Birmingham 1 – 0 Chelsea
Posted on: November 21, 2010
Lee Bowyer’s cool finish took spirited Birmingham out of the relegation zone and sent Chelsea crashing to a third Premier League defeat in four games.
Bowyer ran on to Cameron Jerome’s cushioned header to fire the only goal past keeper Petr Cech after 17 minutes.
The champions missed a host of chances, with Didier Drogba going closest when his wonderful header hit the bar.
But the home side also defended superbly and keeper Ben Foster made some stunning saves to secure the win.
Birmingham boss Alex McLeish will no doubt feel his side deserved their victory, not least for their hugely impressive rearguard action, although no-one could argue they were slightly fortunate to be ahead at the interval.
Ancelotti ‘trusts squad’ despite Birmingham defeat
Carlo Ancelotti’s men were heavily criticised for a sloppy defensive display in the humbling 3-0 home defeat by Sunderland last week, and they began with the look of a side desperate to prove it was a mere blip.
But Chelsea, who only remain top of the Premier League on goal difference following Manchester United’s victory over Wigan, wasted at least five glorious chances before the break and that set the tone for a frustrating afternoon in the west Midlands.
The return of Alex at centre-half seemed to do the trick in restoring confidence to the Chelsea ranks, while Paulo Ferreira’s switch to right-back and Salomon Kalou’s recall certainly helped the balance.
And in a bright start from the visitors, the lively if somewhat erratic Kalou rolled an early effort wide after a wonderful first-time chest pass from Drogba.
The pair then switched roles and Kalou teed up a one-on-one chance for his fellow Ivorian with a glorious pass but Foster narrowed the angle expertly to pull off the first of a series of impressive saves.
Despite Chelsea’s early promise it was the one change that Birmingham had made to their starting XI that proved the game’s decisive moment.
Bowyer, only selected because of an ankle injury to Craig Gardner, was afforded the freedom of the penalty box on 17 minutes and the 33-year-old rolled back the years to burst through and coolly slot past Cech.
Although the goal came through the heart of the much-talked-about Chelsea defence, it was the midfield’s failure to track Bowyer’s run that allowed him to get on the end of Jerome’s astute nod down.
Chelsea continued to dictate the terms, though, and the chances continued to come – mainly for Drogba.
First the striker forced a staggering save from Foster, who dived low to his left to keep out the striker’s fierce close-range downward header from Nicolas Anelka’s cross.
Foster also denied Drogba from a deflected free-kick and then last season’s Premier League top scorer saw his sensational header crash back off the corner of post and bar and to safety.
Ashley Cole also forced a decent block from Foster at his near post after exchanging passes with Kalou – and Ivanovic and Alex and both headed over from Malouda corners.
The only noteworthy opportunity at the other end almost led to a freak goal for Jerome when an Alex clearance rebounded off the striker but went just wide.
Alex McLeish’s side tightened up after the break, standing off Chelsea and letting them have possession until the final third.
The tactics worked for 30 minutes as Chelsea, still desperately missing Frank Lampard and Michael Essien at the heart of the midfield, dominated possession but barely threatened the home goal.
A rare attempt on goal from Carlo Ancelotti’s men saw the excellent Roger Johnson make a last-ditch challenge to prevent Ramires firing at goal and although Chelsea screamed for a penalty, referee Mark Halsey seemed to get his call spot-on.
That signalled the start of a frantic last 15 minutes and Drogba saw another free-kick saved by Foster while Kalou headed wide.
Birmingham’s excellent defensive organisation was being stretched to the limit as Chelsea piled forward.
Proud McLeish praises keeper Foster
Ivanovic had the pick of the chances but his towering header from Malouda’s cross was somehow beaten away by the inspired England keeper.
But there was no late boost and Chelsea slipped to successive league defeats for the first time in four-and-a-half years after a miserable week in which assistant manager Ray Wilkins was also sacked.
And the home side went on to earn only their second league success in 12 games and their first league win over Chelsea since 1980.
Barclays Premier League table snapshot
As it stood on 20 Nov 2010 23:59 UK
| Position | Team | P | GD | PTS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chelsea | 14 | 19 | 28 |
| 2 | Man Utd | 14 | 13 | 28 |
| 3 | Arsenal | 14 | 13 | 26 |
| 4 | Bolton | 14 | 6 | 22 |
| 5 | Man City | 13 | 5 | 22 |
| 6 | Tottenham | 14 | 2 | 22 |
| 7 | Sunderland | 13 | 2 | 19 |
| 8 | Stoke | 14 | 0 | 19 |
| 9 | Liverpool | 14 | -1 | 19 |
| 10 | Newcastle | 14 | 1 | 18 |
| 11 | Blackpool | 14 | -6 | 18 |
| 12 | Aston Villa | 13 | -3 | 17 |
| 13 | Birmingham | 14 | -2 | 16 |
| 14 | West Brom | 14 | -9 | 16 |
| 15 | Everton | 13 | 1 | 15 |
| 16 | Blackburn | 13 | -3 | 15 |
| 17 | Fulham | 13 | 0 | 14 |
| 18 | Wigan | 14 | -13 | 14 |
| 19 | Wolves | 14 | -11 | 9 |
| 20 | West Ham | 14 | -14 | 9 |
Diabetes treatment
Posted on: November 18, 2010
Treating type 1 diabetes
Type 1 is treated with insulin and by eating a healthy diet. Insulin can’t be taken by mouth because the digestive juices in the stomach destroy it. This means that for most people it has to be given by injections. Most people find giving the injections simple and relatively painless, since the needle is so fine.
How often someone needs to inject depends on what their diabetes specialist has recommended, and which type of insulin they’re using. Insulin is given at regular intervals throughout the day, usually two to four times.
Each injection may contain one, or a combination of different types of insulin, which act for a short, intermediate or longer period of time.
Injections can be given using either a traditional needle and plastic syringe, or with an injection pen device, which many people find more convenient.
An automatic insulin pump is available, which means that fewer injections are needed. The needle is sited under the skin, and connected to a small electrical pump that attaches to a belt or waistband and is about the size of a pager. Inside is a reservoir of fast-acting insulin which is delivered continuously at an adjustable rate.
Inhaled insulin recently became available for treating people with a proven needle phobia or people who have severe trouble injecting. It was hoped that this would become a mainstay method of giving insulin, but initial results were not as impressive as hoped, and so this option is now usually reserved for those patients where all other treatment options have failed.
What is insulin?
Insulin was first used to treat diabetes in 1921. Under normal circumstances, it’s made by beta cells that are part of a cluster of hormone-producing cells in the pancreas.
The hormone regulates the level of glucose in the blood, preventing the level from going too high. Insulin enables cells to take up the amount of glucose they need to provide themselves with enough energy to function properly. It also allows any glucose left over to be stored in the liver.
Most insulin used today is ‘human insulin’, although some people still use insulin from cows and pigs. ‘Human insulin’ is a product of genetic engineering, where bacteria bred in a laboratory are given a gene that allows them to produce insulin. . ‘Analogue’ insulin is another form of artificially modified insulin.
There are six main types of insulin, and each patient requires their own unique combination and dosage. It can take many weeks after starting insulin for sugar levels to stabilise, and it is quite common for different insulin combinations to be tried before optimal treatment occurs. The six types are:
- Rapid acting analogue insulins – as the name suggests, these act quickly and are used up within five hours. A clear-looking insulin, these injections are taken with food.
- Short-acting insulin – a clear insulin, this is injected around half an hour before a meal, and last for up to eight hours.
- Longer-acting analogue insulin – used increasingly in many diabetics, these are given once daily only to provide a background insulin cover for 24 hours. A clear insulin that does not need to be taken with food but, is given at the same time each day (this time varies between patients).
- Medium/long-acting insulin – usually given in combination with shorter-acting insulins, these are injected up to twice a day. Their effect can last over 24 hours.
- Mixed analogue – this artificial insulin is a combination of rapid acting analogue and medium insulin. Depending on the combination used its effect can last over 12 hours.
- Mixed insulin – a simple combination of short and medium acting insulins. Its length of action is similar to that of the mixed analogues.
Another recent treatment, known as Exenatide, is also given by injection, but is not an insulin. Given twice daily before morning and evening meals, it works by increasing the levels of body hormones known as ‘incretins’. These are set to play an increasing role in our management and understanding of diabetes as they help to produce insulin when required, reduce appetite, slow down food absorption, and reduce glucose production by the liver. This treatment is usually only initiated by a diabetes consultant rather than a GP.
Treating type 2 diabetes
Type 2 may have been considered the ‘milder’ form of diabetes in the past, but this is no longer the case. For many people, type 2 diabetes can be controlled by diet alone. Medication in tablet form is used when diet doesn’t provide adequate control.
The different types of tablets work by one of these methods:
- helping the pancreas to make more insulin
- increasing the use of glucose and decreasing glucose production
- slowing down the absorption of glucose from the intestine
- stimulating insulin release from the pancreas
- enabling the body to use its natural insulin more effectively
Examples of these tablets include:
- Biguanides (eg. Metformin) – these cut down production of glucose by the liver and help insulin carry glucose into muscles more effectively.
- Sulphonylureas (eg. Gliclazide) – these stimulate pancreas cells to produce more insulin as well as helping insulin work effectively in the body.
- Glitazones (e.g. Rosiglitazone). Taken up to twice a day these tablets allow the insulin that the body produces naturally to work more efficiently.
- Prandial glucose regulators (e.g. Repaglinide) – these are not usually a first line treatment of diabetes but work by stimulating the pancreas to produce more insulin. Fast-working, their effect lasts only a short time.
- DPP-4 inhibitors (gliptins) – anewer treatment, which blocks the action of the DPP-4 enzyme that destroys the hormone incretin. This hormone helps the body produce more insulin as well as cutting down the amount of glucose produced by the liver.
- Alpha glucosidase inhibitors (e.g. Acarbose) – this works by slowing down the rise in blood glucose after eating.
All tablets used in the treatment of diabetes have potential side effects such as abdominal pains, diarrhoea, and low blood sugar (hypos), but the majority of patients taking them are able to find one or more that suits them.
Over time, a careful diet combined with oral medication may not be sufficient to keep the diabetes under control. If this is the case then insulin injections may be recommended.
Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook Messages is not an email killerFacebook has ramped up competition with AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google with a product to rival their email services.
Facebook Messages aims to tie users more closely to the social networking site at a time when everyone is battling for their attention.
The product will merge texts, online chats, and emails into one central hub.
Facebook said traditional email is too slow and cumbersome and needs to step into the modern world of messaging.
“This is not an email killer,” Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters and analysts at an event in San Francisco.
“Maybe we can help push the way people do messaging more towards this simple, real time, immediate personal experience. Email is still really important to a lot of people. We think this simple messaging is how people will shift their communication,” added Mr Zuckerberg.
‘Killer app’
In a case of bad timing, reports surfaced hours after the Facebook launch that Gmail suffered an outage.
The new service is seen as offering an alternative to Gmail, the fastest growing web service in the past year with over 193 million users according to data tracker ComScore.
Email remains one of the most popular means of communicationThe irony was that ahead of the announcement, speculation was rife that Facebook’s new product would be most crippling for Gmail. Mr Zuckerberg said he did not see it that way.
“In reality they have a great product.
“We don’t expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and say ‘I’m going to shut down my Yahoo Mail or Gmail account’.
“Maybe one day, six months, a year, two years out people will start to say this is how the future should work,” said Mr Zuckerberg.
AOL which at the weekend previewed changes to its once popular web mail service disagreed email is doomed.
“Email remains one of the killer apps on the internet,” said Brad Garlinghouse, AOL’s senior vice president of consumer products.
Industry analyst Augie Ray of Forrester agreed.
“Research we have done shows we know that in the US 90% of adults check their mail at least once a month and 59% of adults say they maintain a profile on a social networking site.
“There is a big gap between the reach social media has and the reach email has.”
Ease of use
At the heart of Facebook Messages is an effort to ensure users “see the messages that matter”.
The new feature will simplify how people communicate whether it be via text, instant messages, online chat or email. All these messages will come into one feed known as a social inbox allowing users to reply in any way they want.
All 500million plus users will eventually be offered an @Facebook.com addressFacebook said around 70% of users regularly use it to send messages to friends and and that a total of four billion messages pass across the site every day.
“We really want to enable people to have conversations with the people they care about,” Facebook’s director of engineering Andrew “Boz” Bosworth told BBC News.
“It sounds so simple. We have all this technology that should be enabling that but it’s not. It’s fragmenting that. So I have one conversation on email with my grandfather and another with my cousin on sms and all these things don’t work the same way.
“I shouldn’t have to worry about the technology. I should just have to worry about the person and the message. Everything else is just getting in the way,” added Mr Bosworth.
The new system will be modelled more on chat than traditional email which means there will be no subject lines, cc or bcc fields.
Liz Gannes of technology blog AllThingsD said she believed users will have a bit of a learning curve on their hands.
“I think the product is just different enough from what people are used to that it will feel really weird to users for a while.
“The lack of subject lines will get people upset at first and then of course they will probably realise they never wanted them anyway.”
‘Game over?’
Other features include being able to store conversations so users can have a complete archive of communications with friends and family. Mr Bosworth likened this to a modern day treasure trove of letters stored in a box.
Incoming message will be placed in one of three folders – one for friends, another for things like bank statements and a junk folder for messages people do not want to see.
The product will also represent a challenge to Yahoo with over 273 million users and Microsoft which has nearly 362 million.
“For me today represents the day when Facebook truly becomes a portal on the level of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL,” Charlene Li social media analyst with the Altimeter Group told BBC News.
“They now have to start making their inboxes more social. Friends are the new priority as opposed to the conversation. This makes Facebook so much more functional.”
The new product will be introduced slowly over a number of monthsRobert Scoble technology writer and founder of Scobleizer.com said this product gives everyone something to aim for.
“This is a new kind of communications system but its not game over for Yahoo and Gmail and all the others because it will take decades to get people to stop doing traditional emails.
“However this is something new and very powerful because Facebook can tap into my social graph and ensure that only my friends are there and I won’t get spammed.”
Facebook said this product was the biggest the social networking giant had worked on to date.
The company will also offer an @facebook.com email address to every one of its more than 500 million users.
A new species of squid has been discovered by scientists during a research cruise in the southern Indian ocean.
The 70cm-long specimen is a large member of the chiroteuthid family.
Squid from this group are long and slender with light-producing organs, which act as lures to attract prey.
It was found during analysis of 7,000 samples gathered during last year’s Seamounts cruise led by the conservation group IUCN.
The project started a year ago when marine experts embarked on a six-week research expedition in the Indian Ocean.
The aim of the cruise was to unveil the mysteries of seamounts – underwater mountains – in the southern Indian Ocean and to help improve conservation and management of marine resources in the area.
“For 10 days now 21 scientists armed with microscopes have been working through intimidating rows of jars containing fishes, squids, zooplankton and other interesting creatures,” says Alex Rogers, of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford,
“Many specimens look similar to each other and we have to use elaborate morphological features such as muscle orientation and gut length to differentiate between them.”
So far, more than 70 species of squid have been identified from the Seamounts cruise, representing more than 20% of the global squid biodiversity.
Eggs with the oldest known embryos of a dinosaur found
An artist’s impression of what the dinosaurs might have looked likePalaeontologists have identified the oldest known dinosaur embryos, belonging to a species that lived some 190 million years ago.
The eggs of Massospondylus, containing well-perserved embryos, were unearthed in South Africa back in 1976.
The creature appears to be an ancestor of the family that includes the long-necked dino once known as Brontosaurus.
The study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology also sheds light on the dinosaurs’ early development.
The researchers used the embryos to reconstruct what the dinosaurs’ babies might have looked like when they roamed the Earth.
Having studied the fossilised eggs, the team, led by Professor Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada, discovered that the embryos were the oldest ones ever found of any land-dwelling vertebrate.
“This project opens an exciting window into the early history and evolution of dinosaurs,” said Professor Reisz.
“Prosauropods are the first dinosaurs to diversify extensively, and they quickly became the most widely spread group, so their biology is particularly interesting as they represent in many ways the dawn of the age of dinosaurs.”
‘Awkward’ bodies
Massospondylus belonged to a group of dinosaurs known as prosauropods, the ancestors of sauropods – huge, four-legged dinosaurs with long necks.
Having studied the tiny (20cm-long) skeletons, the researchers noted that the embryos were almost about to hatch – but never had the chance.
While the embryos are only about 20cm long, the adults are thought to have reached some five metres in heightInterestingly, the report says, the embryos looked quite different compared to the adult animals.
Once hatched, the babies would have had rather long front legs, meaning that they would have been walking on all fours rather than on two legs like the adults.
The embryos’ heads were also disproportionally big, but it is believed the adult Massospondylus, which were about five metres in length, had relatively tiny heads and long necks.
The little ones’ anatomy would have changed with age.
The paper stated that the rather awkward body of the embryos suggested that just like humans, the hatchlings would have required parental care – and if in this case, it would be the earliest known example of parental care.
Yossi Fadhli World News and Entertainment 