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POPSWill Alabama execute an innocent man? I cannot comprehend why they refuse to do this simple test. Are they so fearful of having made a mistake that they would prefer not to administer the test? If they are sure they are right, why not administer the test just so they can say "I told you so"
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POPSIceman Goes Online Allowing Users to Virtually Tour His Body To see Otzi in high definition click here:http://www.icemanphotoscan.eu/ The hunter was frozen with all his possessions including a bow, a quiver of arrows and a copper axe. He was wearing warm clothing including a cloak made of woven grass, a coat and leggings made from goatskin and a bearskin cap with a leather chin strap.
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POPSLondon's Little People Project he Little People Project: it's a guilt-free street art project. Tiny little figures (tiny! Smaller than a dime!) are placed around London. Most of them will never be noticed, but I like to imagine some kid will find some of these someday and be delighted by the surreal magic of the world. --John Brownlee, Wired Blogs: Table of Malcontents Like Amelie finding the little boy's treasure box in her wall-- I'd like to imagine that too.
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POPSHappy Orgasm Day! Did you know that "Orgasm Day" is an official holiday celebrated in 22nd of December? I didn’t know either!
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POPSScientists Warn Large Earth Collider May Destroy Earth Physicists at CERN and Brookhaven National Laboratory, who underwrote the VLEC's construction with donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, agree that there are "some troubling variables" whenever attempting to launch Earth through the vacuum of space into a massive body of solid matter. Yet, they insist, the academic benefits of a planetary collision outweigh any risk of annihilating the Earth. While the project remains controversial, physicists agreed in late November to reconvene and evaluate the risk factor of the project after a small-scale field test, during which the Very Large Earth Collider will be turned on at 10 percent capacity, catapulting Earth into the moon at only half the speed of light.
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POPSHYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE) A Talk By Mark Pesce The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.
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POPSHigh school girl solves her own medical mystery This is proof of what I'm used to saying to my friends after some experiences and anecdotes from other friends: "Doctors are like mechanics. Some of them are good, some of them not so good, and sometimes you end up doing all the work."
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POPSArtists stage street scenes to lurk in Google maps Like many first-time Street View users, Kinsley and Hewlett, then roommates, typed in their address and found their house. Kinsley and Hewlett soon found themselves discussing surveillance and virtual reality, and began considering how they might explore those issues and Street View through art. "But instead of dwelling on the darker undertones of these issues, we began to think about ways of playing with the system," Kinsley said in an e-mail interview from Iceland, where he is participating in an artist residency. The "Street With a View" project was his master of fine arts thesis project at Carnegie Mellon University. "We were interested in interjecting something staged, something fictional, into Street View and playing with - and subtly questioning - the notion of reality in something that we perceive as a factual representation of our world," said Kinsley, 26.
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POPSPioneering Physicist John Wheeler Dies at 96 a real genius, if i am not mistaken he was Hugh Everett III's professor of physics, also he is the one the suggested the 'delayed choice' experiment that showed the experimenter can choose, AFTER THE FACT, whether the photon was in both places or just one.
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POPSHow Electric Cars Could Save the Grid Benefits of the "Vehicle to Grid" project being developed by researchers at the University of Delaware "electric vehicles could do more than provide backup energy. If just a quarter of the nation's cars were electric -- about 50 million cars -- the power capacity of those batteries would be equal to 700 gigawatts, the entire power production capacity in the United States today" "For the system to have the most value, electric cars need to be equipped with a high, 80-amp/240-volt plug -- something a little more powerful than the plug on an electric dryer. (An electrician can install the corresponding outlet into any home.) But most of the existing electric hybrid cars come equipped with a low, 15-amp, 110-volt plug." "the low-amp plugs work...but if the electric car owner is selling electricity back to the grid, they want to sell as much as possible. A 15-amp plug could net a car owner about $400 year, whereas an 80-amp plug could net $4,000"
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POPSone step closer to building artificial human brain Markram believes that with the state of technology today, it is possible to build an entire rat's neocortex, which is the next phase of the Blue Brain project, due to begin next year. From there, it's cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain. Markram is banking on Moore's law holding steady, as a computer with the power of the human brain, using today's technology, would take up several football pitches and run up an electricity bill of $3bn a year. But by the time Markram gets around to mimicking a full human brain, computing will have moved on.
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POPSThe battle for Wikipedia's soul "To create a new article on Wikipedia and be sure that it will survive, you need to be able to write a “deletionist-proof” entry and ensure that you have enough online backing (such as Google matches) to convince the increasingly picky Wikipedia people of its importance. This raises the threshold for writing articles so high that very few people actually do it. Many who are excited about contributing to the site end up on the “Missing Wikipedians” page: a constantly updated list of those who have decided to stop contributing. It serves as a reminder that frustration at having work removed prompts many people to abandon the project. Google has recently announced its own entry into the field, in the form of an encyclopedia-like project called “Knol” that will allow anybody to create entries on topics of their choice.But even if it does not turn out to be the Wikipedia-killer that some people imagine, it may push Wikipedia to rethink its editorial stance."