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Making sense of the language confusion - Switzerland
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Kim Hsu, Feb. 17, 2012
Swiss aim to launch first space cleaner:
Swiss scientists announced Wednesday plans to develop a machine that acts almost like a vacuum cleaner to scoop up thousands of abandoned satellite and rocket parts, cleaning up outer space. Thank you Switzerland!
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Margaret Sewell Feb. 17, 2012
It's encouraging to see a space agency allocating resources to the issue of space debris and space pollution. The Swiss Space Agency must be commended for focusing on this issue.
NASA and private corporations have been launching satellites into space orbit at an alarming rate since the 1970's. Yet, I have never noticed a serious effort on their part to tackle the issue of space debris. They've only been concerned with establishing guidelines on how to deal with potential collision threat from debris.
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Dan Thompson, Nov. 18, 2011
Is ‘the new physics’ here? Atom smashers get a big surprise!!! The world’s largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, the 17-mile (27 km) circular particle accelerator underground near Geneva, Switzerland, is designed as a portal to a new view of physics. And it has produced its first peek at the unexpected: bits of matter that don’t mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45347624/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.TsZ2W1Za8dU
The discovery, if confirmed, could rewrite the known laws of particle physics and help explain why our universe is made mostly of matter and not antimatter. Here’s a great documentary of the Large Hadron Collider
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Jenny Rothberg, Sept. 27, 2011
Swiss Effort to Save a Language Opens a Rift: Villagers Debate Whether to Stick to Dialects of Ancient Roman Tongue or a Cobbled-Together ‘Esperanto’
ZURICH—As kids return to school in Val Müstair, high in the eastern tip of the Swiss Alps, they are also entering the front lines of a bitter battle: the fight over the future of a centuries-old Latin dialect.
The municipality (population 1,600) is a stronghold of Romansh, a language imported by Roman occupiers 2,000 years ago and still spoken by most locals. Today, its villagers are up in arms over authorities’ attempt to push a sort of Romansh Esperanto on locals—one that officials defend as the only chance to save one of the last living relics of the Latin language.
The tiff originated in 1996, when Romansh became Switzerland’s fourth official language even though only roughly 60,000 people speak it.
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Jenny Rothberg, May 31, 2011
Standard German has been banned from Zurich, Switzerland preschools in favor of Swiss German. The outcome of the Sunday referendum was welcomed by the “Yes to dialect in the kindergarten” group that argued for the change. Swiss German, is almost unintelligible in most of Germany and remains a strong element of the Swiss identity. More here:
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