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Hyderabad is experiencing a rash of fake faith healers. Phoney ‘faith healers’ on the loose in Hyderabad’s Old City – The Hindu. Their latest activity revolves around an earthen bowl, which they sell for anything between Rs. 1,100 and Rs. 21,000. They claim that disposing the bowl at some place on a specific day would help rid a particular problem. Tajuddin (name changed) lost about Rs. 3,500 to a faith-healer at Falaknuma recently. “He made me believe that someone had […]
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Today is the second year of ‘International Fascination of Plants Day’ and over 50 countries are celebrating events and activities. Anne Osterrieder and Martin Austwick join in by sharing their thoughts on what fascinates them about plants. I often feel that I am not as fascinated by plants as I should be, having been a(...)
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Silly, but nothing much new here. Didn’t Hollywood types always rely on psychics and astrologers? Why Psychics Are the New Must-Have Hollywood Advisors – The Hollywood Reporter. Perhaps Hollywood’s youngest psychic at 28, John, who often travels to L.A. from his NYC home base, may also be among the most in-demand. He does as many as eight readings a day (at slightly less than $200 an hour) and is booked at least six months in advance. “I’ve been to many […]
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Do you see music the same way as your neighbor? Apparently so. U.C. Berkeley psychologists say people in both the United States and Mexico linked the same pieces of classical orchestral music with the same colors, suggesting that humans share a common emotional palette – when it comes to music and color – that appears to be intuitive and can cross cultural barriers. They suggest that
our brains are wired to make music-color connections depending on how the melodies make us
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Who owns the moon? Is it fair to send people on a one-way trip to Mars? Can doctors safeguard medical experiments in other environments? These are just a few of the ethical questions confronting the human race as we continue to explore space.The Emory Looks at Hollywood series examines these questions in context of the new Paramount Pictures movie "Star Trek Into Darkness," the latest in the long-running Star Trek story. Watch the video above as Paul Root Wolpe, Director of the Center for […]
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Love makes you stupid. Or something. Psychic hypnotised me into having an affair – Telegraph. Jim Gotobed, a former amateur racing driver ended up lavishing £12,000 on Tracie Long during a ten month affair. But he told a court this week he had had felt “hypnotised” after his sessions with Ms Long each of which he said he came out of “more deeply in love with her.” Apparently, that was not her plan and accused him of harassment. She had accused him of repeatedly […]
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My wife’s cousin, the break-dancing radiologist, broke the microphone clip off my mic stand while singing karaoke on Thanksgiving (my wife and I host Thanksgiving at our house for the family every year). I had another microphone clip and replaced it so we could continue with karaoke, but I decided to keep the broken pieces of the old clip for the junk drawer.
I had forgotten about it for a few weeks but eventually came across the pieces of the mic clip. I noticed that the clip, when it
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crookedindifference:
First Solar Eclipse Photograph
Berkowski made the first solar eclipse photograph on July 28, 1851, also using the daguerrotype process, at the Royal Observatory in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kalinigrad in Russia). Berkowski, a local daguerrotypist whose first name was never published, observed at the Royal Observatory. A small 6-cm refracting telescope was attached to the 15.8-cm Fraunhofer heliometer and a 84-second exposure was taken shortly after the beginning of
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Report of an unusually large cat. News & Star | News | ‘Big cat’ spotted on the prowl in Carlisle. Shelley McNeill, 33, of Merith Avenue, Botcherby, was walking her two daughters to school yesterday morning when they spotted the mysterious creature. She said: “We were coming from Botcherby and walking towards the section known as the Arches near Harraby. “As we walked around the corner this cat was sitting on the railway line looking at us.” At first, they […]
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New faculty members Randall Hughes and David Kimbro set up shop at the Marine Science Center this winter after spending several years studying oyster reefs at Florida State University. During their time in Tallahassee, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill devastated the region, dumping nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the ocean over a period of 87 days. [...]
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Almost heaven, San Juan Islands. On my recent reporting trip to a research lab set in this glorious green archipelago, I was thrilled with the beautiful light. With seeing a [...]The post Friday Snapshot: Emily Gertz goes island hopping in paradise appeared first on The Science Writers' Handbook.
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Protecting South America’s Crown of Biodiversity by Anne-Marie Hodge: Visiting a rainforest can be an exercise in challenged expectations. Everyone knows that rainforests are full of life: they teem with species, act as stages for unimaginably intricate food webs, and provide refuge for rare and even undiscovered organisms that exist nowhere else in the [...]
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As Gwenn Seemel points out in her richly illustrated book, Crime Against Nature, the non-human animal kingdom is chock-full of examples that challenge many of our deeply held beliefs about what is “natural” behavior in everything from sexual preference to lifestyle choices to gender roles and even gender identity. A third gender, male pregnancy and [...]
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Manufactroversy. It’s wonderful, made-up word that describes a phenomenon so aptly, so brilliantly, that I like to use it all the time. Basically the word describes a manufactured controversy that is motivated by either extreme ideology (virtually always crank ideology) and/or profit that is intentionally stoked to create public confusion about a scientific issue that…
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With the government's spending review looming, the Royal Society of Chemistry is calling for an Olympic effort to persuade politicians to make a long-term commitment to creating growth and jobs through scienceWhen it comes to Olympic sport, the UK is a small nation making a big impact. Last year's games saw us finish third in the medals table, behind only the United States and China and ahead of Russia, despite our comparatively small population.The UK has a record of punching above its weight
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Uranus and Neptune
have a lot in common, climate-wise, even though Uranus is tipped on its side with the pole facing the sun during winter. They are both home to extreme winds blowing at speeds of over 1000 km/hour, they have hurricane-like storms as big as our whole planet and immense weather systems can last for years.
But what about their origins? Do the atmospheric patterns arise from deep down in the planet, or are they confined to shallower processes nearer the surface?
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Hello guys, I promised to keep you informed on the scientific developments on healthy long life even when I am far away from home. The interesting articles I read recently were about the positive effects of sunshine on blood pressure. … Continue reading →
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Outside the window, the neighborhood kids are running again. They’re about 12 years old, a boy and a girl and the girl’s little sister, about 8, and they’re racing around the court, up the street, along the alley, through a yard, and back onto the court, altogether maybe a full block, around and around. They’re [...]
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Today's new Wikipedia articles: Hanner polytopes and Kalai's 3d conjecture.The 3d conjecture states that a centrally symmetric d-dimensional polytope must have at least 3d faces (of all dimensions including the d-dimensional polytope itself as a face but not including the –1-dimensional empty set). For instance, the cube has 8 vertices, 12 edges, 6 squares, and 1 cube as faces; 8 + 12 + 6 + 1 = 27 = 33.The Hanner polytopes include the cubes, are closed under Cartesian products and duality, […]
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There is a scientific term that causes fear and alarm to those that study biodiversity. More fear and alarm than the term climate change. Biotic homogenisation — introducing a new exotic species to an area that was, until now, without [...]testThe post The parasitic warfare perpetrated by ladybirds appeared first on Australian Science.
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Aaron Bady's essay at The New Inquiry, The MOOC Moment and the End of Reform, is so thoughtful and devastatingly on-target that it gets its own post in the series rounding up links that respond to issues raised in the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (PDF of that letter here). If you [...]
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Well, just a couple of leftovers this fine evening. Have a nice Friday everyone. Follow @doubtfulnews on Twitter. The need for critical science journalism | Science | guardian.co.uk. ‘Dead’ Man Walks Again … But Why? : Discovery News.
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Reblogged from All About Blood: The Discovery of Haemopoietic Stem Cell Blood was regarded as an important tissue, but till the mid 1800s it was not known how blood cells were made. Three discoveries lead to the modern concept of haemopoietic stem cell. Neumann and Bizzozero separately, in 1868, proposed that the bone marrow […]
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This is a further continuation of my (futile) efforts to round up responses to the SJSU Philosophy Department's open letter to Michael Sandel (which you can see in full here). Part 1 collected links mostly from old media-affiliated sites. Part 2 started digging into some of the discussion in the blogosphere. This post picks up [...]
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- Joselle Kehoe – Quantum Mechanical Words and Mathematical Organisms - Dennis Waters – Why Do Sequences Think They Are So Special? - Kyle Hill – Death By Lens Flare: Drink Into Darkness - Scott Barry Kaufman – Gorillas Agree: Human Frontal Cortex is Nothing Special - Maria Konnikova – Want [...]
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A few of you may know that this has been brewing since Wednesday. In my opinion, it has been resolved and there is no substance to the report that a Bigfoot was shot near Altoona, PA. Eric Altman and Ron Galucci of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society and Stan Gordon, chronicler of Pennsylvania weirdness did the legwork to investigate this story VERY promptly. On Wednesday, I heard that there was a reported shooting of a Bigfoot in Somerset County, Pennsylvania (a heavily wooded, rather lightly […]
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Have you ever been haunted by an old movie existing in the shadows of your mind? Something you shouldn’t have seen? Perhaps hiding behind the couch when your parents thought you were in bed sleeping? I can think of several films I saw that way when I was young. Films that gained special power because […]
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Guest Post from Bob Ryan Meteorologist for WJLA TV in Washington DC (This post appeared on the WJLA Weather Blog) Are cities changing summer thunderstorms? This is a follow-up blog to a story I had on our 11PM news Tuesday May 14. You can see the actual story below but I wanted to expand a few things beyond 1 minute and 30 seconds. Here’s the tease :>). Do you live in …
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Do you identify with LGBTQ? Do you work or study in STEM? Take a survey and help to make sure the issues of this community are not overlooked!
My road through working and studying in science has been relatively easy (except for the usual academic challenges). But I’m a straight, white male, and I haven’t had to experience the explicit and systemic prejudices that so many people have to deal with every day, even in such a “progressive” field as this. But I’ve met many folks over the
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