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POPSScientists Develop New Computational Method To Investigate Origin Of Life "Retroelements are an ancient and highly diverse class of proteins; therefore, they provide a rigorous benchmark for us to test our approach. We are happy with the results we derived, even though our method is in an early stage," said Patterson. The team plans to make the algorithms that they used in their method available to others as open-source software that is freely available on the Web. Scientists map out the evolutionary histories of organisms by comparing their genetic and/or protein sequences. Those organisms that are closely related and share a recent common ancestor have greater degrees of similarity among their sequences.
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POPSA Novel Bacterial Species Is Found Trapped In 120,000-year-old Ice The ultra-small size of the new species could be one explanation for why it was able to survive for so long in the Greenland glacier. Called Chryseobacterium greenlandensis, the species is related genetically to certain bacteria found in fish, marine mud, and the roots of some plants. The organism is one of only about 10 scientifically described new species originating from polar ice and glaciers.
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POPSWaste water plus bacteria make hydrogen Hydrogen at the moment, is generally produced from Hydrocarbons and can also produce greenhouse gases. The Bacteria produce hydrogen from vinegar in a way that is environmentally friendly,and is a method of using renewable organic material, It uses 10% of the energy that is used in Hydrolysis, where hydrogen is produced only using an electric current
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POPS'Tis the Season of Election Dirty Tricks: Scaring Student Voters Other underhanded tactics seek to confuse voters about their voter registration. In 2006, voters in Virginia reportedly received fake voicemail messages from the state elections commission claiming that the voters were registered in another state and could be criminally charged if they cast their vote in Virginia.
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POPSPhysicists Demonstrate How Information Can Escape From Black Holes Hawking's idea was generally accepted by physicists until the late 1990s, when many began to doubt the assertion. Even Hawking himself renounced the idea in 2004. Yet no one, until now, has been able to provide a plausible mechanism for how information might escape from a black hole. A team of physicists led by Abhay Ashtekar, Holder of the Eberly Family Chair in Physics and director of the Penn State Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, now has discovered such a mechanism. Broadly, their findings expand space-time beyond its assumed size, thus providing room for information to reappear.
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POPSMysterious Bee Deaths Linked To Pesticides? Comment hsutton wrote: Pesticides "in and of itself is probably not the cause of the honeybee's dying. What are you feeding them? If the answer is a combination of high fructose corn syrup and water then it should be noted that some time back a genetic modifier introduced into "corn" is the real culprit. This modifier causes the corn to make it's own "pesticide". Going back to feeding them real Sugar/Water will stop most of the problem. Monsanto and other companies are putting these things in 90% of the vegetable crops in the US, and have been for some time. Whatever it's doing to the honey bees it will also eventually do to us. If this trend continues human beings will start dying from "unknown" causes sometime in the very near future too. Comment by subscriber:hsutton
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POPSHouston, We Have A Problem... A majority of Americans cling to a fairy tale to describe the origins of man (and women). To have their fantasies threatened evidently scares them to death. Because of this threat to their faith they lie without blinking an eye. Using their twisted logic that religion is not their motivation for squeezing Intelligent Design into science class falls apart when applied to other disciplines. There is no national push to teach astrology as an alternative to astronomy. There is no push to teach alchemy alongside chemistry. The only push is to teach Creationism (in the thin guise of ID) alongside evolution. And the drumbeat of lies from the IDers continues. Their discredited "science" (see Dover Penn trial) continues to be their best hope of getting god into the classroom and they won't stop until this is accomplished.
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POPSPenn State Rife With Voting Problems Why is it so hard to have a reliable voting scheme... unless it is intentional. Don't officials understand that eyes are upon them? Could it be simply that they don't give a crap about the public they are supposed to be servants to, and that they know that things are so out of whack that their misdeeds, intentional or not, have no repercussions?
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POPSThe science of terror To study ‘terror’ one needs not only to examine the insurgents in occupied countries, but also the terrorists at home, the ones who hide behind the jingoism and rhetoric of Western goodness while occupying countries and killing those that get in the way of their military, political, and economic goals. The neocon mind would be a great place to start. The mind -- neocon or not -- is a difficult thing to study. The mind of terrorism is equally complex and for it to have any validity it needs to begin at home where much of the global terror begins.
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