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Old 2008-11-09, 09:41   Link #981
Mystique
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Indeed. The usual 11am silent moment was probably observed too. But it just seems to be a big deal within the commonwealth countries.

For something that's kinda sweet (hope in humanity?)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/e...et/7717336.stm
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Old 2008-11-10, 21:58   Link #982
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NASA Mars Phoenix mission finally dead (or not quite dead, undead maybe).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7721032.stm

Many months past its original expected-to-live date, the Phoenix operations finally officially shut down but they'll check on it periodically to see if its still beeping.
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Old 2008-11-10, 22:31   Link #983
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Man Cleared Of Sleepwalk Sex With 15-year old

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A BRITISH RAF mechanic who claimed he was sleepwalking when he had sex with a 15-year-old girl has been cleared of rape.

Senior Aircraftsman Kenneth Ecott, 26, wept after a jury took two hours to find he was not responsible for his actions.

Mr Ecott did not deny having sex with the girl, but said he had no memory of it happening.

Instead he insisted he had a condition known as sexsomnia in which sufferers carry out indecent acts in their sleep.

It was this affliction that made him climb naked on top of the girl at a friend's birthday party sleepover in Poole, Dorset, the Bournemouth Crown Court heard.

The girl screamed when she awoke.

Mr Ecott was said to have confessed to the girl's family and apologised for having sex with her.

But when he was arrested in his barracks at RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, he told police he was prone to sleepwalking.

He claimed to have been in a state of automatism while with the girl, meaning he was not aware of his actions.

His girlfriend told the court that he had fondled her in bed while asleep.

The Daily Mail, in The Herald Sun
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Old 2008-11-10, 22:55   Link #984
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DiCaprio is Producing Akira, Ninja Scroll, Not Acting in Them
Self-professed "big fan of anime" says final Akira script draft is being written
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Old 2008-11-10, 23:21   Link #985
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Alaskan man says he accidentally stole a car.

FAIRBANKS, Alaska - A motorist confronted by a state trooper said he was stunned when the officer told him the car had been stolen.

Charles J. Schultz explained that he was driving his Chevy Cavalier and everything was fine. That's when the trooper informed Schultz that he was actually behind the wheel of a Ford Escort.

Police charged Schultz with auto theft, felony driving under the influence and misdemeanor drugs misconduct. Police said the 27-year-old's blood-alcohol content was .166, more than twice the legal limit.

It all started when Fairbanks police received a report shortly after midnight Friday that a Ford Escort had been stolen from the parking lot of a gentlemen's club. An officer spotted the stolen Ford two hours later — with Schultz driving.

Schultz swore he had no memory of taking the wrong vehicle outside the club, according to a criminal complaint.
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Jogger runs mile with rabid fox on her arm

PRESCOTT, Ariz. - Authorities in Arizona say a jogger attacked by a rabid fox ran a mile with the animal's jaws clamped on her arm and then drove herself to a hospital.

The Yavapai County sheriff's office said the woman told deputies she was on a trail near Prescott on Monday when the fox attacked and bit her foot.

She said she grabbed the fox by the neck when it went for her leg but it bit her arm.

The woman wanted the animal tested for rabies so she ran a mile to her car with the fox still biting her arm, then pried it off and tossed it in her trunk and drove to the Prescott hospital.

The sheriff's office says the fox later bit an animal control officer. He and the woman are both receiving rabies vaccinations.
These stories just make you feel so much better in life. I am not the only freak out there .
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Old 2008-11-11, 00:57   Link #986
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http://www.counton2.com/cbd/news/sci...ulation/16655/

It seems as though somebody has been reading too much Thomas Robert's population theory.
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Old 2008-11-11, 01:48   Link #987
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Originally Posted by Pendevous View Post
Sexsomnia
*nods slowly*
Ok... now i've heard it all

the rabid fox one was funny, my friend from AZ linked me that one
As for Hollywood leeching of more anime series to make movies with, Dicaprio's all like 'We won't accept the script until it's fully shaped, we know there are die hard fans out there...'

Well the script could be awesome.
The direction, acting and casting could be total crap, and that's what conerns me rather. How much of the US audience are they gonna pertain to, while directing, cause Akira and ninja scroll...well mass bloodbath and mindf^%k anyone?
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Old 2008-11-11, 22:33   Link #988
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/science/11gene.html

This is likely the largest news since the discovery of DNA itself, and the ultimate impact may be even larger.

What will it be used for first? One of the first concentrated efforts will be attempts at identification of lost Hebrew descendants. It likely won't make the news until it has a very definite success in doing so, but it is a very important field for some of the people who make things happen in this field, and it's a small but lucrative business even in our now-former understanding of DNA.
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Old 2008-11-12, 22:05   Link #989
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Epigenetics may be new enough to not be included in text books (I'm not sure, maybe it is) but it's taught at the graduate level with at least some level of understanding. It's an additional layer of complexity, but I don't know that I'd call it something that major. It has allowed for us to explain certain disease models.

Or did I miss the main idea of the article? I read the first page, thought "epigenetics" before they used the term (comes up on the second page), and sort of started skimming from there...
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Old 2008-11-12, 22:22   Link #990
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I didn't see anything terribly new in the article (but then we have a subscription to Nature at our house thanks to #2 son) but it was a nice summation article for the educated layperson on "stuff thats happened since long ago year of biology class". Nice catch by Kyuusai - I like finding articles like this for "here, read this and get back to me" moments to stop stupid debates in their tracks.

So much has happened in biology in the last 20 years that it is kind of painful trying to have ethics, social, or political discourse with people who are using mid-20th Century fuzzy ideas.
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Old 2008-11-13, 01:11   Link #991
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Originally Posted by Vexx View Post
I didn't see anything terribly new in the article (but then we have a subscription to Nature at our house thanks to #2 son) but it was a nice summation article for the educated layperson on "stuff thats happened since long ago year of biology class". Nice catch by Kyuusai - I like finding articles like this for "here, read this and get back to me" moments to stop stupid debates in their tracks.

So much has happened in biology in the last 20 years that it is kind of painful trying to have ethics, social, or political discourse with people who are using mid-20th Century fuzzy ideas.
Personally, I believe that issues on ethics necessarily took time. Relatively speaking, the time it takes for research to bear fruit seems to pass a whole lot faster.
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Old 2008-11-13, 01:28   Link #992
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So much has happened in biology in the last 20 years that it is kind of painful trying to have ethics, social, or political discourse with people who are using mid-20th Century fuzzy ideas.
Hmmm, I was vague there ... I meant mid-20th Century old science concepts.
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Old 2008-11-13, 01:32   Link #993
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Originally Posted by Vexx View Post
Hmmm, I was vague there ... I meant mid-20th Century old science concepts.
Hmmm....

On that count, science advancement in the last half-century has been really fast compared to previous eras. I mean: Most of us keep saying that we live in a fast-paced world, but I doubt only the elderly would fully appreciate that statement, especially in regards to science and technology. It is easy for the young to accept new stuff and take them for granted, but the older generation do have difficulty in trying to integrate all this, especially for those who are not well-educated.
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Old 2008-11-13, 01:42   Link #994
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I knew there was something iffy with my high school bio class' lecture on DNA, considering I never quite grasped the full picture of what the hell it is no matter how hard I tried. Now it's a little clearer that that's to no fault of my own nor my biology teacher's but rather because we simply don't really know the full picture of it. Comforting.

It might be old news to some, especially to those who are in the discipline itself and up-to-date on the latest advances, but to reconsider these "exceptions" as the norm or makes some sense of it all can be a big deal to some of us laypeople. We of the popular culture takes bits and pieces of what the scientists painstakingly attempted to explain to us in simple terms and put these knowledge into the repertoire of popular knowledge -- and just as commonly popular misconceptions. I consider it encouraging news though: once upon a time physicists declared their discipline dead, and then it was all turned upside down on them, and now biologists are exploring massive new continents of knowledge with just a flashlight, a hypotheses, and an old map to guide them. Science is alive and well.
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Old 2008-11-13, 01:46   Link #995
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@Irenicus: On that, I have to bring in Donald's quote. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and the "unknown" unknowns. Science does indeed have a long way ahead.
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Old 2008-11-13, 02:22   Link #996
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Originally Posted by yezhanquan View Post
Hmmm....

On that count, science advancement in the last half-century has been really fast compared to previous eras. I mean: Most of us keep saying that we live in a fast-paced world, but I doubt only the elderly would fully appreciate that statement, especially in regards to science and technology. It is easy for the young to accept new stuff and take them for granted, but the older generation do have difficulty in trying to integrate all this, especially for those who are not well-educated.
I don't know. What's the last life-changing stuff? Cellphones? Internet? Those come from the 90s. Teenagers were born with them.
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@Irenicus: On that, I have to bring in Donald's quote. There are known knowns, known unknowns, and the "unknown" unknowns. Science does indeed have a long way ahead.
Yeah. Still waiting for my jetpack.
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Old 2008-11-13, 04:49   Link #997
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I don't know. What's the last life-changing stuff? Cellphones? Internet? Those come from the 90s. Teenagers were born with them.
Well, not all scientific breakthroughs gets translated into technology. Besides, technology is not the only life-changing stuff. It is the commercialisation of technology, the process of making it affordable to many people, that is the key. Your jetpack is already available. it's just not commercialised so that everyone can have one.
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Old 2008-11-13, 13:29   Link #998
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Vexx View Post
I didn't see anything terribly new in the article (but then we have a subscription to Nature at our house thanks to #2 son) but it was a nice summation article for the educated layperson on "stuff thats happened since long ago year of biology class". Nice catch by Kyuusai - I like finding articles like this for "here, read this and get back to me" moments to stop stupid debates in their tracks.

So much has happened in biology in the last 20 years that it is kind of painful trying to have ethics, social, or political discourse with people who are using mid-20th Century fuzzy ideas.
That's pretty much it. My post was very poorly worded (I shouldn't have used the word "news", for instance), but I'm in rapid-posting mode most of the time due to my limited time online. It's not news, but it's an excellent layperson summary for a field that's getting near-zero attention. I've been reading news snippets for years about research results that clearly showed more was going on than the old DNA model, but never did those stories actually have anything to say about what's actually being learned in this field.


On the issue of AMA... I really don't find those figures surprising at all. Not only does it sound like a process most people would be willing to go through, but I can't think of any legal process which the general public is sufficiently educated about in any country, so I don't imagine that something like this would be well understood by the populace.

On the other hand, I really have to wonder what could have caused confusion such as people mistaking it for a euthanasia. I can't imagine how a person could confuse being able to die naturally with being euthanized. Surely there must have been some misinformation being spread?
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Old 2008-11-14, 02:27   Link #999
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Jean-David Levitte, Sarkozy's chief diplomatic adviser, reported the exchange in a magazine today ahead of an EU-Russia summit in Nice Friday chaired by the French leader and President Medvedev.

With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on Aug. 12, Sarkozy told Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia, Levitte said.


"I am going to hang Saakashvili BY THE BALLS," Putin replied.

Sarkozy responded:
"Hang him?"

"Why not? The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein," Putin said.

Sarkozy replied, using the familiar "tu":
"Yes but do you want to end up like (President) Bush?"

Putin was briefly lost for words, then said:
"Ah, you have scored a point there....."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle5147422.ece
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Old 2008-11-14, 15:09   Link #1000
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Russian communist, the last defenders of Russian Democracy

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/wo...15duma.html?hp

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Political opposition leaders have been harshly critical of the proposed change, which is almost assured of becoming law, but opposition parties have little presence in the Duma, and on Friday, the Communists were virtually the only dissenters.
In the end, the bill sailed through its first reading in the Duma, passing by a vote of 388 to 58. Fifty-seven of those votes were from Communists, who opposed the change unanimously. The measure must pass two more readings in the lower house, and also be approved by a majority in the upper house and Russia’s regional parliaments.
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