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Masters of the martial art of Tae Kwon Do have gotten so lightning-quick that even a team of four judges placed around a competition ring can have a hard time keeping up.

Google has a small fleet of robotic cars that since autumn have driven themselves for thousands of miles on the streets of northern California without once striking a pedestrian, running a stoplight or having to ask directions. The cars’ ability to analyze enormous quantities of data--from cameras, radar sensors, laser-range finders--lies in the 18th-century math theorem known as Bayes’ rule.

In 1959 physicist Gilbert Plass warned in Scientific American that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was causing climate change. In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson warned Congress of the risk . In 1979 the U.S

Want to convince with your gift of gab? Sales people are hip to the tricks, stating everything as a question and doing more listening than yapping.

It is the ultimate paradox of American health care: going to the hospital can kill you. Every year nearly two million hospital-acquired infections claim roughly 100,000 lives and add $45 billion in costs; that is as many lives and dollars as taken by AIDS, breast cancer and auto accidents combined.

We started trawling! The tide of seasickness has passed and the crew was up early this morning getting ready to deploy the high-speed trawl. The trawl looks like a manta ray and collects samples from the surface of the ocean through a fine mesh net attached to the trawl’s metal "mouth." The sampling net will collect anything in its path, usually plastic fragments and plankton.

Used to be that sick kids got lollypops after a visit with the doctor. But in some cases candy can be more than a reward--it can be part of the therapy. Because scientists have found that, in battling chronic infections, sugar can boost the effectiveness of antibiotics

Rain continues to fall (as it has for the past month) in record-breaking amounts across the middle Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, swelling the two waterways and their tributaries. As some residents evacuate and others await word on whether they must flee, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is considering its increasingly limited options for containing a major catastrophe already washing away homes and farmland

Climate change has yet to diminish crop yields in the U.S. corn belt but scientists expect drought to become more common due to global warming in coming years.

The party line on piracy is that it's bad for business. But what to make of the case of "Go the Fuck to Sleep," the "children's book for adults" whose viral-pirate PDF launched the book to the number-one spot on Amazon.com a month before its release? Something remarkable happened today.

By Richard A. [More]

By Declan Butler of Nature magazine Health ministers from the World Health Organization's (WHO's) 193 member states will next week debate when to destroy the two last known remaining stocks of the virus that causes smallpox, a scourge that was eradicated in 1980. Many scientists argue, however, that the variola stocks should be maintained, perhaps indefinitely

How do you get from Virginia to Paris? For one team of young rocketeers, the way across the Atlantic will involve a homemade model rocket, a chicken egg and some serious competition

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