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By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - La Nina, a weather phenomenon typically linked to flooding in the Asia-Pacific, African drought and a more intense hurricane season over the Atlantic, could occur in a weak form this year, the World Meteorological Organization said Thursday. [More]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The earthquake that shook the East Coast last week rattled casks holding radioactive nuclear waste at a Virginia plant, moving them as much as 4.5 inches from their original position, the plant's operator said. The 5.8-magnitude quake shifted 25 casks, each 16 feet tall and weighing 115 tons, on a concrete pad at Dominion Resources Inc's North Anna nuclear plant.

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It sounds like something out of an Edgar Allen Poe tale of horror . A man becomes agitated by strange sounds only to find that they are emanating from inside his own body--his heart, his pulse, the very movement of his eyes in their sockets. Yet superior canal dehiscence syndrome (SCDS) is a very real affliction caused by a small hole in the bone covering part of the inner ear .

Two months after al Qaeda terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, analytical chemist John Butler found himself working late nights in his lab, developing DNA assays to identify 911 victims from the tens of thousands of charred human remains recovered at Ground Zero. Thinking back, he still clearly remembers the sense of rising to a national need that was shared by dozens of researchers recruited to the same difficult problem.

As the ship pulled out of port, a young man near me started humming the theme from Gilligan’s Island . I mentioned to him that the show would have been very different had the SS Minnow been carrying not a lone professor but--as our vessel was--a contingent of Nobel laureates. “Yeah,” he replied, “with everybody who’s here, we’d probably get off the island pretty quick.” This boat ride on Lake Constance, or the Bodensee as it is locally known, was part of the last day’s activities of the 61st annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany

By Shinichi Saoshiro TOKYO, Sept 1 (Reuters) - Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) [More]

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Researchers analyzed data from the Gallup World Poll covering 2005 to 2009. They looked at religious affiliation, life satisfaction, social support and positive versus negative states of mind in 150 countries around the world. In societies that lack proper food, jobs, or health care, religious people are indeed happier than those who are not religious

Attempts to understand and control new synthetic recreational drugs are being hindered by analysis laboratories' inability to obtain pure samples of the compounds, experts say. [More]

Handwashing is the best way to avoid spreading infection, according to the CDC. But doctors, nurses and hospital staff wash up less than half as often as they should. Some hospitals encourage handwashing by posting signs that tell docs a simple scrub will prevent them from getting sick.

The ski resort is betting it will get more bang for its buck from letting happy vacationers post the photos taken by its hillside photographers to Facebook--for free--than it will from selling them hardcopies. One of the hardest things to do for any company that wants to innovate is to willingly cannibalize a profitable line of business.

The space shuttle era is finished, its vehicles museum-bound . The deep-space forays of Apollo astronauts are long gone, their final moon voyage nearly 40 years in the past

This and more important news from your Fast Company editors, with updates all day. Google Launches Disaster Response Website .

When will a computer finally understand sarcasm? Seth Redmore of Lexalytics gazes into the future of text analysis and machine intelligence. The next guest in our futurist series, Crystal Ballin’ , is Seth Redmore, VP of Product Management at Lexalytics , a major player in the realm of text and sentiment analysis