curiosity has found hydrocarbons.
The scientists’ arguments that the rover found more hydrocarbons than would be expected from contamination alone are “tenuous at best,” says Jeffrey Bada, an emeritus professor of marine chemistry at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, via e-mail. He says that if Curiosity really had stumbled on hydrocarbons, other kinds would’ve been detected, not just the few purified by the rover’s chemistry set.
Others point out that living things have colonized much harsher environments on Earth than this gentle Martian lake, making it possible that microbes once called it home.
“If you give it an environment, life is going to spontaneously develop, so why not?” Johnson says. “But it’s not proven, and people should realize that to actually prove it … is probably many years down the road.”
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