The rover Opportunity has been roaming over the planet Mars since January 2004 and traveled over 28 miles. It has sent back 225,000 photos of the planets surface. The information from the rover has told us that the winter is twice as long as Earth’s winters. Since it is longer than Earths winters the scientists didn’t expect the rover to […]
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Mapping the infant universe is no easy task. New data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite is giving astronomers their most complete look yet at the very earliest moments of the universe. Planck, which measures microwave radiation, has created a heat map of the temperatures present in the universe a mere 370,000 years after the Big Bang. The data […]
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■ Chris Bires lost his wedding ring out of an act of charity, but a stranger’s charity helped him get it back. The 41-year-old had given a pocketful of coins to a street saxophonist while walking to work in Chicago, not noticing that he’d handed over his ring as well. When he returned to the spot, the musician was gone, […]
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Fewer people are being killed by lightning strikes due to better ways to get out of its way. In the United States we have learned that we can get out its way by having covers over us that don’t attract the lightning bolts. In the 1940s there was over 400 people a year that were killed by lightning and in […]
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Why do people complain? Not to torture others with their negativity, surely. When most of us indulge in a bit of a moan, the idea is to “vent.” By getting our emotions out, we reason, we’ll feel better. But science suggests there are a few serious flaws in that reasoning. One, not only does expressing negativity tend not to make us […]
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Since a Chinese engineer has found it difficult to find love he decided to build and marry his own robot bride. He was getting tired of getting pressured from his family and friends to get married so he decided to make his own wife. He dated her for over two months and then got married at a ceremony attended by […]
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Getting enough sleep may help you maintain good health. That may sound fairly simple, but most people don’t get enough sleep. A survey of over 30.000 people in England found that the people that got the right amount of sleep were happier and healthier. The researchers found that even though they had enough sleep they may not have had a […]
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The average human being generates about eight watts of energy with each step, most of which is expended as vibration. It may not sound like much, but take the 30,000 or more people who pass through a major-city subway hub at rush hour, and suddenly you’ve got serious power. That’s usually a problem for architects and engineers, who have to […]
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Rich foreign countries are buying up Thai farmland to ensure their own food supplies, said Sanitsuda Ekachai. An international nonprofit farmers’ rights group has documented “an alarming trend of governments and corporations buying up farmland on a large scale in more than 60 developing countries.” The rush began after the global food crisis of 2007-08, when rich countries realized they […]
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The Chinese government has revealed that it has a nationwide surveillance system to track dissidents, and it bears the same name as the evil computer network that tries to destroy humanity in the Terminator movies. Skynet, begun in 2005, has at least 20 million cameras installed across the country in public places, including on buses and streets, and outside dissidents’ […]
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