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POPS12 Popular Wikis that actually ‘WORK’ (6) WikiSummaries - short, quick summaries for thousands of books. (Summaries: Freakonomics, Getting Things Done, …, see other bestsellers) (7) WikiMapia - cool mashup between Google Maps and wiki-style editing. Lets you browse, view, search and add descriptive notes to any location on the globe. (8) Wiktionary - multilingual, comprehensive, user-edited dictionary. Provides word definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations. (9) Uncyclopedia - extremely entertaining wikipedia clone, that is filled with funny and not-necessarily correct articles. Check out: Colonel, Britney Spears, Donald Trump, …or an image pulled from an article about Women. (No offense ladies, it’s just funny…)
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POPSHow did 100,000,000 women disappear? Two researchers crunching population statistics have confirmed an unsettling reality. Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray noticed the ratio of women to men in developing regions and in some cultures is suspiciously below the norm.
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POPSWhy Are Humans Different From All Other Apes? It’s the Cooking, Stupid This is a fascinating and quite fresh view on a possibly groundbreaking view on the evolution of the human specie. “Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.” (emphasis mine)
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POPSShrunken Heads Could Tell Political Tale "This small scale agrarian society was succeeded by an empire with regional authority," said Ryan Willams, curator of Chicago's Field Museum, in a press release. "For the first time people were governed by others who lived hundreds of miles distant. Understanding how this came about may help us better understand how these forms of government first emerged."
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POPSFixing it could improve our lives—and the planet: Batteries... It's an issue that goes beyond cars and mobile devices. To reduce carbon emissions, utilities are likely to shift more generating capacity from coal and natural gas to renewable sources like wind and solar. Solar cells and wind turbines require batteries because they provide power intermittently.
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POPSCooking and Cognition: How Humans Got So Smart We started innovating. We tried different materials, such as bone, and invented many new tools, including needles for beadwork. Responding to, presumably, our first abstract thoughts, we started creating art and maybe even religion. To understand what caused the cognitive spurt, Khaitovich and colleagues examined chemical brain processes known to have changed in the past 200,000 years. Comparing apes and humans, they found the most robust differences were for processes involved in energy metabolism. The finding suggests that increased access to calories spurred our cognitive advances, said Khaitovich, carefully adding that definitive claims of causation are premature. The research is detailed in the August 2008 issue of Genome Biology.