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POPSStudy backs theory Hobbit was distinct species While some scientists have argued the hobbit's head was unusually small because she suffered from a disease, Dr Jungers and Dr Baab found no resemblance between her brain shape and that of modern humans with abnormally small heads.
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POPS'Unfriend': dictionary's word of the year To spite the naysayers, there is at least one case in which men (and women) of letters will be happy. According to the Scrabble website, "unfriend" is an acceptable word, worth 12 points when played on blank spaces.
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POPSBen Franklin on Global Warming In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson opined in his “Notes on Virginia” that “both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged,” expressing views articulated as early as 1721 by Cotton Mather: “Our cold is much moderated since the opening and clearing of our woods, and the winds do not blow roughly as in the days of our fathers, when water, cast up into the air, would commonly be turned into ice before it came to the ground.”
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POPSA new look for Google Translate We also have a new input transliteration feature for Arabic, Persian or Hindi. If you want to translate from one of these languages, but can't type the script on your keyboard, our input transliteration feature will allow you to type words as they sound and convert them to native script.
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POPSConservation 2.0 Paula Kahumbu, executive director of WildlifeDirect, on a movement powerful enough to reverse catastrophic species loss in Africa and around the world.
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POPS The Guinea Pig Diaries A.J. Jacobs, the man who spent a year reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and another year following every rule prescribed by the Biblesubsequently turning his experiences into the hilarious New York Times bestsellers The Know-It-All and The Year of Living Biblically -- chronicles his recent adventures in extreme living in The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment. With fearlessness, Jacobs immerses himself in month-long exercises in self-illumination -- from assuming the identity of a beautiful young woman to living a life of total honesty. VIDEO on Source. In Jacobs' quest for self-improvement, he embarks on nine projects that deal with every aspect of modern life: Love, work, fame, truth and, of course, nudity. The results are equal parts funny and insightful.
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POPSKashmir - Journey To Freedom In a rare look at the region, Udi Aloni filmed his protagonists as they launched their new struggle. Finally refused re-entry by the Indian government, Aloni was forced to tell the rest of this story far from the land and people he had come to admire.
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POPS1 Million Spiders Make Golden Silk for Rare Cloth Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.
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POPSBBC Save the Sounds What is BBC World Service?World Service Newsroom We are the world’s leading international broadcaster providing programmes and content for radio, television, online and mobile phones in English and 31 other languages. Hundreds of reporters and specialist correspondents bring impartial news reports, documentaries and analysis from around the globe. We also offer a rich mix of other programming from arts, business and culture to drama, science and sport. BBC World Service is one part of the collected international-facing television, radio and online services which form BBC Global News.
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POPSSmall Wonders: Finalists From the Nikon Small World Competition Small World is regarded as the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope. For over 30 years, Nikon has rewarded the world's best photomicrographers who make critically important scientific contributions to life sciences, bio-research and materials science.
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POPS'Spider pill' A new way to scan for diseases, including cancer of the stomach or colon, using a remote contol ‘spider pill’ camera with moving legs, has been hailed by scientists in Italy.
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POPSGenome-wide study of autism published in Nature "The biggest challenge to finding the genes that contribute to autism is having a large and well studied group of patients and their family members, both for primary discovery of genes and to test and verify the discovery candidates," said Aravinda Chakravarti, professor of medicine, pediatrics and molecular biology and genetics at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins, and one of the study's senior authors. "This latest finding would not have been possible without these many research groups and consortia pooling together their patient resources. Of course, they would not have been possible without the genomic scanning technologies either."
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POPSCrimespotting: the new way to make money on the Internet Tony Morgan, who set up the site, said: “This could turn out to be the best crime prevention weapon there’s ever been. I wanted to combine the serious business of stopping crime with the incentive of winning money. Users will be awarded one point for spotting a suspected crime and three if they see an actual crime. They can also lose points if the camera operator decides that the alert was not a crime.
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POPSArthur Ganson Not exactly steam punk, hard to define, captivating form of art. by Arthur Ganson. A talk, a meditative walk, an experience
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POPSHow Last.fm inspired a scientific breakthrough
How does it work? At the basic level, students can "drag and drop" research papers into the site at mendeley.com, which automatically extracts data, keywords, cited references, etc, thereby creating a searchable database and saving countless hours of work. That in itself is great, but now the Last.fm bit kicks in, enabling users to collaborate with researchers around the world, whose existence they might not know about until Mendeley's algorithms find, say, that they are the most-read person in Japan in their niche specialism. You can recommend other people's papers and see how many people are reading yours, which you can't do in Nature and Science. Mendeley says that instead of waiting for papers to be published after a lengthy procedure of acquiring citations, they could move to a regime of "real-time" citations, thereby greatly reducing the time taken for research to be applied in the real world and actually boost economic growth. There are lots of research archives. For the physica
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