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Creative Commons founder, free information advocate and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig announced today the formation of an exploratory committee looking in to a potential bid for a U.S. Congress seat. He announced his maybe-decision (with a more finalized announcement coming March 1) today on a new Web site, lessig08.org.
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We told you about a new ultra-black material back in January and guess who was the first group to come knocking on the researchers' door?
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What will San Francisco look like 100 years from now? According to the winning entry in a "city of the future" contest, residents will live in a forest of sinuous towers.
IwamotoScott Architecture took home the $10,000 prize for its "Hydro-Net" design, which also envisions an underground web of carbon-nanotube-walled tunnels where people travel in hydrogen-fueled hover-cars.
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For years, mothers have been divided sharply on the issue of bottle-feeding versus breastfeeding. Studies have long supported the notion that breastfeeding provides infants with benefits like improved immunity to diseases, better maternal bonding and a plethora of important nutrients.
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Welcome to the prey’s-eye view of the three-spined stickleback. Mark Purnell, a research fellow at the University of Leicester in England, stained the fish to highlight the skeleton and examined surface textures on the teeth. Each tooth is about the width of a human hair, and its texture indicates what the fish ate.
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More than a billion people worldwide live in poverty—not a gadget hound's I-can't-afford-an-iPhone poverty, but devastating, living-on-a-dollar-a-day poverty. These folks have trouble paying for food, staying healthy, getting an education, and doing many of the other daily things you and I take for granted. In future postings of this column, we'll discuss new tech that tackles each of these specific problems. But to kick things off, let’s look at a new program that aims at the most obvious problem of the poor They need more money.
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There's just no nice way to say it You're stupid with your money. You may fancy yourself a shrewd investor, but if you have normal human instincts—if you stand up and cheer at sporting events, if you follow the crowd toward the exit at the theater—then you have the instincts that make investors alternate between delirious greed and inconsolable fear. Like most of your peers, you are wired to buy high and sell low, and that's why Richard Peterson is about to become one very rich psychiatrist.
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“I don’t know of another place in the universe that would have this intensity of light.” That’s a quote from physicist Karl Krushelnick of the University of Michigan. It might sound a bit bold, but he and his team believe they’ve developed a laser beam with record-smashing intensity. According to the scientists, the HERCULES laser is so powerful that it’s roughly equivalent to concentrating all the sunlight heading towards Earth on a single grain of sand.
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Here's a mildly reassuring fact from today's AAAS news briefing on nuclear forensics There are no known cases of a finished nuclear weapon being stolen or sold on the black market. But raw nuclear materials are a different story. In the past fifteen years, more than 1,300 cases of nuclear trafficking have been registered. Anita Nilsson of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a member of today's panel, said that most of these cases were "innocent," but some are anything but. The 400 grams of weapons-ready plutonium seized at the Munich airport in 1994?
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The waters around Antarctica are an anomaly; they're home to a marine ecosystem straight out of the Paleozoic era (the period spanning from 541 million to 251 million years ago). But global warming is about to change that, according to research presented today at AAAS. The reason for the preponderance of ancient organisms is the cold water Predators that are capable of breaking the skeletons of their prey—modern fish, sharks, skates, and so on—simply can't live there. In fact, the most vicious predator in the Antarctic marine ecosystem right now is either a big sea star or an acid-oozing worm.
Those waters are warming, though, and possibly faster than the rest of the world's oceans.
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