Egypt To Apply For First Arabic-Alphabet Internet Domain Name

From CTV News/AP:

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt — Egypt will apply for the first Internet domain written in Arabic, its information technology minister said Sunday at a conference grouping Yahoo's co-founder and others to discuss boosting online access in emerging nations.

Tarek Kamel said Egypt on Monday would apply for the new domain -- pronounced ".masr" but written in the Arabic alphabet -- making it the first Arab nation to apply for a non-Latin character domain. The effort is part of a broader push to expand both access and content in developing nations, where the Internet remains out of reach for wide swaths of the population.

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The Ghost Wineries of Napa Valley

The Freemark Abbey is a fully functional ghost winery located in the
Napa Valley just north of St. Helena. Matt Kettmann

From The Smithsonian:

In the peaks and valleys of California’s wine country, vinters remember the region’s rich history and rebuild for the future

Atop Howell Mountain, one of the peaks that frame California’s wine-soaked Napa Valley, the towering groves of ponderosa pines are home to one of the region’s legendary ghost wineries. Born in the late 1800s, killed off by disease, disaster, depression, and denial in the early 20th century, and then laid to solemn rest for decades, La Jota Vineyard — like its countless sister specters found throughout the region — is once again living, breathing, and making world-class wine. And for those who care to listen, this resurrected winery has plenty to say about everything from America’s melting pot history and the long-celebrated quality of West Coast wine to strategies for sustainability and using the power of story to boost sales.

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In 2012, Neutrinos Melt The Earth's Core, And Other Disasters

Scence from 2012 courtesy of Columbia Tristar Marketing Group

From Scientific American:

During an early screening of Roland Emmerich's latest disaster flick 2012, which opens today, laughter erupted in the audience near the end of the film thanks to corny dialogue and maudlin scenes (among the biggest guffaw getters: a father tries to reconnect with his estranged son on the telephone, only to have the son's house destroyed just before he could say anything). Nobody wants to take anything seriously in a movie like this, in which digital mayhem is the draw. But if it were an audience of physicists, the laughter probably would have started in the first five minutes. You can't take any of the science seriously, although I give the filmmakers credit for creativity.

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2009 Leonid Meteor Shower: "Strong Outburst" Expected

Leonid meteors streak across the sky over Joshua Tree National Park in California on November 18, 2001. The horizontal streaks are stars and planets caught moving in the long-exposure photograph. During the 2009 Leonid meteor shower, sky-watchers—depending on where they are—may see anywhere from 30 to 300 shooting stars an hour, experts say. Photograph by Reed Saxon, AP

From National Geographic:

During the 2009 Leonid meteor shower, you may see anywhere from 30 to 300 shooting stars an hour, depending on whether you're in the right place to see the showy peak on November 17, experts predict.

With the highest number of meteors streaking across the skies around 4:45 p.m. ET, the Leonids peak will be effectively invisible for viewers in North America and Europe.

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World's Worse Case of Arsenic Poisoning Solved

Many people in Bangladesh continue to drink arsenic contaminated water (Source: USGS)

From ABC News (Australia)/AFP/Reuters:

Researchers have finally worked out what led to the widespread release of arsenic into drinking water in rural Bangladesh, affecting millions of people.

Dubbed 'the worst mass poisoning in history', the incident has puzzled scientists for decades.

Now a team publishing in Nature Geoscience say that tens of thousands of man-made ponds are to blame.

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Space Shuttle To Haul Spare Parts For Monday Afternoon Launch

Space Shuttle Atlantis on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center on Sunday in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Matt Stroshane/Getty Images

From The New York Times:

The space shuttle has often been called a pickup truck to orbit, and the next flight of the shuttle Atlantis, scheduled to launch Monday afternoon, lives up to that description.

The Atlantis is lugging up to the International Space Station a cargo bay full of spare parts, including a couple of refurbished gyroscopes, pumps, tanks for ammonia and nitrogen and piece called the “trailing umbilical system reel assembly” for the railway system that moves the station’s robotic arm.

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Love and Envy Linked By Same Hormone, Oxytocin

Studies have shown that the oxytocin hormone has a positive effect on positive feelings. The hormone is released in the body naturally during childbirth and when engaging in sexual relations. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2009) — A new study carried out at the University of Haifa has found that the hormone oxytocin, the "love hormone," which affects behaviors such as trust, empathy and generosity, also affects opposite behaviors, such as jealousy and gloating. "Subsequent to these findings, we assume that the hormone is an overall trigger for social sentiments: when the person's association is positive, oxytocin bolsters pro-social behaviors; when the association is negative, the hormone increases negative sentiments," explains Simone Shamay-Tsoory who carried out the research.

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The Beautiful Aftermath Of Tropical Storm Ida

Clouds of sediment clouded the Gulf of Mexico on Nov. 10, 2009, after Hurricane Ida came ashore. Credit: Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.

From Live Science:

One of the dramatic and often unseen effects of tropical storms and hurricanes is the muck they churn up from the ocean floor as they come ashore.

These clouds of sediment in the Gulf of Mexico were spotted Nov. 10, after Tropical Storm Ida made landfall and then moved on.

The image was made from data collected by NASA’s Aqua satellite.

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In A Malaria Hot Spot, Resistance To A Key Drug

From Time Magazine:

Every year, thousands of workers arrive at the sapphire and ruby mines of Pailin, Cambodia, risking their lives to unearth gems in the landmine-ridden territory. Soon, however, they could be the ones to put millions of others at risk. On the Thai-Cambodian border, a rogue strain of malaria has started to resist artemisinin, the only remaining effective drug in the world's arsenal against malaria's most deadly strain, Plasmodium falciparum. For six decades, malaria drugs like chloroquine and mefloquine have fallen impotent in this Southeast Asian border area, allowing stronger strains to spread to Burma, India and Africa. But this time there's no new wonder drug waiting in the wings. "It would be unspeakably dire if resistance formed to artemisinin," says Amir Attaran, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Ottawa who has written extensively on malaria issues.

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Penis Implant Brings Hopes To Thousands

From The Independent:

An unusual organ implant grown in the laboratory and rigorously tested on highly-sexed male rabbits could bring new hope to thousands of men.

Scientists in the US completely rebuilt the "stiffening" elements of the penis from donor cells - and showed that they worked.

Rabbits given the implants attempted to mate within one minute of being introduced to a female partner, and 83 per cent succeeded.

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Drink Culture: It's As Old As The Hills

From The New Scientist:

QUESTS don't come much more appealing than this. But while for most people the quest ends in the nearest bar, biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern has gone much further. He has spent decades travelling the world and journeying back in time, scraping dirty crusts from ancient cauldrons, retrieving dribbles of liquid from sealed jars and extracting residues from the pores of prehistoric pots, all in the name of investigating the origins of ancient alcoholic beverages.

After he famously identified the world's oldest wine - a resinated grape wine found in two clay jars from the Neolithic village of Hajji Firuz in Iran, in 2004 he found an even older sample in China. At a 9000-year-old site called Jiahu on the banks of the Yellow river, he recovered the remains of grog made from rice, hawthorn fruit, grapes and honey. Another of his recent revelations is that the people of Central America got drunk on fermented chocolate, giving new meaning to the word chocoholic.

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Weekend Lie-Ins For Teenagers Wards Off Obesity

The scientists, who studied children aged five to 15, found those who slept in on Saturdays and Sundays were much less likely to have weight problems Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Teenagers lying in at the weekend might seem like laziness, but it will actually help them stay slim and healthy, claim scientists.

New research suggests lazing in bed at the end of a busy week is just what children need to ward off obesity.

The scientists, who studied children aged five to 15, found those who slept in on Saturdays and Sundays were much less likely to have weight problems.

They believe the weekend snooze is crucial for school-age children to catch up on the sleep they miss out on during a busy week.

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Surf's Up! Hawaiian Sea Turtles Take To The Waves

Here comes the wave: A giant Hawaiian sea turtle prepares to ride the surf

From The Daily Mail:

He has eaten a big lunch and had a snooze on the beach. So this turtle is looking for a nice quiet journey home.

Rather than be crashed about on the breakers as he makes his way back out to sea, he ducks down to the sand for a smoother ride.

The Hawaiian green sea turtle makes the same journey every day to and from the Laniakea Beach in Hawaii, where he munches on seaweed and takes his rest.

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Tick-Tock - The Clock Is Running On Europe's Proposed Sat-Nav System, Galileo

From The BBC:

Most people have had a pop at Europe's proposed sat-nav system, Galileo, down the years. Let's face it, it's been an easy target.

Artist's impression of an IOV satellite in orbit"How not to implement a large-scale infrastructure project" is the criticism you often hear. "The Common Agricultural Policy in the sky" also became a popular jibe for a while.

Galileo will be at least five years late on its original timescale and hugely over budget.

It should have been fully operational by now and have cost the European taxpayer no more than 1.8bn euros.

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Scientists Find Key To Creating Clean Fuel From Coal And Waste

From The Guardian:

'Gasification' process enhanced to save millions of tonnes of carbon and provide energy

Millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide could be prevented from entering the atmosphere following the discovery of a way to turn coal, grass or municipal waste more efficiently into clean fuels.

Scientists have adapted a process called "gasification" which is already used to clean up dirty materials before they are used to generate electricity or to make renewable fuels. The technique involves heating organic matter to produce a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called syngas.

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The Vatican And The Internet. Working Together

The Pope said that Catholics 'must find ways to spread voices and pictures of hope through the internet'. (Jonathan Bainbridge/Reuters)

Vatican Gathers Internet Experts To Help The Holy See Get To Grips With New Media -- Times Online

Experts on the internet have gathered at the Vatican to help the Holy See improve its public relations by getting to grips with new media, including the mysteries of internet searching, downloading, hacking and social networking.

The conference, attended by European Catholic bishops, includes representatives of Google, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia. Corriere della Sera said that the bishops and Vatican officials would be given advice by a young hacker from Switzerland, named only as "Petit Frere Bruno", and an Interpol expert on cybercrime. It is organised by the Swiss-based European Episcopal Commission for Media.

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New Type Of Supernova Lacks "Oomph"

False colour image of the supernova SN2002bj (blue) on top of its host galaxy, NGC1821. Credit: D. Poznanski; W. Li; and A.V. Filippenko

From Cosmos:

SYDNEY: Astronomers have discovered a new type of supernova - the thermonuclear blast from a dying star - which happens three to four times faster than other known types.

Writing in the U.S. journal Science, the researchers, led by astronomer Dovi Poznanski from the University of California, Berkeley, said it is the fastest evolving supernova they have ever seen.

"It was three to four times faster than a standard supernova, basically disappearing within 20 days. Its brightness just dropped like a rock," he said.

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Longevity Tied to Genes That Preserve Tips of Chromosomes

Researchers have found a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that rebuilds telomeres -- the tip ends of chromosomes. (Credit: iStockphoto/Felix Möckel)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 15, 2009) — A team led by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University has found a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that rebuilds telomeres -- the tip ends of chromosomes.

The findings appear in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Female Wild Horses Stick Together

Wild mares socialize in new Zealand's Kaimanawa Mountains. Credit: Elissa Z. Cameron

From Live Science:

Wild mares that form strong social bonds with other mares produce more foals than those that don’t, researchers have found, in what may be the first documented link between “friendship” and reproductive success outside of primates.

The study followed bands of feral horses in the Kaimanawa Mountains of New Zealand over the course of three years. Elissa Z. Cameron, now at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and two colleagues computed sociality scores for 56 mares, based on parameters such as the proportion of time each animal spent near other mares and the amount of social grooming she did.

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California Droughts When Planet Warms?

From Future Pundit:

Why worry about earthquakes when we can worry about massive droughts instead?

California experienced centuries-long droughts in the past 20,000 years that coincided with the thawing of ice caps in the Arctic, according to a new study by UC Davis doctoral student Jessica Oster and geology professor Isabel Montañez.

The finding, which comes from analyzing stalagmites from Moaning Cavern in the central Sierra Nevada, was published online Nov. 5 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Global warming gets a lot of attention due to the prospects of huge low lying areas getting submerged. But big changes in regional climate - whether human caused or not - seem much more interesting to me. Such changes could occur at any time.

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On the Copenhagen Agenda, Reducing Deforestation May Still Succeed

Photo: A deforested area of rain forest in southern Para state, Brazil. JEFFERSON RUDDY / AFP / Getty

From Time Magazine:

This month, the journal Nature Geoscience published a study calculating that deforestation is responsible for about 15% of global carbon emissions, down from earlier estimates of 20% or more. Most of the world's deforestation is concentrated in a few tropical nations, like Brazil and Indonesia where trees are disappearing fast — when these trees die or are burned, they release into the atmosphere all the carbon they've sucked up while they were alive. According to the Nature Geoscience study, the problem of deforestation is becoming a lot less dire than previously thought.

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Michael Jackson Planned 'Robot Duplicate' Of Himself

From Register:

Dead megastar droid zombie blueprints offered for $1m.

Famous dead pop legend Michael Jackson intended to construct an eerily-lifelike robotic duplicate of himself, according to reports. Detailed three-dimensional scans of the deceased globo-celeb's body were made, and the super-accurate body maps are now said to be on sale for a million dollars.

The story was reported yesterday by the Daily Star, which says that the occasionally troubled dead overlord of pop had the scans made in 1996 "in a bizarre bid to build a robot twin... [Unidentified] scientists say following his death on June 25, the eerie images could be used to bring him back".

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Mini Ice Age Took Hold Of Europe In Months

Big freezes can happen fast (Image: Tancrediphoto.com/Stone/Getty)

From New Scientist:

JUST months - that's how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated.

Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or "Big Freeze". It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years.

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Telegraph.co.uk At 15: Making The News

From The Telegraph:

The machinery for putting the news online has changed a lot in the 15 years that Telegraph.co.uk has been live, says Ian Douglas.

In the summer of 1999, when the web was nine years old, the Telegraph's website was almost five and I arrived at Canary Wharf for my first shift. Newcomers were paired with someone with more experience to learn the ropes.

Check the text, paste some tags in here and here, add links to the bottom of the page, then send it off, I was told. 'Send it off where,' I asked. 'To Overlord,' was the ominous reply. Overlord was the batch process built by Tim Brown, architect of the early online Telegraph efforts. Tim was usually to be found cropping photographs in the corner on night shifts, but two years before I arrived he had built the newspaper's first web content management system in his spare time. Overlord took the stories that had been worked on throughout the evening and turned them into web pages to be published on a server sitting in a cupboard a few doors down.

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The Giant Iceberg That Went Walkabout... Towards The Coast Of Australia

Should that be there? A giant iceberg is seen off Macquarie Island which lies halfway between Antarctica and Australia. Scientists say it is unusual to see one so far north

From The Daily Mail:

Australia is known for sunny beaches, surfers, and blistering Outback heat.

So scientists were a bit taken aback when they spotted this giant iceberg floating near an island Down Under.

Australian Antarctic Division researchers were working on Macquarie Island when they first saw the iceberg last Thursday about about five miles off the island. It is rare to see an iceberg floating so far north of Antarctica, researchers said.

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Apec Leaders Drop Climate Target

From The BBC:

World leaders meeting in Singapore have said it will not be possible to reach a climate change deal ahead of next month's UN conference in Denmark.

After a two-day Asia-Pacific summit, they vowed to work towards an "ambitious outcome" in Copenhagen.

But the group dropped a target to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, which was outlined in an earlier draft.

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Army Corps of Engineers Now Required to Consider Climate Change in All Future Projects

Flood Plans Here's to keeping above water Army Corps of Engineers

From Popular Science:

Worst-case planning never hurt anybody, and certainly not federal water projects that cost millions of dollars and could be easily undone by climate change and rising sea levels. A new policy now requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to plan for future climate change when designing plans for flood control or other projects.

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Can Alternative Energy Save The Economy And The Climate?

Photo: RENEWABLE WINDFALL: Utility companies are investing in diverse renewable energy projects with or without success at Copenhagen. ISTOCKPHOTO/JLGUTIERREZ

From Scientific American:

The "new energy" economy rolls forward even as hopes for an international deal to combat climate change at Copenhagen shift into reverse.

BRIGHTON, Colo. - The low-carbon economy has already arrived on the windy prairie north of this fast-growing Denver 'burb. It's here that Danish wind-turbine giant Vestas converted 298 acres of hayfield into the West's largest turbine factory - and turned Brighton into a magnet for "green" energy companies.

It's part of a $1 billion investment by the company in the United States, what Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter touts as a "new energy economy."

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Watch A 2006 Bugatti Veyron Crash On Video

2006 Bugatti Veyron Crashes On Video, Posted To Facebook -- Christian Science Monitor

Facebook video of a 2006 Bugatti Veyron crash shows the car making a wall of water as it hits a Texas lagoon. No one was injured in the crash.

It’s one of the rarest cars on the road, and Galveston, Tex. medical school student Joe Garza saw it crash on his way to get groceries.

He and a friend were driving off of Galveston Island when they pulled up alongside the $2 million French supercar, believed to be one of just 15 in the US. When they pulled up to the sporty two-seater, Garza whipped out his camera and started shooting. That’s when the unthinkable happened.

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Cocaine And Pepper Spray – A Lethal Mix?

Could be fatal (Image: Miguel Villagran/Getty)

From New Scientist:

DEATHS in US police custody during the early 1990s may have been the result of an interaction between capsaicin, the key ingredient in pepper sprays, and psychostimulant drugs, an experiment in mice suggests.

If the two have a fatal interaction in people then police forces might have to rethink their use of pepper spray as a non-lethal weapon, says John Mendelson of the Addiction and Pharmacology Research Laboratory at St Luke's Hospital in San Francisco, who led the mouse research.

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El Niño Gaining Strength

Click for large image - This image was created with data collected by the U.S./French satellite during a 10-day period centered on November 1, 2009. It shows a red and white area in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific that is about 10 to 18 centimeters (4 to 7 inches) above normal. Image credit: NASA/JPL Ocean Surface Topography Team

From Watts Up With That?

From the “WUWT never reports on anything warm department”, JPL reports El Niño looks like it is on schedule to make a Christmas appearance as “The Boy”. The good news is that it will likely help California’s water situation this year.

From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

El Niño is experiencing a late-fall resurgence. Recent sea-level height data from the NASA/French Space Agency Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 oceanography satellite show that a large-scale, sustained weakening of trade winds in the western and central equatorial Pacific during October has triggered a strong, eastward-moving wave of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave.

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Google's Replacement for HTTP Protocol To Make Web Browsing Twice As Fast

Faster Internet Google's Chromium group wants to boost your Internet browsing Google

From Popular Science:

The proposed rewrite of the web's backbone comes with both benefits and caveats.
Google has scarcely stopped for a breather since launching its cloud-based Chrome OS as an alternative to PC and Mac operating systems. Now its Chromium group has announced an effort to replace the traditional HTTP web browser language with a new protocol that supposedly boosts Internet browsing by up to 55 percent.

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Rat Made Supersmart -- Similar Boost Unsafe in Humans?

Scientists have tripled the memory of a rat named Hobbie-J (not pictured) by enhancing a single gene, suggesting that similar therapies may someday aid—or bedevil—humans, according to an October 2009 study. Photograph by Vincent J. Musi, National Geographic Stock

From National Geographic:

By modifying a single gene, scientists have made Hobbie-J the smartest rat in the world, a new study says.

A similar gene tweak might boost human brainpower too, but scientists warn that there is such a thing as being too smart for your own good.

For years scientifically smartened rats have skittered through movies and books such as Flowers for Algernon and The Secret of NIMH. But Hobbie-J is anything but fiction.

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The 10 Weirdest Physics Facts, From Relativity To Quantum Physics

Albert Einstein, who pointed out that the faster you move,
the heavier you get Photo: AFP/GETTY

From The Telegraph:

People who think science is dull are wrong. Here are 10 reasons why.

Physics is weird. There is no denying that. Particles that don’t exist except as probabilities; time that changes according to how fast you’re moving; cats that are both alive and dead until you open a box.

We’ve put together a collection of 10 of the strangest facts we can find, with the kind help of cosmologist and writer Marcus Chown, author of We Need To Talk About Kelvin, and an assortment of Twitter users.

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Dinosaur Discovered In South Africa... And May Reveal How They Grew To Be So Big

Bridging the gap: A graphic released by Australian paleontologist Adam Yates shows the newly discovered dinosaur species - with the fossil bones found by the team marked on the outline

From The Daily Mail:

A new dinosaur named the 'Earth Claw' has been discovered in South Africa.

The discovery of the Aardonyx celestae marks a breakthrough in understanding how creatures began walking on all fours - and why they grew so large, scientists claimed yesterday.

Researchers believe the near-perfect skeleton bridges the gap between the earliest two-legged specimens and those who later walked on four limbs.

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Two Earth-sized Bodies With Oxygen Rich Atmospheres Found, But They're Stars Not Planets

Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopy of this inconspicuous blue object -- SDSS1102+2054 -- reveals it to be an extremely rare stellar remnant: a white dwarf with an oxygen-rich atmosphere (Credit: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2009) — Astrophysicists at the University of Warwick and Kiel University have discovered two earth sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres -- however there is a bit of a disappointing snag for anyone looking for a potential home for alien life, or even a future home for ourselves, as they are not planets but are actually two unusual white dwarf stars.

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Humans Still Evolving As Our Brains Shrink

Weighing in at an average of 2.7 pounds (1,200 grams), the human brain packs a whopping 100 billion neurons. Every minute, about three soda-cans worth of blood flow through the brain. Credit: dreamstime.

From Live Science:

Evolution in humans is commonly thought to have essentially stopped in recent times. But there are plenty of examples that the human race is still evolving, including our brains, and there are even signs that our evolution may be accelerating.

Shrinking brains

Comprehensive scans of the human genome reveal that hundreds of our genes show evidence of changes during the past 10,000 years of human evolution.

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Medpedia To Best The More Democratic Wikipedia?

Image: The nearly year-old Medpedia grows up with the addition of three key features. (Credit: Medpedia)

From CNET News:

Medpedia, a collaborative project for medical information launched in February, is getting beyond the medical-data basics as it adds answers, alerts, and analysis.

Founded on the noble and semipractical system of providing free online medical information generated for and by physicians, journals, schools, patients, and more, Medpedia's three stated goals are to be collaborative, interdisciplinary, and transparent. The idea is to maximize knowledge and minimize the kind of screwing around that continually threatens the efficacy of other wiki-based projects. Of course, the extent to which this is successful hinges on the quality, integrity, and transparency of the editors.

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Quantum 'Trampoline' To Test Gravity

From The New Scientist:

IT'S the world's smallest trampoline. Bouncing atoms with lasers could make ultra-precise measurements of gravity.

To test theories such as general relativity, the strength of gravity is measured precisely using ensembles of supercold atoms falling in a vacuum chamber. These ensembles are called "Bose-Einstein condensates".

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How The Brain Hard-Wires Us To Love Google, Twitter, And Texting. And Why That's Dangerous.

From Slate:

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."

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National Security Agency's Surveillance Data Could Fill Two States by 2015

Data, Delicious Data I see you Warner Bros.

From Popular Science:

Where will the NSA house its secret yottabytes?

We always knew that the National Security Agency collects a lot of surveillance data from satellites and by other means, but we never quite imagined it was this much: the NSA estimates it will have enough data by 2015 to fill a million datacenters spread across the equivalent combined area of Delaware and Rhode Island. The NSA wants to store yottabytes of data, and one yottabyte comes to 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB.

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Friday The 13th Superstitions Get Rare Workout In 2009

Traditionally an omen of ill fortune, a black cat crosses a Palermo, Italy, street in an undated photo. Unlike its feline fellow resident of the bad luck hall of fame, Friday the 13th doesn't have nine lives—it can't even exist more than three times a year, thanks to the eccentricities of the calendar. Photograph by William Albert Allard/NGS

From National Geographic:

Today, Friday the 13th superstitions are fraying nerves for the third time in 2009.

Luckily for paraskevidekatriaphobics—people who harbor Friday the 13th superstitions—three Friday the 13ths are the yearly maximum, at least as long as we continue to mark time with the Gregorian calendar, which Pope Gregory XIII ordered the Catholic Church to adopt in 1582.

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Pursuit Of Pleasure Drives Human Decisions

Chemical in the brain plays a key role in choices

From The Telegraph:

The pursuit of pleasure drives the everyday decisions that direct people's lives, research suggests.

Scientists discovered that a reward chemical in the brain plays a key role in choices such as where to go on holiday.

They believe the ''pleasure principle'' may be at the heart of most human decision making.

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There Is More Water On The Moon Than What We Thought

Lunar Impactor Finds Clear Evidence Of Water Ice On Moon -- Wired Science

There is water on the moon, NASA confirmed today, and lots of it.

In the first look at results from the LCROSS mission, which sent a probe crashing into the Cabeus crater near the moon’s south pole, NASA’s main investigator said their instruments clearly detected water, despite the underwhelming plume.

Within the field of view of their instruments, the team measured approximately 220 pounds or about 26 gallons of water. Next, the team will try to understand how the compounds they saw in the plume relate to what’s actually embedded in the lunar regolith at the bottom of the permanently shadowed crater.

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More News On The Discovery Of Water On the Moon

NASA discovers 'significant' amount of water on moon -- Washington Post
NASA sees "significant quantities" of water on the moon -- Ars technica
Splash! NASA moon strikes found significant water -- AP
Water Found on Moon, Scientists Say -- New York Times
NASA Moon Crash Found 'Significant Amount' of Water -- FOX News
Water found on Moon after Nasa 'bombing' mission -- The Telegraph

Rosetta Probe Makes Final Earth Flyby As It Sling-Shots Towards Speeding Comet

From The Daily Mail:

This spectacular image of our home planet was captured by Europe's Rosetta probe as it made its third and final flyby of Earth.

The outline of Antarctica is visible under the clouds in the illuminated crescent. Pack ice in front of the coastline caused the very bright spots on the image.

The Earth image was taken by the-board camera OSIRIS yesterday, from a distance of 393,000 miles.

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Pollination In The Pre-Flower-Power Era

The long, tubular proboscis (arrow, left image) sported by some species of scorpionflies suggests that the insects were pollinating ancient plants including conifers (right) millions of years before flowers evolved. Credit: Photo: Wenying Wu; Illustration: Mary Parrish/National Museum of Natural History

From Science News:

Scorpionflies may have aided plant reproduction long before blossoms evolved.

An obscure group of scorpionflies with specialized mouthparts may have pollinated ancient plants millions of years before flowers evolved, a new study suggests.

Fossils indicate that before flowers evolved about 130 million years ago, most plants with seeds were wind-pollinated. Yet the pollen grains of some plants that lived in the prefloral era were too big to be wind-dispersed, say Conrad Labandeira, a paleoentomologist at Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Also, he notes, pollen receptors were hidden deep within some of those plants and wouldn’t have been readily exposed to windborne pollen.

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ESA Spacecraft May Help Unravel Cosmic Mystery

Cassini-Huygens swings by Earth and accelerates towards Saturn. (Credit: ESA)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 13, 2009) — When Europe's comet chaser Rosetta swings by Earth on Nov. 13 for a critical gravity assist, tracking data will be collected to precisely measure the satellite's change in orbital energy. The results could help unravel a cosmic mystery that has stumped scientists for two decades.

Since 1990, scientists and mission controllers at ESA and NASA have noticed that their spacecraft sometimes experience a strange variation in the amount of orbital energy they exchange with Earth during planetary swingbys. The unexplained variation is noticed as a tiny difference in speed gained or lost during the swingby when comparing that predicted by fundamental physics and that actually measured after the event.

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Friday The 13th: Your Luck Is About To Change

From Live Science:

If Friday the 13th is unlucky, then 2009 has been an unusually unlucky year. But your luck is about to change. Today is the last of three Friday the 13ths you'll have to endure this year.

The other two were in February and March. Such a rare triple-threat occurs only once every 11 years.

The origin of the link between bad luck and Friday the 13th is murky. The whole thing might date to Biblical times (the 13th guest at the Last Supper betrayed Jesus). By the Middle Ages, both Friday and the number 13 were considered bearers of bad fortune. In modern times, the superstition permeates society.

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Tiny Mutation Led To Human Speech

Human speech is thought to have emerged 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, some five million years after chimps and humans took divergent paths on the tree of evolution. Photo: iStockphoto

From Cosmos:

PARIS: Two minute evolutionary changes in a gene that is otherwise identical in humans and chimps could explain why we have fully fledged power of speech while other primates do not.

The findings may also point to new drug targets for hard-to-treat diseases that disrupt speech, such as schizophrenia and autism, said a study detailed in the British journal Nature today.

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Behind The CDC's Soaring H1N1 Death Totals

From Time Magazine:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released on Thursday updated estimates of the number of H1N1 infections and deaths in the U.S. According to the new figures, about 4,000 Americans, including 540 children, have died of H1N1 flu, and 2 million people have been infected since April, when the novel flu virus first surfaced. The new death toll, which encompasses data through Oct. 17, represents a tripling of CDC estimates issued just last week; the number of deaths in children quadruples last week's figures. But the increase does not mean that the disease has suddenly become more deadly or severe, according to health officials, who say they are not surprised by the higher numbers.

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Undercurrent Of Doubt Over Electric Motors

A loophole in EU targets on cutting CO2 emissions means that the more electric cars are produced, the more SUVs manufacturers can sell. Reuters

From The Independent:

Greener power generation needed if electric vehicles are really to reduce emissions.

Electric cars , which emit no carbon dioxide from their tailpipe, are not the answer some people think they are to environmental transport problems, a new report claims today.

The idea that a wholesale switch to electric transport would automatically reduce CO2 emissions and dependence on oil is a myth, says the analysis prepared for the Environmental Transport Association (ETA).

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His Facebook Status Now? ‘Charges Dropped’

Facebook has become more than a diversion for Rodney Bradford. Damiano Beltrami

From The New York Times:

Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in indecipherable street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

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Mars Rover Battles For Its Life

Last chance to lift NASA's spirit (Image: Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

From New Scientist:

NASA's twin Mars rovers have outlasted their planned three-month missions for so long that they seem indestructible. Nearly six years on, their presence on the Red Planet is taken for granted, as if they are immutable parts of the Martian landscape.

But we may soon have to confront a new reality. Spirit, which has always suffered more hardships than Opportunity, is facing its toughest challenge yet. When New Scientist went to press, the rover was set to begin a risky push to free itself from a sand trap it has been mired in for six months. Mission engineers say it may not survive the attempt. "She's in a very precarious situation, and we don't know for sure if we're going to get her out," says rover driver Scott Maxwell of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

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