The Blog of Walker By Jeremy Page, via the Times Online: Om Prakash, the head of the department, said the drink – called “gau jal”, or “cow water” – in Sanskrit was undergoing laboratory tests and would be launched “very soon, maybe by the end of this year”. “Don’t worry, it won’t smell like urine and will be tasty too,” he told The Times from his headquarters in Hardwar, one of four holy cities on the River Ganges. “Its USP will be that it’s going to be very healthy. It won’t be like carbonat

Willem Kolff, inventor of the modern kidney dialysis machine and the man behind the artificial heart and other mechanical organs, died on Wednesday. He was 97. The Dutch-born physician showed a unique resourcefulness in developing the first artificial kidney. After witnessing a 22-year-old man die from kidney failure, he set about trying to figure out how a machine could help cleanse the blood. Working during World War II, he salvaged a cooling system from an old Ford car and metal pieces fro

_ FPA Russia blog sometimes gives the Guardian’s Russian man Luke Harding a hard (ahem) time, but hats off to him for today’s chilling and well-researched investigation into rising skinhead and neo-Nazi violence. Ultranationalist gangs, whose members are mostly in their early 20s or even younger, are responsible for over 300 brutal killings since 2004. Harding talks about [...]