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POPSNew spaceship force field makes Mars trip possible Now this has been confirmed in the laboratory in the UK using apparatus originally built to work on fusion. By recreating in miniature a tiny piece of the Solar Wind, scientists working in the laboratory were able to confirm that a small "hole" in the Solar Wind is all that would be needed to keep the astronauts safe on their journey to our nearest neighbours. Dr. Ruth Bamford, one of the lead researchers at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, said, "These initial experiments have shown promise and that it may be possible to shield astronauts from deadly space weather".
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POPSThe Big Question: Do electronic books threaten the future of traditional publishing? A tipping point for e-books could come when content starts to be made available on the next-generation of mobile phones. the author Toby Young says: "The great thing about electronic books is that in the long run they will benefit writers, creating an easier way to enable first-time authors to get their work in front of the public. That will be a revolutionary change." Is this the end of the book as we know it? Yes...
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POPSThe Promise and Power of RNA RNA interference, or RNAi, discovered only about 10 years ago, is attracting huge interest for its seeming ability to knock out disease-causing genes. There are already at least six RNAi drugs being tested in people, for illnesses including cancer and an eye disease. And while there are still huge challenges to surmount, that number could easily double in the coming year. “I’ve never found a gene that couldn’t be down-regulated by RNAi,” said Tod Woolf, president of RXi Pharmaceuticals, one of the many companies that have sprung up in the last few years to pursue RNA-based medicines. The two scientists credited with discovering the basic mechanism of RNA interference won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2006, only eight years after publishing their seminal paper. And three scientists credited with discovering the closely related micro-RNA in the 1990s won Lasker Awards for medical research this year.
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POPSNewt protein makes legs grow back They've found the protein that causes immature cells, similar to stem cells, to multiply, and grow to reform the missing limbs in newts. It is hoped understanding of this process may lead to it's application as a regrowth factor in mammals.
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POPS"'Junk science' as front-page fact" more (full at source): In a lecture entitled The Three Wise Monkeys and the Marketplace of Ideas: Censorship in a Free Society , Lord Justice Sedley pointed to a story published this summer that reported as a fact that kidney stones affected one adult male in four – “a level of risk which might well send you to your doctor for preventive treatment, but which, it turns out, was made up by the PR firm which represents a pharmaceutical company with an interest in such treatment”.
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POPSNo Gay Sex, Please; We're from Virginia The Minneapolis-St. Paul area has a large and vibrant gay nightlife, where club managers said many Republicans were expected this week. "We've had quite a spike, mostly people who are curious come down and they wind up leaving and having a good time," said Robert Parker, the manager of the Gay 90's club in downtown Minneapolis which features a popular "drag queen" show. "Mississippi, Alabama, California, Arizona, I've seen people from all over, said Parker.
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POPSNew Photos from Abu Ghraib Just another one of those days that I am sick to be an American. How can people do this? They are amassing so much bad karma for themselves. Very disturbing
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POPSOur Hackable Democracy Last month, Princeton researchers submitted a report based on their study of the machines' security, part of an ongoing lawsuit filed by Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic against the state government aimed at decertifying Sequoia machines. The results of the study still aren’t known: A judge placed a gag order on the researchers that prevents them from publishing their work. "Any reasonably talented security researcher can compromise these machines" In fact, California's study of Sequoia's machines found that any poll worker with access to Sequoia's machines could quickly change the results of an election. In 2006, researchers at Princeton found that a Diebold machine could be hacked in less than a minute. There's a possibility their votes will be hacked, lost or miscounted. But that's no excuse not to vote, argues Smith. "You'll just have to take a chance," she says. "The only way to be sure your vote won't count is not to show up.
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POPSWomen Seeing Women 'Women Seeing Women: A Pictorial History of Women's Photography from Julia Margaret Cameron to Annie Leibovitz' (Haus Publishing, £30), edited by Lothar Schirmer, published on 30 November, is available from Telegraph Books.
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POPSScribd - online publishing One of early problems Scribd encountered was that there was no good format for displaying its documents, as formats like PDF, Microsoft Word, and PowerPoint were designed before the Internet existed. In response, Scribd created iPaper, the first document format built for the web. Like YouTube's player did for video formats, iPaper standardizes all document formats into one viewer that can be seamlessly integrated into webpages. Recognizing the value of this technology, Scribd released the Scribd Platform, which allows any website to use iPaper to display their documents.
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