■ An Iowa State University professor has developed a virtual reality headset for chickens that will fool factory-farmed hens into thinking they’re free-range. The gadget uses a special headset that lets caged chickens pad around a virtual farmyard, pecking at virtual bugs. “I did a lot of work to get the technology right,” said inventor Austin Stewart. He admits that […]
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When the Liberal Party of Norway asked Gylve Nagell to run for the position of Backup Town Councilor for a suburb of Oslo he was very hesitant because he is not a politician. He is a member of the black metal band Darkthrone where his lyrics and music are about murder and mayhem. As the election got closer, he sensed […]
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Prison Sentences – Loosening The Shackles U.S. Prison Population The U.S. prison population is the highest in the world. A quarter of the world’s inmates reside in U.S. prisons, despite being only 5% of the world population. Since the 1980’s the U.S. prison population has increased 8-fold to over 2.4 million people. More than $80 billion of taxpayer money […]
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A huge virus discovered in sediment on the Chilean coast and another in an Australian pond are not only the largest scientists have ever seen, but also among the most baffling. A single so-called pandora virus is 1,000 times the size of the influenza virus and holds 2,556 genes, compared with the flu’s 13. Only 6 percent of its genes […]
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■ A Brazilian school is teaching kids proper English by asking them to correct erroneously worded tweets by their favorite celebrities. The school asks its preteen students to point out grammar and spelling errors to the likes of Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, and Charlie Sheen. In April, Bieber tweeted, “That was a long bus ride. But we here.” Maria, 9, […]
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Rio De Janeiro No rain forest beef: Hoping to prevent Amazon deforestation, Brazilian grocery stores say they will no longer sell beef from cattle raised on land clear-cut from the rain forests. Brazil is one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of beef, and an area of the Amazon larger than France has been cleared to create pastureland for […]
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THE UNIVERSE IS A LOT OF THINGS, BUT EASY TO understand isn’t one of them. Take the fact that more than 80% of its mass is missing. Galaxies spin so fast, they would fly apart if the gravity of some unseen mass weren’t keeping them intact, sur rounding them like a glass paperweight encasing a butterfly. Cosmologists have been trying […]
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Along with goods for U.S. markets, China’s booming factories are exporting pollution that fouls the air over the Western U.S., a new study has found. “We’ve outsourced our manufacturing and much of our pollution, but some of it is blowing back across the Pacific to haunt us,” University of California, Irvine, earth scientist Steven Davis tells The Telegraph (U.K.).The study […]
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■ A 96-year-old Indian man has been declared the world’s oldest father after his wife bore a son last month—the second in two years. Ramjeet Raghav, a farmer in a village about 30 miles from Delhi, said the doctors who delivered the healthy boy in a nearby hospital were surprised when he told them he was the father. “I think […]
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The more time you spend on Facebook, the more unhappy you become. A new study by University of Michigan researchers has strengthened a growing body of research showing that frequent use of the social-networking site leads to feelings of envy, sadness, loneliness, and anger. Researchers gauged the mood of 82 young study subjects by texting them five times a day, […]
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