Sooty ships may be geoengineering by accident

GEOENGINEERING is being tested - albeit inadvertently - in the north Pacific. Soot from oil-burning ships is dumping about 1000 tonnes of soluble iron per year across 6 million square kilometres of ocean, new research has revealed. Fertilising the world's...

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Russian opposition activist put under house arrest: media

MOSCOW: A Russian court on Saturday put prominent opposition leader Sergei Udaltsov under house arrest amid accusations he incited mass disorder to overthrow President Vladimir Putin, local media reported.The Basmanny court in Moscow was responding to a request by investigators who said Udaltsov was not showing good behaviour and not cooperating with the authorities.The judge said that...

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Poll: Do you listen to movies or TV over headphones?

I suppose it's still a fair assumption that more people listen to music than movies with headphones, but there has to be a growing audience listening to movies, TV shows, and YouTube videos via their headphones. Thanks to the booming popularity of tablets, might the ratio of movies-to-music listening time be moving away from music? Or not?I watch a lot of movies at home with headphones on. They present...

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Space Pictures This Week: Sun Dragon, Celestial Seagull

Solar DragonImage courtesy SDO/NASAResembling a dragon's tail, remnants of a solar filament strain to escape the sun's gravity in an image released this week by NASA's Solar Dynamics...

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Northeast Digs Out After Blizzard

A fierce winter storm brought blizzard conditions and hurricane force winds as the anticipated snowstorm descended across much of the Northeast overnight.By early Saturday morning, 650,000 homes and businesses were without power and at least five deaths were being blamed on the storm, three in Canada, one in New York and one in Connecticut, The Associated Press reported.The...

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Today on New Scientist: 8 February 2013

Webcam and CCTV security flaw shows us to prying eyes A networking loophole has made it easy to have a peek at what everyone else is doing by accessing cameras connected to the internetWorld of life's jewelled beauty in new museum shrine The latest additions to a London zoology museum would all fit in a wardrobe: vintage glass microscope slides that form a fascinating, dazzling tribute to lifeSleep...

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EU agrees historic cut to budget after marathon talks

BRUSSELS: European Union leaders agreed to cut back the bloc's budget for the first time in six decades on Friday after marathon all-night talks driven by sharp differences over priorities for the next seven years."Deal done!" summit chair and EU President Herman Van Rompuy said on Twitter after more than 24 hours of tough talks between the bloc's 27 heads of state and government."There's...

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Friday Poll: Which 'Star Wars' character should get the first spin-off film?

Will your favorite character get a spin-off?(Credit:Lucasfilm)First, Disney bought Lucasfilm and "Star Wars" fans everywhere had mixed feelings. Then, a rumor became reality as J.J Abrams signed on to direct the next "Star Wars" movie. Now, almost everybody is feeling hopeful about the future of the franchise. To put a cherry on the sci-fi sundae, we've now been told that a series of character spin-off...

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Debate Continues: Did Your Seafood Feel Pain?

Part of our weekly "In Focus" series—stepping back, looking closer.Chefs have been grappling with the question for years: What's the best way to humanely kill a lobster?Some cooks recommend tucking the invertebrate into the freezer for an hour, while others prefer quickly stabbing it behind the eyes. For the serious seafood gourmand, there are even stun devices that are advertised as the...

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Rescued Ethan Spends Birthday With SWAT Heroes

As a beaming 6-year-old Ethan said "cheese" for photos and played with toy cars at his birthday party, there were no immediate signs of the turmoil the young boy had endured just days earlier.The boy, identified only as Ethan, was held hostage in a nearly week-long standoff in Alabama. He was physically unharmed after Jimmy Lee Dykes kidnapped him from a school bus and held...

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Today on New Scientist: 7 February 2013

Light-taming window conjures Turing's image Watch how a surface can be manipulated to cast images, allowing designers to paint with lightNew map pinpoints cities to avoid as sea levels rise Sydney, Tokyo and Buenos Aires are in for some of the biggest sea-level rises by 2100, finds one of the most comprehensive predictions to dateTour of the body hardly gets under the skin Anatomies by Hugh...

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War crimes court wants Gaddafi spy chief handed over

THE HAGUE: International Criminal Court judges on Thursday demanded Libya hand over Muammar Gaddafi's former spy chief Abdullah Senussi to face charges of crimes against humanity.The latest broadside in the legal tug-of-war between The Hague-based ICC and Tripoli over where Senussi and Gaddafi's son Seif al-Islam should be tried repeated a demand for Senussi to be handed over.The ICC "orders...

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Options for managing browser tabs in OS X

Tabbed browsing is one of the more useful features to make it to Web browsers. However, as with using single windows you might inadvertently close one and need to restore it. While you can create a new tab and then peruse the browser history to find a link to the content it contained, an easier option is to use the built-in tab restoration options in your browser.To do this, there are two hotkeys...

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Severed Heads Were Sacrifices in Ancient Mexico

Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of more than 150 skulls from an ancient shrine in central Mexico—evidence of one of the largest mass sacrifices of humans in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.The skulls, many facing east, lay beneath a crude, slightly elevated mound of crushed stone on what was once an artificial island in a vast shallow lake, now completely dry."The site is barely a bump...

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Suspect Tried to Flee Country Before Cop Shooting

The fired ex-California cop who set off a region-wide manhunt after allegedly shooting three police officers this morning -- one fatally -- had initially gone to a yacht club near San Diego where police say he attempted to steal a boat and flee to Mexico.Police say that former police officer Christopher Jordan Dorner, 33, who officials believe posted an online manifesto outlining...

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Today on New Scientist: 6 February 2013

Open Richard III DNA evidence for peer review A good case has been made that a skeleton unearthed from a car park is that of the last Plantagenet king of England - it's time to share the dataUniversal bug sensor takes guesswork out of diagnosis A machine that can identify all bacteria, viruses and fungi known to cause disease in humans should speed up diagnosis and help to reduce antibiotic...

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Football: Singapore lose to Jordan in opening 2015 Asian Cup qualifier

SINGAPORE: Singapore's quest to reach the 2015 Asian Cup got off on a disappointing note with a 4-0 defeat against Jordan in Amman on Wednesday.Two goals from Ahmad Hayel in the 54th and 73rd minutes, and one each from Abdallah Deeb (18th) and Khalil Zaid Baniateyah (52nd) gave Jordan the win over the reigning Southeast Asian champions at the Amman International Stadium.The win puts Jordan...

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Mobile Internet data traffic to grow 13-fold by 2017, says Cisco

There are a number of different predictions floating around about how many Internet-connected devices there will be worldwide within the next few years. But regardless of those numbers, we can all be sure that mobile Internet data traffic is going to explode exponentially as well.Cisco Systems has chimed in with its latest predictions through 2017 in regard to mobile data traffic -- and the forecasts...

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Richard III Mania: Understanding a Kingly Obsession

A.R. Williams He reigned for only two years and 47 days, and he died more than 500 years ago. But suddenly he's trending on Twitter and the talk of Facebook—and our story this week on the discovery of his bones beneath a British parking lot has netted 11,000 Facebook "likes" and counting.And while the apparent confirmation of Richard III's bones is no doubt a testament to the power of archaeology,...

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US Postal Service to End Saturday Mail Delivery

Feb 6, 2013 8:28am Weekend mail delivery is about to come to an end.The U.S. Postal Service will stop delivering mail on Saturdays, but will continue to deliver packages six days a week, the USPS announced at a news conference this morning.While post offices that open on Saturdays will continue to do so, the initiative, which is expected to begin the week of August...

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Today on New Scientist: 5 February 2013

Engineering light: Pull an image from nowhere A new generation of lenses could bring us better lighting, anti-forgery technology and novel movie projectors Baby boomers' health worse than their parents Americans who were born in the wake of the second world war have poorer health than the previous generation at the same ageNew 17-million-digit monster is largest known prime A distributed computing...

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Football: S'pore helping Europol probe match-fixing ring

SINGAPORE: Singapore police said Tuesday they were helping European authorities in their investigation into an international crime syndicate that rigged hundreds of football matches in Europe and elsewhere."The authorities in Singapore are assisting the European authorities in their investigations into an international match-fixing syndicate that purportedly involves Singaporeans," the...

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