Hundreds of pig farmers picketed Downing Street yesterday supported by a real pig named Winnie, a doll of muppet Miss Piggy and a rousing rugby-style chorus of their anthem Stand by Your Ham. They say that unless supermarkets raise the price they pay farmers, producers will be forced out of business.
Farmers are facing soaring global grain prices fuelled by drought in Australia and rising fuel prices. "I am losing nearly £20 on every pig I sell," southwest England pig farmer Cameron Naughton said. "We can only last like this a very short period of time, to be honest. Unless things change we will completely disappear."
Organisers said that at the demonstration's height, some 500 farmers and others were outside Whitehall, sometimes breaking into song with their adapted version of Tammy Wynette's Stand by Your Man - full lyrics on www.pigsareworthit.com.
Sugar pills that work better
Want a sugar pill to work really well? Charge more for it. A study published yesterday shows the well-known "placebo effect" works even better if the dummy pill costs more.
Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at Duke University in North Carolina, and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested 82 volunteers. All got a light electric shock and were offered what they were told was a painkiller.
Half were given a brochure describing the pill as a newly approved painkiller that cost $2.50 per dose and half were given a brochure describing it as marked down to 10 cents.
Writing in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr Ariely and colleagues said the effects were unexpectedly strong. Eighty-five per cent of volunteers who thought they were getting a $2.50 pill said they felt less pain after taking it, compared with 61 per cent of those who thought they were getting a discounted drug.
Hibernating fish in Antarctic
Scientists have found an Antarctic fish that hibernates to conserve energy during the long southern winters. The cod Notothenia coriiceps enters a dormant state, similar to hibernation in land animals like hedgehogs, British scientists say in a report being released today.
Researchers already knew Antarctic fish had antifreeze chemicals in their blood and their ability to effectively put themselves "on ice" is another remarkable adaptation to an extreme environment.
"It appears they utilise the short Antarctic summers to gain sufficient energy from feeding to tide them over in winter. The hibernation-like state they enter in winter is presumably a mechanism for reducing their energy requirements to the bare minimum," said Keiron Fraser of the British Antarctic Survey.
Whiskies galore at travelling show
It could be paradise, a show carrying samples of the world's best whiskies travelling the globe offering tempting tastings for aficionados and the uninitiated alike. Now in its eighth year, Whisky Live was in London at the weekend after visiting Auckland for the first time and before that Tokyo where whisky is immensely popular.
The variety of whiskies is as mind boggling as the effect they can have if consumed in excess: Bourbons, ryes, single malts, blended malts of different strengths and having been matured for differing lengths of time and in barrels that have previously held different alcoholic beverages to give them different flavours.
"There is a whisky for everyone. If you haven't found one that suits you, you simply haven't looked hard enough," said Rob Allanson, editor of Whisky Magazine which organises the shows. Swedish whiskies, Japanese whiskies, Canadian, American, Irish, even Scottish whiskies are on offer at the shows.
After London, Whisky Live travels to Belgium next week then on to New York and Strasbourg in April, Paris in September, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Toronto and Glasgow in October before hitting Cape Town, Johannesburg and finally Leiden in November.
First primate trekked from Siberia
He was the Albert Einstein of his time - aside from the fact that this long-extinct critter weighed about a 28 grams, measured 7.5 centimetres long and munched on bugs and berries.
A US scientist has unearthed the remains of the earliest-known primate to live in North America. In doing so, he figured out the path these ancient representatives of the mammalian group that includes lemurs, monkeys, apes and people must have taken to reach that part of the world.
Based on a group of teeth from a teeny primate unearthed in Mississippi dating to 55.8 million years ago, paleontologist Christopher Beard of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh said the species likely scampered over a now-vanished land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska.