Word: britishers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...concerns about health over vanity. By a doctor's standard, even a 5% to 10% reduction in body weight can make a big difference to a patient's health. On that level, at least, there's little doubt anti-obesity medications can help. The BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) paper, a comprehensive review of 30 controlled trials on anti-obesity drugs, showed unambiguously that orlistat (Xenical), sibutramine (Meridia) and rimonabant (Acomplia) all resulted in weight loss - but the drugs' benefits extended beyond that. In one four-year trial, orlistat reduced the incidence of type 2 diabetes by almost...
Five years ago, British scientist Colin Pillinger convinced the world's biggest medical-research charity, the Wellcome Trust, to bet on a project far beyond its usual scope: a probe to find life on Mars. Detecting life on other planets, he argued, would be a giant leap for mankind toward understanding the origins of life back on earth. But in 2003, the Beagle 2 probe - worth tens of millions of dollars, and carrying a gas-analysis unit bankrolled by Wellcome - disappeared without a trace into the Martian atmosphere. Four years later, scientists and funders alike are delighted...
There's no surer sign of a fading soap opera than a lurid plot twist. Unlike their glossy American counterparts, British soaps like the long-running, top-rated EastEnders traditionally aim for stolid social realism, depicting ordinary folk pursuing humdrum lives. Now, though, dwindling audiences are spurring EastEnders' producers to unleash implausible killers and gothic disasters on their workaday protagonists. In a recent plotline, a character was taken hostage by his deranged stepson and saw his wife shot as she came to his rescue...
...past few months, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has itself resembled a superannuated soap, with the long-term future of the 85-year-old institution called into question as it lurches from embarrassing revelations about editorial lapses to high-level resignations and job cuts. Management has apologized for such breaches of trust as falsifying the results of a public vote held to name a cat on the children's show Blue Peter (producers rejected the winning entry, Cookie, in favor of Socks) and showing a trailer for the documentary A Year with the Queen with scenes shown out of sequence...
...institution revered for the quality of its output, a global role model for public-service broadcasting, the backbone and guardian of British life--"monolithic and ingrained into our culture," in Greenslade's words--suddenly seem so vulnerable? One source of the BBC's problems can be seen on EastEnders: only 9 million viewers tuned in to the finale of the hostage plotline--far shy of EastEnders' record episode in 1986, when more than 30 million watched nothing more dramatic than the marital breakdown of a pub owner and his barmaid wife...