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Bin Laden's cook pleads guilty at Guantanamo

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 17:27
MIAMI (Reuters) - A Sudanese prisoner accused of guarding Osama bin Laden and helping him escape U.S. forces in Afghanistan pleaded guilty at Guantanamo on Wednesday, giving the Obama administration its first conviction in the controversial war crimes court.


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Toolik Field Station: Remote research camp or exclusive resort?

Scientific American Online - Wed, 2010-07-07 17:00

Editor's Note: Vienna, Austria-based science writer Chelsea Wald is taking part in a two-week Marine Biological Laboratory journalism fellowship at Toolik Field Station , an environmental research post inside the Arctic Circle. To see the current conditions in Toolik, check out the Webcam .

Doing science in the Arctic is hard. Polar field researchers can spend most of their time surviving, with little time left over for science. But that's not the case at Toolik Field Station, I discovered during my two-week stay, which ended last Thursday. There, I was never hungry, rarely cold, and always in good company. No wonder some scientists affectionately call Toolik "the Hilton of the North." [More]

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Sports Results Affect Voter Behavior

Scientific American Online - Wed, 2010-07-07 16:28

When it comes to elections, sometimes we vote with our heads and sometimes with our hearts. But scientists at Stanford say we might also be voting with our pompoms. Because they’ve found that our behavior at the polls is influenced by the results of local sporting events, work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . [Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, http://bit.ly/cURQ2E ] [More]

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Solar-power plane heads into first night flight

Scientific American Online - Wed, 2010-07-07 15:58

By Vincent Fribault

PAYERNE, Switzerland, July 7 (Reuters) - A solar-powered aircraft designed to fly round the clock without traditional aviation fuel or polluting emissions headed on Wednesday into its crucial first night flight.

[More]
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EPA gives final "no" to Texas refinery permits

Scientific American Online - Wed, 2010-07-07 15:48

By Erwin Seba

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has told Texas pollution regulators that flexible permits issued by the state since 1994 for refineries, chemical plants and power plants did not meet the standards set by the U.S. Clean Air Act.

[More]
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Obama bypasses Senate to fill Medicare post

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 15:21
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama appointed health expert Donald Berwick on Wednesday to run the Medicare and Medicaid programs that provide care to seniors and the poor, bypassing the Senate to fill a key job over Republican objections.


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Luminary Lineage: Did an Ancient Supernova Trigger the Solar System's Birth?

Scientific American Online - Wed, 2010-07-07 15:00

One star dies, another is born. The remains of the old are gathered up, at least in some small measure, to become part of the new. That is the astronomical circle of life, the reason that stars have evolved through the eons, each generation incorporating new elements synthesized in the stars that came before. Unlike the earliest stars of hydrogen and helium, stars nowadays contain heavier elements passed down to them by their predecessors, such as carbon, iron and oxygen. [More]

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UK inquiry finds emails do not undermine climate science

Scientific American Online - Wed, 2010-07-07 14:12

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - Emails stolen from one of the world's leading climate change research centers contained no evidence to undermine the case for manmade global warming, a report found on Wednesday.

[More]
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When I'm 64: Identification with 'Future Self' Helps with Successful Financial Habits

Scientific American Online - Wed, 2010-07-07 14:00

How much money do you put away each month toward retirement? Maybe you sock away all you can, already dreaming of that Florida condo. Or maybe you can’t even imagine where you’ll be then, what you’ll want to use the money for, even what you’ll be like: when you think about yourself far in the future, it’s almost like thinking about someone else. A growing body of work suggests that the more you feel your future self is really you, the more you’ll put in his or her--whoops, your--bank account.

When making decisions, we often treat our future self the way we would treat another person, found a study in 2008 by Princeton psychologist Emily Pronin. People in the study often shied away from doing something helpful but unpleasant when they had to do it right at that moment. But when their help was needed a few months or a year down the line, they were more likely to sign up--just as likely as they were to suggest that someone else should help out.

[More]
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No Country Is an Island

Scientific American Online - Wed, 2010-07-07 13:00

This spring I was stranded in Europe for a week, a minor victim of Mother Nature, as most airports on the continent were closed after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. This remote natural event did not result in a huge human death toll but still caused hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue for almost all the world’s major airlines. More important, it disrupted millions of people’s lives.

Such is the nature of our modern interconnected society, where a catastrophe in one corner of the world can nonetheless affect almost immediately the livelihood and well-being of people around the globe.

[More]
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Rights wronged: North Pacific right whale nearly extinct in Bering Sea

Scientific American Online - Wed, 2010-07-07 13:00

One of the world's only two populations of North Pacific right whale ( Eubalaena japonica ) has declined to the point where it will probably not survive. [More]

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Israel prepared to take steps for peace talks: Netanyahu

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 12:44
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israel is prepared to take additional steps to ease Palestinian movement in the West Bank in a bid to coax Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas into direct peace talks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday.


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Manuel Noriega sentenced to 7 years

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 12:32
PARIS (Reuters) - Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was sentenced to seven years' jail in France on Wednesday for laundering millions of euros into French bank accounts and properties in the 1980s.


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UK inquiry finds emails do not undermine climate science

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 12:15
LONDON (Reuters) - Emails stolen from one of the world's leading climate change research centers contained no evidence to undermine the case for manmade global warming, a report found on Wednesday.


Categories: Science News

Iran says atom plant set for launch after final test

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 10:18
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's first nuclear power plant is set to be launched by late September now that an important final test has been carried out at the reactor, the head of the Islamic state's Atomic Energy Organization said on Wednesday.


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Obama urges level playing field with China on trade

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 10:06
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama called for a level playing field for U.S. companies in China on Wednesday and pledged to push ahead with free trade deals with three other nations.


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U.S.-Russia may seek spy swap to free agents

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 09:46
MOSCOW/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Russia and the United States appeared to be considering a spy swap on Wednesday to send home a ring of suspected Russian agents whose arrest cast an unwelcome Cold War chill over warming diplomatic ties.


Categories: Science News

Soldier charged over leaked video of attack

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 09:33
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. military said on Tuesday it had charged a soldier in connection with the leak of a classified video showing a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists.


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Germany and Spain in fight for final

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 09:24
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Germany and Spain do battle on Wednesday for the right to meet the Netherlands in the World Cup final, in a semi widely expected to be one of the most exciting clashes of the tournament.


Categories: Science News

NATO airstrike kills five Afghan soldiers

Reuters - Wed, 2010-07-07 09:07
KABUL (Reuters) - Five Afghan government soldiers were accidentally killed and two others wounded in a pre-dawn NATO airstrike on Wednesday, prompting condemnation from the country's government.


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