Daily Online News

Pretoria, July 2 (bdnews24.com/AFP) - Argentina were boosted on Friday when Lionel Messi trained normally ahead of the World Cup quarter-final against Germany while coach Diego Maradona pledged his men would stay true to their attacking style. "It would be a sin to change now. I am not going to play 4-4-2," Maradona vowed ahead of Saturday's showdown at Cape Town.Messi, who reportedly had a cold which curtailed his training session on Thursday, has recovered and should be fit to start."The best news of the day at the University of Pretoria was the return to training of Lionel Messi - the fright has passed ... tomorrow he will be in the starting line-up against Germany in Cape Town," Clarin daily newspaper reported.

   Cape Town, July 2 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Diego Maradona and Joachim Loew were at opposite ends of the soccer spectrum when Argentina and Germany contested the 1986 and 1990 World Cup finals but the matches made a deep and lasting impression on both men. Those two games are the most important in what has developed into one of the game's great rivalries and the latest instalment and 19th in all takes place Saturday when they meet in Cape Town battling for a place in the World Cup last four. Current Argentina coach Maradona was at his peak in 1986, as he captained his country to their second World Cup, scoring five goals on a run culminating in a thrilling 3-2 final victory over the then-West Germany. Some of the game's most iconic images were carved in the Mexico sunshine -- Maradona poised, ball at feet, about to take on a line of six Belgian defenders, Maradona punching the ball past Peter Shilton for his infamous "hand of God goal" and Maradona, slaloming throug...

  Port Elizabeth, July 2 (bdnews24.com/AFP) - Brazil's dreams of a sixth World Cup title were shattered as the Netherlands came from behind to claim a famous 2-1 win in an enthralling quarter-final here on Friday. An own goal by Felipe Melo - who was to be sent off later - and a Wesley Sneijder header enabled the Dutch to overturn Robinho's early opener for Brazil and completely turn around a match that, at half-time, the five-time world champions appeared destined to win comfortably. The defeat means Brazil's campaign has ended at the quarter-final stage for the second successive World Cup while the Netherlands can look forward to a semi-final against Ghana or Uruguay having avenged their 1994 and 1998 last-eight defeats by the Brazilians.The Dutch cause had not been helped by losing centre-back Joris Mathijsen to a knee injury minutes before kick-off. The consequent disruption to their defence was quickly apparent, and Robinho had already had one effort chalked off becaus...

Dhaka, July2 (bdnews24.com)--The BNP will not be participating in the programmes declared by its key opposition ally Jamaat-e-Islami but fully support those to force the release of their top leaders including chief Matiur Rahman Nizami. Secretary general Khandaker Delwar Hossain revealed his party's stance at a press briefing after a meeting on Friday morning between the party's policymakers and leaders of associate organisations. He said, "We've condemned the arrest of the Jamaat leaders. However, the party's agenda are their own and they will carry it out alone. However, they have BNP's full support." Delwar said the Jamaat leaders were being persecuted for supporting the agitation against the government. The government brought false charges after arresting Jamaat chief Matiur Rahman Nizami, secretary general Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed and central executive committee member Delwar Hossain Sayedee, he alleged. He pointed out that the leaders have bee...

Johannesburg, July 2 (bdnews24.com/AFP) - Uruguay claimed their first World Cup semi-final appearance in 40 years after a pulsating 4-2 penalty shootout win over heartbroken Ghana at Soccer City on Friday. Uruguay goalkeeper Fernando Muslera saved skipper John Mensah and Dominic Adiyah's attempts after the quarter-final had been locked at 1-1 after extra time. Two-time World Cup winners Uruguay will now play the Netherlands in the semi-finals in Cape Town on Tuesday. Ghana could have won the match in the last minute of extra-time but leading scorer Asamoah Gyan sent a penalty crashing off the crossbar after Luis Suarez had been sent off for deliberate handball on the goal-line. Ghana were bidding to become the first African team to win through to the semi-finals of the World Cup after Cameroon (1990) and Senegal (2002) had fallen in the last eight. The Ghanaians scored first through Sulley Muntari two minutes into first-half stoppage time before Diego Forlan equalised with ...

July 2nd is the birthday of Hans Bethe. Hans Bethe was a German-American physicist who was awarded the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for describing how stars create their energy. He was in a good place to work out ideas in atomic and nuclear physics when he worked in the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project to build America's atomic bomb. He was part of the team that calculated the critical mass necessary for a chain reaction and later worked on the implosion method to start that chain reaction. After the war, President Truman announced the hydrogen bomb project and Bethe joined the project but hoped it would prove an impossible task. His personal feelings against atomic and thermonuclear weapons showed when he joined Einstein's Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists against nuclear testing and the arms race. He also played a role in the eventual ban on atmospheric testing and the SALT I Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Find out what else occurred on this day in...

I get a lot of questions about whether the recipes that you can find online for making colored smoke bombs are valid. Yes, they are, but... you have to keep in mind the colored "smoke" is not made by burning the dyes to change the color of normal (gray or white) smoke. You can make black smoke by releasing a lot of soot into the air, or yellow smoke by releasing elemental sulfur, but most colored smoke is produced by vaporizing organic dyes. You can't use just any dye. For example, most clothing dyes will not work. Pigments from ink pens or food coloring will not work. While the proper composition will make colored smoke even if you ignite a pile of it in the open, the "trick" to getting clouds of colored smoke is to heat the dye and force it through a small hole. So... if you want to make colored smoke, use one of the mixtures intended to produced colored smoke, don't substitute chemicals, and encase the mixture in a ball or smoke cylinder. Insert your fuse...

Nuclear fission and nuclear fusion both involve radioactivity, both yield enormous amounts of energy, and both are used in nuclear weapons. So, how can you tell them apart? Fission reactions involve breaking large atomic nuclei into smaller pieces. For example, uranium can be fissioned into strontium and krypton. Fusion reactions involve fusing or joining atomic nuclei together. The products of fusion will contain more protons or neutrons than the reactants. For example, helium (atomic number of 2) is produced in the sun from hydrogen (atomic number of 1) through nuclear fusion.

I've had the chemical structure for Sodium Ethyl Xanthate up for quite a while, which bears the acronym "SEX", but there is another molecule that is more deserving of the name: This molecule does not exist in nature, but the structure is amusing. The systematic name for SEX is [3-[2-[3-[7-[2-[[3-[[4-benzyl-3-hydroxy-2-[3-hydroxy-4-(3-hydroxy ​propyl)phenyl]phenyl]-hydroxy-methyl]-4-[2-[3-(2-hydroxyethyl)phenyl]propyl]cyclohexyl]methyl]phenoxy]-2-[4-[3-[(4-ethyl-2,3-dihydroxy-phenyl)methyl]phenyl]-3-[2-[2-[2-hydroxy-3-[3-[2-[3-(2-tetra​ hydropyran-2-ylethyl)phenyl]ethyl]phenyl]cyclohexyl]ethyl]phenyl]​ butyl]-9,10-dihydroanthracen-1-yl]-1,2-dihydroxy-propyl]-5-(2-hydroxyethyl)-4-methyl-phenyl]phenyl]-[2,6-dihydroxy-3-(2-hydroxyethyl)phenyl]methanone