Drinking water which contains the element lithium may reduce the risk of suicide, a Japanese study suggests.

Researchers examined levels of lithium in drinking water and suicide rates in the prefecture of Oita, which has a population of more than one million.  The suicide rate was significantly lower in those areas with the highest levels of the element, they wrote in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

The Japanese researchers called for further research in other countries but they stopped short of any suggestion that lithium be added to drinking water. The discussion around adding fluoride to water to protect dental health has proved controversial - criticised by some as mass involuntary medication.

Winter's over. Summer is just around the corner. That's as good a cause for celebration in Sweden as any, and the revelry on Valborgsmässoafton - Walpurgis Night- on April 30th gets pretty heated. Intensely so, actually, as massive bonfires up and down the country honour an 8th-century German abbess, St. Walpurga, or Valborg in Swedish.

Only now do we see how each crossroads
was bound to throw up not just a cross
but a couple of gadabouts with goads,
a couple of gadabouts at a loss

as to why they were at the beck and call
of some old crock soaring above the culch
of a kitchen midden at evenfall,
some old crock roaring across the gulch

as a hanged man roars out to a hanged man.
Now bucket nods to bucket of the span
of an ash yoke, or something of that ilk…

Now one hanged man kicks at the end of his rope 
in another little attack of hope.
Now a frog in one bucket thickens the milk.

II

Now a frog in one bucket thickens the milk
as it tries out for the sublime
from chime to birch-wood chime,
a frog thrown in with no more thought as to whilk

way he was geen
from the hussy turned resourceful housewife
than she gave to where in Ayreshire or Fife
her beloved spalpeen

might fetch up as a tatie-hoker,
a tatie-hoker revealing a lining of red tatted silk
to his sack-cloth, so to speak,

just as it’s revealed our stockbroker
is creaming off five hundred a week
while the frog in one bucket thickens the milk.

III

Now a frog in one bucket thickens the milk
as a heart might quicken behind its stave
at the thought of a thief who bilked
us of our life savings himself being saved.

Only now do we see… How spasm and lull
are mirrored somewhat by lull and spasm
when the nitwit roars out to the numbskull
thinking he might yet narrow the chasm

between his own cask and the other’s keg,
thinking he might take the other down a peg
if not leave him completely in the lurch…

Leave him to ponder if it’s less an ash
yoke tipped by his bucket of balderdash,
less an ash yoke than a cross-bar of birch.

IV

Less an ash yoke than a cross-bar of birch
from the single birch that insinuated itself into the grove
of oaks sacred to Jove
and took him in as from his perch

the nincompoop who’s churning our account
took in the other knucklehead
with the proposal that our aversion to being bled
is pretty much tantamount

to the old crock being averse to paying his ransom,
the bucket where you would search
for the significance of a frog taking the plunge

proving to be less cask than keg, the transom
from which the old crock offered his vinegar-sponge
less an ask yoke than a cross-bar of birch.

V

Less an ash yoke than a cross-bar of birch
and a birch-wood bucket where a frog breasts
the very milk we feared it would besmirch.
Only now do we see we’re at the behest

not of some old crock kicking the beam
but ourselves. We balk at the idea, balk
at the idea of a frog no sooner opening a seam
in milk than it’s… Surely not caulked?

Only now do we see how it’s ourselves who skim
determinedly through the dim
of evenfall with no more regard for our load

as we glance up through the sky-hoop 
than the ninny who roars back to the nincompoop,
“Only now do we see how each crossroads…”

Paul Muldoon

With a brutal economic slowdown, 2008 may feel as if it will never end. Now the world's timekeepers are making it even longer by adding a leap second to the last day of the year.

Along with the economy, the Earth itself is slowing down, requiring timekeepers to add an extra second to their atomic clocks to keep in sync with Earth's slightly slowing rotation. So an extra second will be tacked on to Dec. 31 after 6:59:59 p.m. and before 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time.

That extra second will make 2008 — already long with an extra day on Feb. 29 — the longest year since 1992.

Some climate experts are now willing to consider schemes for partly shielding the planet from the sun's rays, such as putting sulfer dioxide in the stratosphere to scatter sunlight; using 1,500 ships, each spraying eight gallons of sea water a second to whiten existing marine clouds (and reflect more light); and a space-based sunshade at L1, the inner Lagrangian point, using solar sails with tiny mirrors to deflect light.

Geoengineering schemes fall into two categories, corresponding to the two knobs you might imagine twiddling to adjust the earth's temperature.

One knob controls how much sunlight—or solar energy, to be more precise—reaches the planet's surface; the other controls how much heat escapes back into space, which depends on how much CO₂ is in the atmosphere.

Schemes for removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, say, by fertilizing the oceans with iron, would strike closer to the root of the problem. But they would inevitably take decades to have much of an effect.

In contrast, a sunshade could, in principle, stop global warming immediately—albeit only for as long as it was maintained. Sunshade ideas thus address what some scientists see as the extreme urgency of the climate problem.

The geoengineering scheme Crutzen and Wigley both defend is the cheapest and most certain to work; it was proposed as long ago as 1974 by the late Russian physicist Mikhail I. Budyko, then at the Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad. The idea is to inject several million tons a year of sulfur dioxide (SO₂) into the stratosphere.

There it would react with oxygen, water and other molecules to form minute sulfate droplets made up of water, sulfuric acid (H₂SO₄) and whatever dust, salt or other particles onto which the acid and water condense.

Clouds of sulfate droplets would scatter sunlight, making sunsets redder, the sky paler and the earth's surface, on average, cooler—everyone agrees on all that. In 1991 the volcanic erup­tion of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines put 20 million tons of SO₂ into the stratosphere, and it had all those effects: it cooled the earth by nearly one degree Fahrenheit for about a year.

"So we basically know it works," Caldeira says. In fact, Caldeira started modeling the idea nearly a decade before Crutzen wrote about it.